Adventures in Food

Being as it is the Year of Biodiversity and I am making my own plot more biodiverse than it was, I thought this would be interesting for you biodiversityfoodiephiles. Bem-me-quer is a vegetarian restaurant located in the centre of Lisbon (Portugal). This vegetarian restaurant has launched a cuisine to show how a simple dish can contain millions of years of species evolution. The project, titled “Biodiversidade à Mesa – como proteger Natureza com faca e garfo” (Biodiversity at the table – how to protect Nature with the fork and knife),aims to promote to diners the value and impact of people’s every-day food choices, and the important role that traditional agriculture has played over millennia to bring us crop varieties.   More information is here: http://www.countdown2010.net/article/biodiversity-at-the-table and the restaurant's website is here: http://www.bem-me-quer.pt/ If you are in Portugal you can visit it here: View Larger Map

I just picked up a little book in a charity shop the other day because it mentioned wildlife gardening and I wanted some wholesome retail therapy. I didn't expect much, I thought it would be very light and fanciful. But it turned out it was a fab piece of popular science writing, about a study done in Sheffield on the wildlife in ordinary gardens. It's charmingly written but I especially like it because it's based on scientific research and it declares the limitations of its own statistics. In summary it says that they found out that using 'native' plants in Britain has no effect on the amount of wildlife. Including nettles - which have a mythological status when it comes to wildlife gardening but apparently this is bunkum. Native is a very slippery concept anyway. But there are some things which make a huge difference, consistently in different locations. In summary, these are the top ways to maximise your garden biodiversity: 1. Grow trees (or at least s...