I am baffled because I have the opposite point of view entirely. Has anyone ever thought about what your ancestor Gunter in Germany was eating a thousand years ago? Probably cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, onions, garlic, barley, cabbage, pork, and turnips. How about Earnest in England?... pretty much the same. Far from food going extinct, I think there is tremendous diversity now in food production. Industrial production might require GM and capitalization of research through protection of intellectual property, but the fact remains that you are eating tomatoes, kohlrabi, six kinds of lettuce, two kinds of carrots, brussels sprouts, etc. All of those are robust and are grown as millions of mini varieties in gardens all over the world. I mean EVERYWHERE. Seed banks, seed companies, and people's dresser drawers hold huge stores of DNA, all slightly different. In five minutes, I could buy 100 different packets of seeds at the hardware store. Was that even possible in the 50s? And that is F1 or F2. Some okra farmer in Alabama has seeds produced through 50 crosses. People can and do create and study their own cultivars of darn near everything every season and then trade them internationally. How will that change? Activism is all well and good, but GM and Mxxxxxxo are small in the big picture and probably getting smaller. Remember that they have to invest millions in a cultivar just to get it to a commercial seed stage. How many cultivars can they do that with? And they and their timing are going to be wrong how often? Monsanto is not a juggernaut, it is a riverboat gambler. The bigger it gets, the bigger it bets. For better or worse, some gardener in China has a seed that is better than what Mxxxxxxo has got, and it is only a matter of time before the rest of the world finds out about it. In Japan, a single pumpkin seed can sell for hundreds of dollars. Mxxxxxxo has not moved in on that action, and it never will. The market is fuelled by enthusiasts and connisseurs. If the market gets cornered, people will immediately lose interest. Viewed in terms of sheer greed, it is in Mxxxxxxo's interest to maintain wild type specimens in environments all over the world. Even if Mxxxxxxo could sell one type of tomato seed that would make all others extinct, it would not do it. Has anyone considered that? Well, I guess that is enough. I could give 20 more examples. Viewed from a wider perspective, food diversity has never been better. And I will not be buying Mxxxxxxo stock. I should watch more TV, it sounds very entertaining.

India is so big and has such a rich regional variety of dishes that if you travel great distances like I did on my recent trip there, you can experience foods you would swear come from totally different parts of the world, and they do - in the Himalayan states you might, for example, encounter local dishes that resemble Nepalese or even Tibetan food, while in Goa you will find food that is heavily influenced by Portuguese cooking. You can also, if you wish, eat the same dishes everywhere, because restaurants that cater to tourists generally seem to have the same 30 or so dishes on their menus, shuffled in a slightly different order (you would, for example, almost always find aloo gobi, several biryanis and pilafs, one or more kebabs, banana lassi and gulab jamuns on these menus). Indian table manners are interesting to someone from the West. The Indians I stayed with generally didn't drink anything with their meals, rather having a glass of water after the meal, often followed by chai. Although these people belong to the educated and rather westernised middle class, they still prefer to eat with their fingers. I followed suit and found that it adds an extra dimension to the eating experience. Flat breads like chappatis are used to scoop up the food. A spoon might be used to help eat dal and curries with lots of sauce, but curries would also be mixed with rice and either scooped up with bread or with the fingers. The right hand is used for eating, and it is quite interesting to see bread being torn skilfully with one hand while the left hand rests in the person's lap or on the table. Guidebooks give the reason that the left hand is considered unclean, but among educated people the (almost) exclusive use of the right hand is surely by now more of a tradition than anything else. In Indian restaurants outside India the food tends to taste milder than it does in India. By that I don't just mean less chili, but less spiciness in general, although my favourite Indian restaurant in Reykjavík gives you a choice between genuine and mild. Another difference is that stews/curries where meat would be just one of many flavourings in India, have heaps more meat in them, which can alter the flavour and texture of dishes quite a bit. I long for the day when someone opens a south Indian restaurant in Reykjavík. We are currently well served in the northern Indian, mughal and Pakistani varieties, but I would love to be able to order dosas and idlis. If you want to try cooking Indian foods at home, try any of Madhur Jaffrey's Indian cookbooks, or Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking. Both not only give recipes but also regional and technical background to the recipes.

Food pairings are very much subjective, and I object to a whole slew of them. I hate coconut in curries and also abhor most sweet things that find their way into meat dishes - especially fruit. People put all kinds of sweet fruits on ham, and I won't touch it. The absolute worst pizza is ham and pineapple (which I love separately), but there are people who eat it. Certain cuisines have more acceptable (to me) food combinations, such as Italian, Greek, Cajun, Mexican, Sichuan, and Japanese (except for their curry), and others have combinations that I consistently avoid - especially Philippino, and some of its neighbors. Some cuisines have a few dishes that I love and a few that I hate, such as Thai, Indian, Persian, and Jamaican. I will go to those restaurants but be very careful what I order. There are no universal rules about what goes with what because there will be exceptions to every rule and nothing will please everyone. Here are some pairings I do NOT like: nutmeg in spinach cinnamon in curry Waldorf Salad (bad mix all around) and there are a few herbs/spices that I just don't care for, such as tarragon and star anise, although I can handle them in minute amounts. I love cilantro, however, and many people hate that. Once I was on the Fillmore bus in San Francisco, and I happened to start talking with the woman sitting next to me and told her that I had just made my grandmother a lavender silk blouse for her birthday. The woman said to me, "That's perfect! Lavender goes with everything!" and I tried to imagine what this woman's wardrobe looked like. Lars

Tissue Culture Explained Set the picture in your mind ... think of a single eye of a hosta as an artichoke .... There is a bud under every junction of the leaf at the crown .... the first ones are visible to the naked eye ... as they are now swelling for next year .... as you remove more leaves, they get smaller and smaller ... these are dormant buds ... they may never become undormant ... or should i say dominant ... A TC'er will take a bud .... strip it of all leaves ... sterilize the bee-gee-bees out of it and the work station... and put it in a beaker with food and hormones ... at this stage the hormones will tell the bud to unlock the dormant buds .... They will come back after a given period of time ... and there will be all these little ex-plants on the bud .... maybe the a sixteenth by 1/8th inch .... They will then take these off and put them in a new beaker with a new hormone to cause root growth .... if there was too much budding hormone .... the plant can continue to force dormant buds all thru the growth cycle ... the balance on all these hormones is very delicate ... They put them under the lights for another time period ... and then move them up to cell packs ... Some tc'ers sell them now as tiny, tiny runts ... there is barely anyway to tell if the plant is true to name .... as they are barely bigger than your thumb at this time .... Other tc'ers will grow them up thru 2x4 inch cell packs ... these tc'ers provide the customer a 6 inch plant with multiple leaves ... and we can be pretty sure they are true to name .... Contributed by ken adrian