24 Hours in Paris

Two things occurred to me as I was hauling Chinese Communist propaganda posters in giant glass frames up four flights of stairs in Istanbul:

1. I spent six weeks in France and never went to Paris - An insulting omission. 

2. Christy's new apartment is lousy with bizarre travel mementos.

So, when booking my flights back to the US, I deliberately planned 24 hours in Paris with part-time Istanbulli and new friend Susanne Fowler, who is not only a whip-smart travel writer but an editor at the International Herald Tribune.

I dropped into Charles de Gaulle airport, which is only 14 miles from Paris yet still surrounded by farmland - a nod perhaps to the French's agrarian sensibilities. After quick glass of wine on Susanne's terrace we met her friend Elaine at their favorite neighborhood spot called Le Stella. It is a traditional French Brasserie that was praised in Gourmet Magazine in 2007 as one of the last Parisian Brasseries actually doing things right.

How refreshing and quintessentially Parisian that the tuxedoed waiters not only carry white napkins on their arms but can also supply an immediate and credible wine recommendation. Service like that in the US seems either the purview of the wealthy or a throwback to a bygone era. I kind of miss it. 

"The steak tartare is excellent here by the way," said Elaine, who is British and has lived in Paris for about ten years. 

For the uninitiated, steak tartare is a traditional French dish composed mostly of raw beef and raw eggs. Way worse than cookie dough, but with a local recommendation how can you not? Millions of French can't be wrong. 

Turns out, they are not. It was delicious and it came with fries and then champagne and then a bottle of wine and then creme caramel and then coffee and...

A three-hour dinner passed in what seemed like 30 minutes and soon we were rushing to catch the Eiffel Tower at the top of the hour. 

Why? 

It seems the French spent some time pondering how they could 

enhance one of the world's most spectacular and iconic buildings. Somebody must have said,

"Hey, let's make it sparkle."

And so it does. For five minutes at the top of the dark hours, the whole structure twinkles like champagne bubbles in a fluted glass. I don't care how many times you've seen it, especially at night, all lit up, it still takes your breath. 

We rounded the corner a few minutes late though and missed the sparkles. So we decided to have a few of our own at the local Champagne bar not far from Trocodero Square. The Hotel Dokhan, a former private mansion built in the 18th century, hosts champagne tastings in its candlelit Grand Salon, even at 11pm on a Sunday. 

Our server was charming and deeply knowledgeable about the Pinot Noir Champagne by vineyard Marie-Noelle Ledru. Our tasting was accompanied by a plate of tiny, warm cakes that I think were made of fig. 

Susanne and I ducked out at 11:45 headed for Trocodero Square. We arrived just in time to watch the Tower twinkle and visitors from all over the world kiss and take their pictures in front of it. It doesn't take long though for the bustle to settle and to catch people just watching it in awe; letting it wash over them. 

Leaving Paris hurts. 

The next morning, to ease the pain, I started with a cafe creme and a pan au chocolat at the corner patisserie. That helped but it wasn't enough so Susanne and I followed it up with a hot chocolate at the local chocolatier. It is probably more apt to describe Parisian hot chocolate as a large bowl of thick, hand-made 85% dark chocolate soup served with a dollop of Chantilly creme and cocoa powder. 

Of course I told you all that to tell you this: 

I just spent six weeks in France listening to locals - French and Ex-Pats - talk about their favorite places and then trying them myself. I'm headed back next June to do it all over again. 

Wanna Go?

Call to Prayer

I was in Indonesia, the first time I heard a full Muslim prayer call.

It was dawn and I was climbing a not-terribly dormant volcano on the island of Java with a friend. The tone and melody surprised me so thoroughly that I sat down and just listened. I recall wondering then, as I do today in Istanbul, how many times, if ever, I'd climbed out of bed at dawn and got down on my face before God.

I'm fascinated by devotion.

If you've ever been curious how a Muslim prayer call sounds, watch this handy 38-second video.

If you live in Istanbul and have zero curiosity about Muslim prayer calls because they issue five times a day from loudspeakers in your neighborhood, but you are curious about the ridiculous view from Christy's new apartment, watch the  handy 38-second video below.

I'm here to serve.

Wanna Go?

I bought a print in the South of France weeks ago that I have been toting around by hand, since it won't fit in my suitcase. The image is such an emblem of everything I love about France, that if I accidentally leave it in a yellow cab in Istanbul, I will cry.

