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Slow Food - tomatoes
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 07 Jan 05 - 02:59 PM I must have dozed off when all this evidence came to light. Can you direct me to these sources? |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 07 Jan 05 - 05:03 PM There are some obvious possibilities in the news recently, like Kennewick Man, who predates Columbus by several thousand years. One National Park Service memo (follow the link above to this and other bits about him) The BA date (Beta-133993) gave a conventional radiocarbon age of 8410 +/- 40 BP (Hood 1999a and Attachment 1). The equivalent calibrated radiocarbon age (using the two sigma, 95% probability) in years BP is cal BP 9510 to 9405 and cal BP 9345 to 9320. The question then arises, what was he doing here, was he alone, what did he bring with him? (Since "BC" is not used much any more in scholarly applications, there is a collection of terms. I think "BP" is something like "Before Present" era (meaning BC without mentioning Mr. C.) So you're looking at a traveller who might have come through the area 11,400 years ago or so. I've seen programs recently also about European mummys turning up in China. NOVA ran a program about it. Trade is once again considered a major factor in the travels of these individuals. All of this is a tangle when doing a web search. The beginning dates of humans in the New World is as big a question as how they got here and how often they made the trips back and forth. My information about early travel to the New World comes through American Indian literature classes, and the material that surrounds the study of the origin stories of many tribes or nations. There is one book that I can think of off the top of my head that explores the (possible) results of early European visits to the New World (going back to the times of the Vikings and the sea-going Irish and Spanish who are presumed to have landed here while fishing long before Columbus made his trips). That's Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade by Calvin Martin. It has been several years since I read this, but I believe he backs up these contacts to well before Columbus' travels, and he suggests that the main reason for these early contacts was for trade. (Some of his conclusions at the end of the book are rather over-the-top, but the research he presents up to that point is interesting.) It's quite an interesting subject, hampered primarily by the skimpy evidence since any perishable trade goods are not extant today. But that doesn't mean they weren't traded, just that it's difficult to prove. Personally, I think that given the curiosity and resourcefulness of humans, it is almost safer to assume that they did make trade trips a long time ago than that they didn't. Modern humans are so hung up on their technology that they seem to think humans didn't figure out how to get around before the manufacture of iron or the invention of the internal combustion engine. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 07 Jan 05 - 05:06 PM P.S., back to the subject of food, how are your mushrooms out in the woods? Have you beaten a regular path to them? Did GPS come into it? SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 07 Jan 05 - 05:31 PM I never did buy a GPS. Last year a woman went missing in the forest in BC (morel hunting in the springtime) and they gave up looking for her after only two days! I figure I won't be gong that ddep into the woods for chanterelles. I had a good season this--I guess last-- year. Found more than I could eat, so I ended up giving lots away. Still love doing it. Took my nine-year-old son last time. He loved it too, although he was much more interested in the salamaders than the shrooms! |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 07 Jan 05 - 05:40 PM They're quite tasty with a little mustard. . . (actually, I think some of the salamanders have toxic defenses, so it's best to take along a key and know what you're getting into if you're going to snack in the woods.) :) SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 07 Jan 05 - 05:46 PM My son has a salamander as a pet in a terrarium in his room. We named it "Rushdie." |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 07 Jan 05 - 06:11 PM Is he still lying low? |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 07 Jan 05 - 06:14 PM I just lowered my brower screen and found a notepad screen with another source that I cut and pasted because it looked interesting in the discussion above: FOX, CARLES LALUEZA. 1996. "Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups in four tribes from Tierra del Fuego-Patagonia: Inferences about the peopling of the Americas." Human Biology 68(6):855-871. It seems some of these studies show that groups in South America came straight across the ocean from east or west, not on a long trek down through North and Central America. This may be a text that discusses that. