The Sicilian peach (Prunus persica L. Batsch) germplasm: Horticultural characteristics and sanitary status

THE ROLE OF DIVERSITY AND DIVERSIFICATION FOR RESILIENT AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

Biodiversity is a unique and precious heritage: generic but also cultural, social and economic. Its drastic curtailment, however, puts at risk the survival of local farming systems, and this is even more so in fragile socio-economic contexts where it risks translating into conditions of food insecurity and poverty. From the elementary level of the gene, rising in complexity up to the ecosystem, it is therefore a central element in defining first the resistance and then the resilience of the system, and by the first term meaning the degree of resistance to a disruption that distances it from the initial state of equilibrium and by the second the capacity of a system to return to guaranteeing…

Quality of autochthonous Sicilian plums

Thirty four plum local varieties and accessions obtained from different growing area of the Sicilian island were analyzed for their qualitative and nutraceutical properties and three commercialcultivar were used as references. These properties included the fruit fresh weight (g), the pulp firmness (FFF), the total soluble solids (TSS), the titratable acidity (TA), the total anthocyanins,the phenolics content and the antioxidant activity.This preliminary study showed significantly differeces among the plums; Zuccarato giallo and Prunu Niuru presented TSS higher than the commercial cultivars (24.9 and 21.6 °Brix respectively)and interesting data obtained on the nutraceutical compounds values …

Food sustainability perception at universities: Education and demographic features effects

The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations merged in 17 goals the strong need to change the pattern of human life on the planet in a path of strengthening sustainability especially in an era that is widely defined as Anthropocene. The Global Action Program (GAP) on Education and Sustainable Development was adopted based on the power of education and knowledge with the idea of 'green universities' aimed at improving the perception of sustainability for future policy decisions. Based on a Best-Worst (BW) scaling methodological approach, in this study we quantified the preferences of generation Y at University of Turin as they relate to issues explicitly connected to the ordinary consumption of foo…

Quality indicators for modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) storage of high-quality European plum (Prunus domestica L.) cultivars.

The use of quality indicators is crucial in selling plums in more distant markets and the evaluation of freshness through multiple index is fundamental to evaluate the goodness of the storage technique. In this study we evaluated the quality of two european plums cultivars ('Ramasin' and 'Ariddo di Core' with purple and yellow flesh colour respectively) after modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) storage, through the selection of the most appropriate indicators. The headspace gas composition, the flesh fruit firmness (FFF), the soluble solid content (SSC), the titratable acidity (TA), the colour and the chlorophyll content of plums wrapped with 5 different films (F1, F2, F3, F4 and F5) were e…