The print is an art deco-period woman in a swimsuit standing in front of a restaurant - probably in the 1930's. Oh thanks Google, there she is. She isn't the point though. Like all good memento purchases, she has a story.

On Sam's last week in France, we walked to the far side of the port looking for the beach that our new friends, Tristan and Kathryn, who are American/Italian/British travel journalists living in Nice, suggested.

Along the cliffs hangs a shell of a building, with an equally decrepit structure perched on a small rock promontory rising out of the turquoise sea. Nothing is left of the structure but a three-story spiral staircase attached to a concrete pillar and a rickety, rusty metal gangplank that hooks the promontory to the main.

Local teenagers gather there to perform the universal teenage mating rituals - shoving, squealing, strutting etc. They also rockclimb the cliffs, swing their legs up onto the rusty gangplank to access the platform, climb the spiral staircase and the concrete pillar and then....

Jump off.

It's at least a 30 foot jump, maybe 40, from the top of the pillar. Girls climb up the slippery and overhanging cliff too in order to sun and preen and jump, well away from any parental supervision.

Sam and I found this deeply entertaining and noted that it really was a perfect way for teenagers to express their considerable teenage angst. In America, of course, such a place would be wrapped in concertina wire and plastered with keep-out signs. Not so, in France.

Besides being a demanding and dangerous climb, the platform provides a perfect stage for the young men to perform feats of aerial bravery and make obscene gestures to the incoming Sardinia/Corsica ferries.

Of course this impresses girls.

The day before I left Nice, I wandered through the old town, photographing architecture, drinking cafe au lait and breathing the Catholic incense burning in 17th century cathedrals. On my way, I happened into a shop selling art deco posters. One caught my eye.

It was a woman in a bathing suit standing on the rocky shore, under a restaurant called The Reserve. The restaurant was perched on the cliffs with the conspicuous elegance for which France in the 30's was so famous. Across a small gangway, restaurant guests were invited to gaze at the Mediterranean from a milk-white, wrought-iron three-story gazebo attended by tuxedoed waiters and a string quartet.

How swank and delicious this place must have been at a time when Nice was bustling with British aristocracy and famous French
impressionists. Today, there is still a swank and lovely restaurant next to the former location. Happily, the restaurant's current website has another picture of it's former glory.

The salesgirl saw me get really excited, when I figured out what I was looking at. When I told her I wanted it, she said in French, "do you know where this is?"

"Oui, oui" I said. "Les garcons sautent."

Believe it or not, "The boys jump" was one of the first sentences I learned while studying French with the Rosetta Stone. The shop girl was clearly pleased that not only did I, an American tourist, knew the site of Restaurant De La Reserve but that I was able to explain myself and my excitement in French.

This exchange marked the end of my keen observance of French culture and the start of my love affair with it.

Americans like to say that the French are rude or even less kind adaptations of that word. But I think the French and their value system are misunderstood by my people.

The French are exceedingly polite and bristle at American informality and presumption. They rigorously defend their beloved cultural institutions from tacky global influences, so that even MacDons on the Promenade des Anglais has flower beds out front.

Because the French haven't surrendered their singular cultural aesthetic in the name of efficiency or commerce, (I'm thinking WalMart) when you stumble into a small town in Provence on a Wednesday morning, you find a local market fairly bursting at the seams. Vendors are selling artisan bread, cheese, porc, chocolate, wine, grass baskets, lavender bunches and warm bread all as a matter of daily course. Normal people - not just tourists or French with boatloads of cash - shop, socialize and conduct business there - like humans have done in the marketplace for millennia.

In my opinion, this is at least one reason why France is the #1 most visited nation on the planet, according to 2010 global tourism statistics. Believe it or not, the US is second and we have the Grand Canyon.

I told you all that to tell you this:

1. I just spent six weeks in Provence, the Cote d'Azur, Haute Provence and The Jura.  

  

2. I plan to be near-fluent by this time next year and I plan to go back.

3. I would like to bring a few of you along: A few smart, fun women who, like me, appreciate high-quality, local food, wine and culture. Who are up for soulful, sensuous travel, where people and their lives trump cities and their buildings.

4. I have scouted a route through lavender fields, roadside cherry stands, mountain lakes, antique markets, wineries, Roman ruins, Mediterranean beaches and other natural and man-made wonders. 

