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
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