The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (18 page)

“I’d like to take some,” I said. “Which variety would you recommend?”

He pointed to a hillock of bulbs. “If you like to eat plywood, that’s your plant.” I won’t name the variety Swenson dissed because there will be farmers who swear by it. Let’s just say I chose a variety called McCullars White Top Set—one that, according to Swenson, tastes like a cookout on a summer evening.

While I was at the Seed Savers Exchange conference, I researched Conch cowpea in the one-room library tucked downstairs in the majestic barn. The latest (sixth edition)
Garden Seed Inventory
, which canonizes the commercial availability of garden cultivars, had a listing:

Running Conch Cowpea
90 days

Non-clinging long vines, originally from which other cowpeas have been developed, harder to shell than modern varieties. Valued for its ability to resist insects and weeds. From the late 1800s.

The seed had been offered by one seed saver in 1991, one in 1994, one in 1998, and three in 2004. That had been only four years prior. So there was hope. I thumbed through a 2004
Seed Savers Exchange Yearbook
and found that Running Conch had been offered by AL HA C, MO GE J, and PA WE W. I wrote down the addresses for Alabama’s Charlotte Hagood, Missouri’s Jeremiah Gettle, and Pennsylvania’s William Woys Weaver, three more revolutionaries.

In the evening, after a tasty supper, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of the syndicated public radio show
The Splendid Table
, delivered the keynote speech. She is blond, with glasses, and wore a white blouse styled after a chef’s coat.

“Microclimate is microculture,” she said, and began to illustrate her point by talking about her Italian heritage. Real Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese comes from nowhere but the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where Parma ham is made, using only three ingredients—salt, air, and time. (Incidentally, if champagne is not made in Champagne, a region of France, it is not champagne.)

Kasper told the story of being in Bologna, the regional capital of Emilia-Romagna, where everybody ate
tortellini en brodo
, or pasta in capon broth. When she found herself in Parma, one hundred miles north, she ordered
tortellini en brodo
. “We don’t eat
tortellini
,” her host whispered to her, “It is a foreign food.”

“Each place has a different collection of past history,” said Kasper. “Where we live and what we live with is who we are.”

In America we have a shortened history with food. Early Americans effectively displaced and decimated our native people, both co-opting their agricultural knowledge and snuffing out their agricultural evolution. The recorded, white story of food begins in the 1500s in pockets of this country. By contrast, the history of food on most continents reaches back thousands and thousands of years, with people staying more or less in place, practicing subsistence farming and developing unique cuisines.

Eating local in Italy, Kasper said, is more potent than eating local in the United States. Even the word
local
is different. For us Americans,
local
is geography: This came from a certain place. In Italian markets, some produce will be marked with the word
nostrono
, which is a possessive meaning “ours,” as in “it belongs to us”; for Italians,
local
is more personal, a proud ownership.

Also in Italy, according to Kasper, exists a concept called
campanilisimo
, which is literally translated to mean “within the sound of the bell tower.” In many Italian villages stands a bell tower, or
campanile
, and whomever lives nearby can hear it ring. Anyone not from within sight or sound of the
campanile
is a stranger. The Italian local, then, becomes even more focused and distinct, meaning anything produced within the sound of the bell that rings for you.

“Globalization is not doing any of this any favors,” Kasper said. She got so worked up explaining what happened to food in America that she drew a big, jade-green fan from behind the podium and commenced to wave it. Somewhere we got the idea that food was science, she said. What worked in industry overtook what worked in the backyard, a kind of “better living through chemistry” mind-set. We let corporations make supper for us, not to mention breakfast and lunch.

Kasper’s talk brings us to
terroir
, which has come to mean the relationship between soil or ground and the taste of a plant. This idea is based on the belief that the same plant grown in different places will taste differently. Take Vidalia onions. Vidalia is not a variety. A number of varieties of sweet onions are grown in a thirteen-county
territoire
in southern Georgia whose low-sulfur soil imparts a sweetness to the onion so incredible that people claim to eat them like apples. This is
terroir
, the taste of southern Georgia in an onion.
Sentir le terroir
is to smack of the soil, as in the native tang of wine.

I’m going to pause here, because I have another question for my friend Tom Stearns, president of High Mowing Organic Seeds. I want to know if the genetics of a variety change with different soils and environmental factors.

“Most definitely,” he says. “Let’s say you grow one hundred plants in Georgia. You save the seeds of the ten that do the best. I do the same up here in Vermont. For ten years both of us are always saving 10 percent of the best. At the end of ten years, if we plant your seeds side by side with my seeds, they will definitely be genetically different.”

“Is this because of mutations?” I ask.

“They are not mutating,” he says. “If you’re growing a mustard green that can handle frost and you plant one hundred of them, some of them will go through the frost and survive. You’ve now gotten rid of a whole bunch of genes that make the mustard susceptible to frost.”

“So this is what selection pressure means?”

“Yes, you’re encouraging certain genes and discouraging others by the selections you make.”