So, my question is, what are you doing next June?

A Whole New KRO

It seems, to me, that a successful blogger is one who employs a platform that a) doesn't require three hours per post to untangle messed up code; b) gives the impression the blogger actually does live in the 21st century.

Good news! Kirk Ranch Organics has finally achieved this. After 18 months of wrangling our old site, Kirk Ranch Organics has a fresh new look, with proper RSS, a new address and even  consistent fonts. Wow.

Since we will no longer spend three hours on jacked up code, we might actually blog on topics like The French Riviera, What to do in Nice, Where the best markets hide in Provence and shopping at Ikea in Istanbul. We even have ideas about bringing a few of you back to Provence with us next summer to scout out the best cheese, antiques, flowers and perfume. France is soooo good. I can't keep it all to myself.

We are very much looking forward...

Brave or Crazy

In honor of my upcoming 39th birthday, I decided to quit agonizing about it and finally do something with my hair. 

My current style, which I like to call aging-hippie-spends-too-much-time-in saltwater-chic, I believe is the main culprit behind people inquiring which of us, me or Christy, is older. This is intolerable.

So this morning Christy took me to her Turkish hairstylist here in Istanbul. She had an approximately 30 second, halting conversation in Turkish with the salon owner, pointed to my grey hair with exasperation, and then left. 

My stylist knows the word OK in English and I know the words Hello and Thank you in Turkish. Hooray, what else do we need? Let's color my hair.

Some of you who know Christy might be saying, "wow you let Christy tell them what color to dye your hair?"

I know, that thought crossed my mind as I sat helpless with ammonia based goo all over my head. I resigned myself to the fact that the horses were really out of the barn on this one. 

I comforted myself by remembering what she said as she left; "don't worry you can always grow it out."

The story has a happy ending. They were in fact incredibly competent and my hair looks much like it did when I was 20. This is good because I have been invited, this afternoon, to be a panelist for a United Nations Development Program agency seminar on organic farming. I'm pretty sure I will be the only Texan there.

It's a long story how this happened and I will post more after it happens but at least I can go with good hair. July 11, 2011

Encouragement.

Browsing through some photos of last June and July in Texas, I realized that we actually got a bunch of soaking rain last summer.

The fields were deep with healthy green bermuda, my beds were growing like crazy and big drenching rainstorms weren't all that uncommon.

In this hard season of heat and drought in Texas, I thought I'd post these photos as an encouraging reminder that when it does rain again, it will be lovely and grow. July 11, 2011

Easter Evacuations.

Evacuate is an ugly word. One that forces this weird union between hysteria and disciplined action. Both are required, I think, if you plan to get any of your stuff out. 

As luck would have it, I 've had this experience, now twice, in the last ten days: Once for oncoming wildfire and once for oncoming tornado. I would have hit the trifecta if the predicted softball-sized hail had, in fact, occurred. Happily, it didn't. It was only quarter-sized. 


I'm going to spare you the details of conditions in Central Texas right now because you can just go to CNN and find out. 
In short, two weeks ago, Texas, which is suffering the worst drought since the 30's, started burning and it hasn't stopped. Then last night it started raining, which should be terrific news, and it was, until it turned into hail, massive lightning strikes and then tornadoes.


When a wildfire is burning in someone else's backyard, like in California, it usually prompts sympathy but not much else because well, what can you do? When a wildfire, which is swallowing oak and mesquite trees so fast it makes them explode and disintegrate, barrels toward your life galvanized by 60 mph winds, things get real. Fast. 


Horses. Dogs. Cats. Truck. Trailer. Hard Drive. Guitar. Guns. Saddles. Change of clothes. Water. Wedding Album and the rug my sister gave us from Azerbaijan. And each other. That's it. 


Had the fire managed to jump a highway or two and burn my precious home, which has been defying natural disasters since 1917, that's what we would have had left. 


A mere eight days later, as we raced to our neighbor's storm cellar and I alternated between praying for and cursing this crazy-ass Texas weather,  I had my iphone, my hard drive, a hard copy of my book and Sam. Everything else was on its own.


It's hard not to be schizophrenic about all this. 


The number one feeling is gratitude because thanks to our volunteer firefighters, we never had to pull down our driveway to escape the advancing fire and the tornado turned Northeast and petered out.