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 07 Jan 05 - 06:25 PM I agree there's lots of speculation regarding this issue, but no hard evidence. Did you see the PBS program about the skeletal remains unearthed (in New Hampshire?) that differed significantly from American Indians (forgive me if I have that term incorrect) physiologically? There is a law that requires burial of Indian remains ASAP so the scientists could not conclude their study, but the buzz was the age of the bones indicated they did not belong to the same strain of humans as American Indians. Interesting. |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 13 Jan 05 - 01:52 PM Well, this certainly turned out to be a damp squib ...re. 2000 year old Chinese tomato seeds Dear [BigPinkLad]; Sorry for the delay in response ... [snip] ... I have done some digging, including talking to our former writer who now lives in BC. Source material from 1995 no longer appears to be available. The only thing I can suggest at this point, is a web search. |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: GUEST,MMario Date: 13 Jan 05 - 02:09 PM Tomatoes came originally from the Andes (what's now Peru) and historians can find no evidence they were used as food. Indeed, none of the languages of the area even have a word for 'tomato.' More accurately the closest extent wild relatives of the tomato come from a section of the Andes - but tomatoes were brought to Europe from MEXICO - and the local languages there are what we derived our word "tomato" from. |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 13 Jan 05 - 02:30 PM You have to look at a lot of different sources if you're trying to piece together a large story like this. There is a story for corn that has been evolving also. It migrated around North America from it's original location in the Andes, where it was a simple grain with a few kernals. It was nurtured and just as farmers of today work to increase the output of a plant, native farmers brought it to a point where what was traded was a much improved food crop with the ear as we see it today. The biologists who have been looking into the earliest forms of corn are upset that Monsantos' varieties are going to cross-pollinate and destroy the native plants that still grow in the wild, or those that are cultivated in remote regions. I suspect that someone looking into the ethnographic materials from as far back as they have been collected could shed light on attitudes toward some of these plants that came through in stories but weren't the primary reason for the interviews so haven't been highlighted in the literature. This has certainly been the case in my research toward cultural attitudes toward this nebulous thing we call "The Environment" among native North Americans prior to or early into the exploration and colonial periods. Last year at this time I was writing a book chapter on sports and recreation in the Southwest. It went back far before colonization, and one way to try to interpret early activities is to look at the writings of the first Europeans to have extensive contact within cultures. Admittedly a lot of it is dismissive and biased, but you can still pick up information simply by looking at what they dismiss. I was researching the ancient ballcourts and games, and this sentence is extracted from that chapter:
Who knows, maybe something about tomatoes and other foods or plants turns up in passing in a text like this. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: GUEST Date: 13 Jan 05 - 02:34 PM More then in passing - there are quite lengthy descriptions of the foods and meals dating right back to the original expeditions |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 13 Jan 05 - 02:50 PM Some excellent information here: Sam Cox's page ... with references cited! |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: GUEST,.gargoyle Date: 13 Jan 05 - 10:29 PM contact me at : gargoyle@fcbayern.de
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 14 Jan 05 - 01:02 AM Gargoyle, What are the plant and fruit characteristics? And the temperature conditions where you grew them? I've had luck with cherry tomatoes and one called "super fantastic" here in the hot Texas climate. They seem to do better when the hot nights slow down the pollination of other tomatoes (typically, if it doesn't cool below 80 degrees at night, tomatoes won't pollinate). Nice offer, though. I've saved a few seeds from some of my good garden plants also. Peppers in particular. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 15 Jan 05 - 02:29 PM Back to the top. It was a good thread. My slow food onions are looking nice out in the yard now, and I'm going to set up flats this week for starting tomatoes indoors from seed. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: GUEST Date: 16 Jan 05 - 02:28 PM That's just cruel SRS ... the temp dropped to -8 Celsius here in Victoria over the weekend ... might be a while before I plant anything out! gargoyle thanks for the generous offer. I will contact you via email. |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Georgiansilver Date: 16 Jan 05 - 07:13 PM 69 |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:35 AM gargoyle ... for some reason my email is being rejected by your server (says it can't find any such address) and neither can I PM you via Mudcat ... thanks for the offer anyway. Very kind. |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: just john Date: 18 Jan 05 - 11:54 AM I remember how tomato plants would spring up after we'd moved the outhouse and filled in the old hole. (Which was nearly full, and why we were moving the outhouse.) Tomato seeds are unusual in that they can survive a trip through the human digestive tract. So, this suggests a strategy, if you can't get the seeds any other way. Find somebody who's eaten some and invite them over .... |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: