As part of @Joseph_Lofthouse’s tour around Europe this October, I’m organizing a full-day event here at the Copenhagen Hospitality College on the topic of kitchen-centered plant breeding.
The idea is to create an international meeting for kitchen gardeners, chefs and anyone interested in new tendencies in the farm-to-table movement. My hope is that it will introduce adaptation gardening to farmers and market gardeners here as well as introduce the idea among chefs that they could get access to a larger diversity of plant ingredients if they played a role in plant breeding.
We’re still working on the details. You can read about it here: Future Heirloom
Call for images: I’m looking for a better header image for the invitation. Can someone help? Ping @ThomasPicard (perhaps some of your recent photos preparing the stand), @julia.dakin, @Joseph_Lofthouse . You can send me pictures via pm or post here in the thread.
Three criteria:
High resolution
More diversity of one or two vegetables (e.g. a harvest picture of squash)
Some human element in it (doesn’t have to include a face, a hand or arm is enough).
sorting out per taste quality before seed extraction and drying… Fermenting the inner core for beverages and lactofermenting the rest for agricultural use
The school’s Green Lab showing their experiments with squash - fermented squash juice, squash crisps/crackers, Japanese style tsukemono, “sausage-style” salt-cured-smoked-koji-molded vegetables and some interesting failures too:
Tasting 11 different squash and 15 carrots from diverse populations and selecting the best. All participants going around the table, discussing flavor and judging, writing notes on a big piece of paper. I encouraged everyone to leave aside the compulsive positivity and have some fun being judgmental!
Assessing scores at the end of the day. Huge differences. Which confirmed for me how I’d probably get to the crops I want much faster if I only save seed from things that someone evaluated the taste of.