So we had a nice underground visit with Durwood and Aletha and her 92 year old mother, my yoga student, Aline. They are all more experienced with hail, fire and tornado than I and therefore seemed to enjoy a lesser degree of panic.


That's the good news.


But the bad news is a fireman lost his life fighting the Gorman fire and 167 families have lost their homes in a nearby community. Thousands of others are homeless from these tornadoes. We are in this weird middle place. We aren't cleaning up wreckage but we are deeply paranoid about the possibility.


Maybe things seem more radical than they actually are because we are new here, but how do you tell?


It's unsettling to be so distrustful of the natural world; to sense that it is hostile to your presence. I'm an earthquake girl myself. At least with earthquakes - the initial one anyway - you don't know they're coming. You just get out from under your desk (hopefully) and start surveying the damage. But this stuff has been going on for weeks. I'm exhausted by red radar screens with purple tornado dots and weathermen saying things like "baseball-sized hail hitting Gorman in eight minutes."


In addition, looking at the weather almanac last week, I discovered that the normal average high temperature for April 20th in this area is 77 degrees. It was 102 that day just south of us in Comanche.
I think that is what's bothering me. I'll bet people in Missouri and North Carolina and even Japan and Haiti - places that have gone wild on their human inhabitants lately - feel the same way. Maybe I'm overreacting, but this stuff is making me pause and reflect.


There's not much we can do about earthquakes and tsunamis. Maybe there is nothing we can do about droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes either. However, I believe 98% of the scientific community, when they say there is.


Scientists repeatedly say, when the number of carbon molecules in the atmosphere increases, the earth's temperature increases. This has a huge impact on ice, oceans and weather patterns.


 In 400,000 years of atmospheric history, as recorded in ice cores, there has never been this much carbon in our atmosphere. 


Never.


It's easier to blow off this data when you are not demolishing historic weather averages and enduring 80-year droughts. Watch PBS correspondent Martin Smith's thoughtful and interesting documentary called Heat  here. 


Even as I write, I can hear the tv in the next room. The newscasters have taken over the golf tournament Sam was watching to tell us about a whole new set of tornadoes. These are working not far from the area that, tonight, is still on fire. The tornado west of us is heading our way and we are hoping it veers south.Or better yet, dies completely and just settles into a good soaking rainstorm for oh, I don't know, a month. 


At the end of the day, I still believe in a sovereign God, who knows exactly what is going on and will work it out for the good of those who love Him. He doesn't however, promise the ride won't be bumpy.

On the way to church this morning to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus - we drove past black fields and scorched trees. The roads are torn up with firebreaks and everything smells of smoke. Yet somehow, even with zero moisture last week, green shoots have sprung up through the charred ground. All over, there are swaths of black death covered by the fuzz of bright green promise. 


How's that for an Easter message. April 24, 2011

My Auction Buddy.

There is nobody in the world who loves an equipment auction more than Ranch Boss. 


No, sorry Danny, Durwood, Mark; R.B. loves them more.

A day at the equipment auction for Ranch Boss is like a day in Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, theMetropolitan Museum of Art and the spa all rolled together, for me.

His palms even get sweaty as he throws them up on a hay baler that he totally does not need but "it's such a sweet deal." Actually, he never throws his hand up, that's what rookies do. He just catches the bid-catcher's eye and nods. That way nobody around him really knows who is doing the bidding.

Believe me this little addiction is not without its perils. 


Once, we nearly brought a $7,000 horse home in the back of my Nissan pickup. Ranch Boss was insulted that such a fine horse should sell for so paltry a sum. The bidding stalled with him at $7,000. I had no idea, he held the winning bid. The loud sigh of relief he blew when someone bid $7,500, tipped me off though. 


If we'd hauled a trailer to Fort Worth that day, I'm pretty sure we'd own that horse. This is a long way of saying, we may have to hold an auction intervention soon.


The auction yard is crawling with coveralled, cigar-chewing men in sweat-stained caps that bear the names of local implement dealers.


One guy, who wears a lifetime of farming on the skin of his hands,eased his field-worn body up into the seat of an old Massey Ferguson and assessed - correctly I might add - "what she'll bring." 


But don't kid yourself, this is no place for rookies.
Some of this equipment has clocked enough peanut and hay field mileage to go from here to the moon and the guys with the implement caps know it. They stomp clutches and raise buckets, check hoses and hookups.