TheBigPinkLad Date: 18 Jan 05 - 12:25 PM That made me laugh just john -- near where I lived as a kid there was a sewerage plant that was always covered in 'feral' tomato plants. Although some were put off by the nutrient source, many others gathered the rarely-ripening green tomatoes for chutney etc. |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 18 Jan 05 - 05:46 PM Then there is the "compost surprise." Every year I use my compost from the year before for gardening and top dressing beds. So there's always something that made it through the heat of the heap and the cold of winter and grows happily out out of place. I had some nice canteloupes last summer, out in the bed of lantana in the front yard. I intentionally planted tomatoes and peppers in the front yard, and I plan to again. They did very well and looked great. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: JennyO Date: 19 Jan 05 - 05:56 AM I love "compost surprise"! I've had tomatoes, potatoes and pumpkins spring up out of my compost in previous years. The pumpkins turned out to be butternuts - yum! The plant rambled all over the place and I had picked pumpkins sitting in rows in the laundry, enough to last for several months. This year, I found two tiny tomato seedlings growing in the ditch in front of some big tomato plants I had. I transplanted them into another part of the garden and watched them grow into big lush bushes. It wasn't till the fruit started to form, that I realised I had Romas. Strange thing is I have never grown Romas. Might have eaten some that I bought, but the compost heap is about 20 feet away. I would maybe think that someone here before me might have grown them, except that this is a garden which didn't exist till I came here 18 months ago. It was a lawn. So who knows? I'm certainly not complaining though! The Roma tomatoes are getting to full size now and about to get some colour, so that's something else to enjoy soon, along with my cherry tomatoes, Big Reds, passionfruit, spinach and beans. Just starting to pick beans, and I'm giving passionfruit away - even gave some to the NRMA man who came to try and fix my car which has basically died. He did try awfully hard, so I thought - why not? Jenny |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Bunnahabhain Date: 19 Jan 05 - 08:00 AM Silly river sage, BP stands for before present, defined as 1950. The terms you were thinking of are CE, common era, and BCE, before common era, covering the same time frame as AD and BC. Or does this belong in useless trivia? Bunnahabhain |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 19 Jan 05 - 10:45 AM Bunnahabhain, That's Stilly river, please! The name is not an oxymoron, it is shortened from Stillaguamish, as in the river in Western Washington state. I have seen several sets of letters meant to dance around the BC that is so embedded in christianity, but is clearly still the easiest one to remember. These CE and BCE seem to turn up most often. I've always objected to the birth of christ as the marker for setting our calendar, but to sidestep his name and use the same calendar is a bit disengenuous. I find the current politically correct substitutions aren't used consistently enough to do more than confuse people, but I'm not going to suggest changing our calendar to reflect something else. Who would get to choose what that something might be? We need to just live with it. Before Present as a term sounds completely arbitrary. At least archeologists in their digs and record-keeping have a reason for choosing 1945 as a before/after date to reflect the beginning of today's era of atomic bombs. The fallout is noticable in the modern layer of soil. Glow in the dark tomatoes, anyone? My garlic and onions are perking along in the back yard, but because of the unusual mix of really warm weather between cold fronts, my quince has bloomed and I have confused daffodils (narcissus) popping up in flower beds. One of my oldest favorite flower pots by the side door finally broke under the effects of frost-heaving in this last cold snap. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 20 Jan 05 - 10:24 AM We have two days of spring-like weather in our forecast, so I'll be out stirring up the compost and moving some to the front beds. This is the first step of the compost surprise process. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 20 Jan 05 - 03:09 PM Here's a great site a friend sent to me today. I'll post it on one of the garden threads also. Kitchen Gardeners International SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 23 Apr 05 - 12:24 PM Digging more beds and turning the compost today. I have some cherry tomatoes and superfantastic tomates in. I'm planning to go look for some grape tomotoes as well. SRS |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 23 Apr 05 - 07:47 PM ... just leave the the grope ones alone though... |
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Subject: RE: Slow Food - tomatoes From: Stilly River Sage Date: 06 Jun 05 - 03:51 PM Oh, my! I just ate a handful of my home-grown cherry tomatoes with my lunch. Each one was a juicy cool burst of wonderful tomato flavor. Something is clobbering a couple of my plants out in the garden. (On the other hand, I also have a few volunteers that I've popped cages over). Time to start the garlic pepper spray, and mix up the Neem. SRS |
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