Kaspar’s talk also reminded me of my amazing friend and inspiration Gary Nabhan, who put together a coalition of organizations dedicated to saving the remaining biological richness of our food system—not by locking it away in a vault, but by bringing it back to the table. He calls it RAFT, and has published a book with that title:
Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods.
What RAFT is doing, Nabhan said, is “trying to retain the synergies that happen when a particular plant or animal adapts to a particular landscape, soil, climate, and food traditions.” He explains that traditional foods are a result of interactions between genetic stock and the soils and climate of a particular area. He calls them place-based foods. Working with RAFT, Slow Food USA began what it calls the “Ark of Taste,” a catalog of over two hundred regional heritage foods that risk extinction because of industrial standardization. The goal of the ark is to bring endangered foods back to American tables, thus creating economic viabilities that will help them flourish again. Foods escorted onto the ark must taste great, be at risk biologically or culinarily, be sustainably produced in limited quantities, and be regional.

Seed savers are the raison d’être of terroir.

Okay, it’s time to say that maybe the Seed Savers Exchange was not the mecca I thought it would be. There had been an upheaval in administration, a divorce between Kent and Diane Ott Whealy, and in October 2007 Kent had been removed from his job as executive director, a position he held since the organization began in 1975. In the ensuing years Kent Whealy wrote a series of angry missives to the Seed Savers Exchange board, sometimes sending copies to the entire membership, airing dirty laundry and accusing the gardeners’ exchange of taking on a corporate mien.

Kent Whealy, who spent his career collecting a putative 26,000 unique varieties of heirloom garden crops, including 140 Native American varieties, accuses the organization of potentially giving away genetic material to corporations. When the nine-million-dollar Svalbard Global Seed Vault was finished in Norway in 2008, the exchange promptly delivered boxes and boxes of seeds. In a speech delivered in 2010 at the Land Institute, Kent Whealy said that depositing seeds in Svalbard places them “under control of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Treaty, specifically designed to facilitate use by corporate breeders.” He calls the participation a misappropriation. The
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
, which has not been ratified by the United States, states in Article 7, “The Depositor agrees to make available from their own stocks samples of accessions of the deposited plant genetic resources . . . to other natural or legal persons.” Kent Whealy went on to say that “original samples,” those stored back in the home country, are also covered by the order.

In a 2010 public letter of rebuttal, the Seed Savers Exchange board said that Kent Whealy’s logic is “flawed at every step.” The board admits that it is a “proud depositor” and “will continue to consign duplicate seed samples to the seed vault from our seed collection for safekeeping.” In other responses, they assure their members that Seed Savers Exchange seeds are only in storage at Svalbard, belong solely to the Seed Savers Exchange, cannot be patented, can be retrieved by the board at any time from the vault, and will not be accessible by any other entity.

Why send seeds to Svalbard? Because it’s a safety deposit box? Because it’s backup? Because conditions are less than ideal at Heritage Farm? Because Iowa is subject to tornadoes? Because Norway is not as far away as we think?

I myself have been confused about the changing values of the exchange. In one example, the idea of a hand-to-hand exchange has deteriorated. Far more seeds are now sold to the public through the organization’s full-color catalog than are exchanged among members. Once Seed Savers Exchange launched its catalog, members of the exchange saw requests, meaning the letters they got from people soliciting seeds, drop precipitously. Although the organization was founded on a gift society, meaning swapping of seeds among members, sales eclipsed barter. I was not the only person who witnessed this. Many seedfolk have reported similar declines. At least this means, however, as one old-timer told me, that the Seed Savers Exchange has developed a more stable system for keeping seed alive. If it’s a corporate model, so be it. Maybe the time for the exchange is past, he said.

In a recent issue of a seasonal journal that comes with the purchase of membership, Seed Savers Exchange chides gardeners who “steal from the USDA plant germplasm labs.” The USDA requires that seed requests from the country’s official gene banks be limited to scientists and researchers. Some seed savers, the journal reported, have been obtaining germplasm through USDA gene banks by posing as researchers in their official requests to the USDA. Because these seed savers are gardeners and not scientists, the Seed Savers Exchange reprimanded them for writing fraudulent requests and thus for “stealing.” The labs, they say, are not for gardeners who happen to have difficulty finding a certain seed.

That stance bodes ill. In my mind, the accessions in the USDA germplasm system belong to all Americans. They are
our
seeds, developed by our ancestors, grown by them and by us, and collected for use by our citizenry. Why wouldn’t a populist seed exchange want its members to have access to public seeds? Wouldn’t a gene bank
want
its seeds grown out?

The Seed Savers Exchange plays an important role in saving garden seeds, many of which were on the verge of extinction. But the controversy goes to show that as things grow big, they grow complicated—and often they grow out of hand. The controversy is a reminder, perhaps, of how important it is to constantly turn our attention back to the small, to the simple, to the local. And it is a reminder of the understated power, the unquestionable integrity to be found in a single, perfect seed.

Mecca or no, when the weekend ended, I made the long trip in reverse—the rental, the airport, the shuttle, the train station, Chicago, the bus, Atlanta, the subway, and finally the four-hour drive over familiar Georgia roads. Everything had gone perfectly. The hotel had had a vacancy. Its van had delivered me to the train station so I could return the rental early and save money. I had one clean shirt left. I turned off the road, which was still dirt, into my own yard. This was local—ours.

I AM STANDING
in an Iowa field with Dave Cavagnaro, photographer and seed saver. He’s a swarthy man with a Roman nose, thin as an insect. He’s wearing jeans cut off at the knee, the corner of his wallet hanging out a hole in his back pocket, and a worn, plaid, short-sleeved shirt.

Six or seven gardeners hope to learn how to hand-pollinate squash from an expert, and an expert Dave Cavagnaro is. For eight years, he curated the seed collection for the Seed Savers Exchange. Now he is a botanical photographer and garden writer.