Ranch Boss, who's been going to equipment auctions since he was a kid in North Carolina, knows too. So I'm thinking maybe I should rent him out to auction rookies who want to buy some used equipment but don't know what they're up against. I think I'll call it "My Auction Buddy" or something like that.


Sounds like a win-win to me. March 20, 2011

It's a New Day

It hurts a little to note that my last post was in July. It's telling to note that grasshoppers were mentioned. 

Farming is so humbling. 

One of the advantages of living in a rural place is that you can usually throw a raging temper tantrum in your driveway, unwitnessed. One afternoon I was doing just that; smashing grasshoppers with a shovelhead and shouting expletives when, unfortunately, my neighbor Durwood pulled in. I failed to pull it together in time and Durwood, who knows a thing or two about crop failure after a lifetime of peanut farming, watched with sympathy. Then with great kindness he suggested I fog the whole show with Sevin and poison the little suckers.

"But I caaaaaaaan't do that Durwood!" I wailed.

Sometimes holding the line blows.

Later that same day, Ranch Boss drew his own line by announcing that the grasshoppers on the balance of the Kirk Ranch would be sprayed in the morning, to protect his hay crop. I know when things are non-negotiable. So, last summer the Kirk Ranch became something like a restaurant with smoking and non-smoking sections.

But thank God hope springs eternal and we are back at it, with our second year of organic gardening in Central Texas. We are wiser and better prepared now.

Seed catalogues arrive daily, baby green Bermuda shoots are poking up through their dormant beige brothers and we've had four calves in seven days. Here are a few things on the horizon that have us excited. 

1. Lavender. I decided, over the winter, to quit pretending I don't want the front of my ranch tolook like a farm in Provence. I have surrendered and plan to plant several hundred lavenderplants in the open space between vegetables and orchard. In my mind it looks like this. Lavender likes sandy, loamy, sweet soil with good drainage, which I have, it is a drought tolerant plant as well, which, well duh..There are thriving lavender farms in Austin, which we may visit in an upcoming post.

2. Bees. If we aren't concerned about bee colony collapse, we should be. Remember the plants that sustain us are pretty undemanding except for a couple things. Their need for pollenators is absolute. Given that the EPA says that pesticide overuse is at least one probable cause of colony collapse, we hope to provide a haven - if possible. Plus bees love lavender. I love honey. See how this works? Of course I know almost nothing about beekeeping, but I know people who do. Stay tuned.

3. Pullets. I am happy to announce that my baby pullets are becoming hens. Six fresh brown eggs this morning! This may deserve its own blogpost but these little babies came from the Leon Valley Hatchery just down the road. Come to find out they are the largest distributor of fertilized eggs on Ebay! Who knew? People buy fancy breeds of chickens for 4-H or whatever, the eggs are shipped in special packages and then incubated by the buyers. By the way, because I wondered about this too, fertilized chicken eggs are dormant until somebody with a fluffy butt (or other technology) sits on them.

Oh and did you notice the funny looking comb on Tom the Rooster? Do you know what happened? Frostbite! Yep, it got that cold for that long in Texas a few weeks ago. When it doesn't break 18 degrees for four days, it's hard to keep your comb warm.

He's fine though, surrounded by six "blossoming" pullets, if you know what I mean.

4. Farmers Market. The bottom line is this: I don't want to drive to Dallas to sell produce - especially with trouble in the Suez. So I wonder, if somebody started a Farmers Market in Gorman with a mess of backyard growers and then marketed the pants off it, well....If you build it will they come? Perhaps its worth a try. Saturday mornings starting in April/May? More on this to come.

5. Raised Beds. You might recall the industry that double digging 500 square feet of raised beds required last spring. Because Ranch Boss is a genius, he promised he could duplicate the process with all the required finesse if I would just come "look at" this sweet backhoe attachment for his tractor. See how things work around here? Turns out he was right. We more than doubled our raised bed planting space in less than eight hours. Last year each bed took 8-10 hours to dig by hand. We are so ahead of the game that shallots, onions, peas and spinach have been in the ground for a week now.

I promise greater diligence here, stay tuned. February 26, 2011

Shop Your Local Farmers First!

I have a wheelbarrow of cucumbers waiting to become pickles. I have about 30 lbs of sweet, fuzzy, drippy, baseball-sized peaches sitting on top of the cucumbers. A friend loaded me up with about 10 garlic heads yesterday, the chard is, unbelievably, still producing in the sweltering July-ness of Texas. Plus, the grasshoppers have descended heavy enough to make us guard for the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse.

No wonder I haven't blogged.

Summer is in full swing here and I am going to bang the drum once again for local farmers.

A study just released by Virginia Tech found that if each household in the State of Virginia spent just $10 per week on local food - squash, milk, pork, fruit or whatever, it would add $1.65 billion - that's billion with a B - to the State's economy. Holy smokes - how many jobs would that create?

If that doesn't convice you to stop by your local Farmer's Market this week with a ten in hand, here's a story:

Across the street from the Kirk Ranch is a roughly 25-acre field farmed by some friends of ours - a couple in their 70's, named Charles and Carolyn. For decades, the two of them have grown squash and cukes on this land, harvested, sorted and driven this totally fresh, never refrigerated produce to the Dallas Farmers Market. Since 1941 DFM has sold local, wholesale produce in South Dallas. The farmers market, as a trend, has clearly taken off, with the number of markets more than doubling in the US in the last 10 years, but for DFM it's not a trend - it's old hat!

The chefs show up at dawn every day in the summer and buy their produce direct from the farmer - it is an elegant win-win situation for hardworking chefs and farmers both. Charles and Carolyn have been taking their produce there for DECADES. This requires them to get up in the middle of the night, drive 120 miles to Dallas, arrive before dawn for a good spot in the local vendors shed and be ready for the chefs and other early birds.

Ranch  Boss asked Charles yesterday when and where they sleep - do they get a room or something. Charles, who is a hilarious character anyway, said , "Heck no, you sleep right there with your vegetables."

So let's review. 

A couple in their 70's gets out into the field in the morning, harvests squash until noon then washes, sorts and boxes it well into the afternoon, completes all their other normal chores - which for Charles probably means spending the balance of the day on the tractor mowing hay. Then they load up at midnight to drive to Dallas to sell vegetables at dawn. They repeat this procedure as long as there is squash.

As you are taking your second coffee break of the day, stretching a little from a morning of answering e-mails, I'd like you to pause and calmly consider Charles and Carolyn. Consider how hard farmers actually work to grow and sell food. What's sad about this story is there is a glut of squash on the DFM right now- maybe because of all the rain we got, I don't know, but Charles told Ranch Boss they had to bring a bunch home. All that work for nothing. Ugh.

So this is a battle cry!

I implore you shop your local farmers first! Sure you can buy squash at thesame time you buy toothpaste and charcoal and that's super convenient - but just remember somebody busted their tail to grow that squash and if they can't support their families doing it (as all the farming trends suggest) they will quit.

Then what? This isn't a small problem.

We at the Kirk Ranch are awaiting news about a Texas Department of Ag grant called "The Young Farmer Grant" designed to help young people get back to farming. Think about Charles, can you blame twenty-somethings for their reluctance to go all in on a farm?

Now of course, Charles and Carolyn are an absolute delight to be around, they have farmed their whole lives and Charles is one of the happiest guys I know. I can't imagine trying to keep up with his 1000mph lifestyle and I'm half his age. So certainly there are joys inherent to a life spent outside in the sunshine and air with plants. But don't kid yourself, it's hard work.

So make a day of it, take your kids to your local farmers market and spend some money there. Texas is crazy ripe and delicious right now.

See for yourself! July 13, 2010

Why Heirloom Matters - A Primer.

It's so hip to be green right now, it's awesome.



Consumers are panicking about the recent Harvard study which suggests that pesticide residue in fruits and vegetables may increase the occurrence of ADHD. Analysists predict the demand for organic produce will double by the end of the decade and every urban restaurant worth its salt, has heirloom vegetables on the menu.


Unfortunately, the lexicon has become ponderous - USDA organic, non-certified organic, locavore, F1 hybrid , non-GMO, heirloom etc. If you are lucky enough to eat heirloom vegetables but have no idea what they are, we are here to help.


Heirloom vegetables come from plants, usually old varieties that maybe your grandparents grew, which have undergone no genetic modification or hybridization. Simply put, if you save a seed from an heirloom sweet chocolate bell pepper and then stick it in the ground, you will grow a sweet chocolate bell pepper plant.

"But wait," you say. "I've never heard of sweet chocolate bell peppers, I can't even imagine what one tastes like." That's because sweet chocolate bell peppers look weird, they're delicate and don't fare well in shipping containers crossing the ocean. So, in our industrial food system, farmers don't grow them because wholesalers don't buy them. Therefore, you don't get to eat them.
The good news is you can save seeds from bell peppers and plant them in your garden. Humans have done this for millenia. Unless, of course, the supermarket bell pepper you are eating is an F1 hybrid - which it probably is.


With apologies to Gregor Mendel; a first generation hybrid is the product of two different plants with desirable characteristics, like heavy-bearing, frost-tolerant etc. Their union creates a new, uniform variety with those desirable qualities. These days hybrids are bred not so much for flavor and novelty but to withstand the rigors of the industrial food system.


Say you were inclined to save hybrid seeds to plant in the garden. You'll wind up with a pasty, wilty mess of a plant that is good for nothing. "So what," you say. "Seeds are cheap. I can just go to Walmart and get more." Well..yes..but those are probably hybrids too and they make plants that can't reproduce themselves either, so you go back to Walmart the next year and buy more seeds and...see where I'm going with this? Also, the seeds for sale at your neighborhood garden supply are, due to supply changes in the industrial food system, a narrow genetic slice of the variety that was once available.


Are you Irish-American? I am. Two and a half million Irish were displaced in the 1840's because they basically all planted the same variety of potato. Nature likes diversity and if the Irish had planted several varieties of potato, maybe one of them could have survived the blight; and I could be drinking a Guinness in County Cork right now.


Seed Savers Exchange, whose members have saved an estimated 1 million varieties of rare garden seeds since 1975, put it thus: "The vegetables and fruits currently being lost are the result of thousands of years of adaptation in diverse ecological niches around the globe."


Renowned plant collector Jack Harlan said of seed saving, "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine."


Whoa.


In addition, seed company scientists are churning out varieties that have been genetically engineered - Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO. For instance they might splice a cold-water fish gene into a tomato to make it more frost-tolerant. Unlike hybrids, which are like breeding a horse and a donkey to make a mule, this is mating fish and tomatoes - something that could never occur in nature.


So is this food safe to eat? Thirty countries from Japan to Austrailia and the entire EU don't think so. These countries have passed restrictions or outright bans on GMO. The US is a different story. According to the USDA, in 2007, 91% of the soy grown was GMO. By the way, if you eat anything processed, you eat soy.


Health questions aside, there are two other facts that freak me out as much as the phrase "catastrophic starvation."


Problem #1 - Worldwide 81% of GM crops were genetically engineered to resist herbicides, says research by the Center for Food Safety. That means you can spray the whole field and everything dies, including beneficial insects, beneficial microbes in the soil, birds, fish, frogs, etc., but the crop doesn't. This is the wonder of modern science.


But oops... this just in,  farmers across the US have found 10 weed species growing quite well in their Round-Up Ready crops. Round-Up Ready means the plants are genetically engineered to tolerate the application of glyphosate. The presence of weeds means the weeds are evolving to resist the chemical. So what do we do now? Spray more? Yum!


Problem #2 -  Fans of the recent documentary Food Inc will recall a fellow in it named Maurice Parr. He travels from farm to farm, for a living, helping farmers save their seed.. However, since genetically modified crops are developed in a lab they can be patent protected as intellectual property.


So the film tracks Parr's legal troubles with Monsanto - who according to Wikipedia is the largest conventional seed producer in the world, who produces 90% of the GMO sold and posted revenue of $11.3 billion in 2008. In the film, Goliath has been punching David in the face without pause for several years now but David just won't lie down. Look at Monsanto's website, they defend their position.


It's fascinating and provokes questions like: "Who owns the global food supply?"  A question which is worth calm consideration and then complete hysteria.


So here's what it boils down to.


If you buy seeds from places like Seed Savers or Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, you can skip all this nonsense. You can save your seed and grow it again next year without being sued or growing crappy plants. And you are personally helping prevent a catastrophic starvation event by encouraging genetic diversity in your own garden.


If you can't swing all that, just eat a prosciutto and melon appetizer made with an heirloom Charantais melon at your favorite restuarant. After you freak out over how good it is, find the owner, thank him or her and then go get all your friends and repeat the process as often as you can.


We can handle supply, if you handle demand. May 22, 2010