by Ray, Janisse
The most egregious part of the story is that corporations own the playing field. They control the government regulators, or more aptly, they are the government regulators in a revolving-door parade between the multinationals and government. We could call it cross-pollination, but I won’t use a metaphor of life for such a destructive practice. Tom Vilsack, to name one of dozens of examples, was a Monsanto executive before he became the secretary of agriculture. Genetic engineering is not evolution sped up; it is evolution in the hands of multinationals. Thanks to hybridization, genetic modification, and seed patents, and with government as the enforcer, a handful of individuals have control over what we eat.
Loss of Biodiversity
In both hybridization and genetic engineering, farmers lose control of the ability to save seeds year after year and to breed plant varieties ideally suited to a place. To hell with natural selection. Gene flow be damned.
Genetic freedom allows crops to adapt and evolve—to disease, to a transforming earth, and to macro- and micro-climates. These adaptations often prove useful and profitable. A landrace of alfalfa, for example, discovered in 1940 in Iran, proved resistant to stem nematodes, and this landrace parented a strain of alfalfa that greatly improved production. Biotechnology subverts natural adaptation and destroys diversity.
In the United States, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), this is gone: 95 percent of vintage cabbage varieties, 96 percent of field corns, 94 percent of peas, and 81 percent of tomatoes. In the century between 1804 and 1904, over seven thousand varieties of apples were grown in the United States (including Roxbury Russet, Black Gillifeather, and Greening)—and 86 percent have been lost. Sure, we’ve kept lots of varieties and we’ve gained new varieties, but 86 percent have disappeared.
Ever fewer commercial varieties in chemical systems replace local varieties employed in traditional farming systems. In 1949 China, ten thousand distinct wheat varieties could be found growing. By the 1970s, those varieties had been laid to waste—one thousand were in use. Likewise, in Korea, by 1993 only 26 percent of those garden crops growing in 1985 were still being grown, a loss of three-fourths in eight years.
Loss of Landedness
Pull one thread on a problem, like that of the loss of food diversity, and you’ll find one issue connected to everything else. Part of our loss is that we’ve not stayed in one place. For the past century, rural places have steadily bled people. The sons and daughters of farmers were lured to cities, resulting in the largest diaspora in American history, one that spanned many generations and continues to this day.
In 1900, 41 percent of Americans farmed for a living. Now less than 2 percent earn their livelihood farming, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. During this era, many folk traditions went underground—not just seed saving, but customs like buckdancing, clogging, fiddling, tatting, and quilting.
The falling apart of rural communities began in the late 1800s with the advent of railroads that made travel easier and brought a keen dissatisfaction with rural isolation and lack of society. The bleeding of rural people intensified during World War II when, to rebuild our war-broken country, the US government launched an advertising campaign to entice people away from farms to cities. Industrial capitalism needed a workforce, and what it promised in return was certain prosperity. Jobs were plentiful in the city, factory labor easier than hardscrabble farm life. To leave the farm was an act of patriotism (albeit a misguided one).
The ad campaign worked. There ensued a mass exodus of rural people. Between 1915 and 1960 about 9 million rural Southerners, to name one region, were displaced to cities; another 9 million—approximately half white, half black—were gone from the South entirely. (We must also recognize that to leave could also be an act of self-preservation. In the case of the South, millions of blacks fled rural lands to escape Jim Crow laws and search for higher paying jobs and freedom from cultural oppression.)
Young people would graduate from schools in little towns like Ideal, Georgia; Liberty, Mississippi; Enterprise, West Virginia; Faith, South Dakota; and Hope, Arkansas—and they would go away to university and never come back. They would have internalized what we told them, as the late thinker Paul Gruchow explored in his book Grass Roots: The Universe of Home, that if they wanted to amount to anything they’d better leave home: “We raise our most capable rural children from the beginning to expect that as soon as possible they will leave and that if they are at all successful, they will never return. We impose upon them, in effect, a kind of homelessness.” If they were any good they wouldn’t be in the country—they’d be somewhere else. They would want to pursue learned professions. They wouldn’t want to tackle illiteracy, religious fundamentalism, poverty, joblessness, racism, rural homophobia. People speak of having “escaped.” “I would die if I had to go back there,” I’ve heard said. “I couldn’t wait to leave. Nothing’s there.” Once uprooted, folks tend to continue peregrinating, moving about for careers, for education, for marriage, for lifestyle.
Four-fifths of people in the United States now live in urban areas. Across the country you see evidence of this “hollowing out” of rural America—abandoned small farms, ghost towns, country stores with dark windows—and its attendant suffering. Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists—those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.
Our seeds are disappearing.
When seed varieties vanish from the marketplace, they evaporate not only from collective memory but also from the evolutionary story of the earth. Seeds are more like Bengal tigers than vinyl records, which can simply be remanufactured. Once gone, seeds cannot be resurrected.
Goodbye, cool seeds. Goodbye, history of civilization. Goodbye, food.
A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help. Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener.
It needs you.
— 3 —
me growing up
WHEN I GREW UP in the 1960s and 1970s among south Georgia’s flat gray fields, which spun waist-high tobacco and battalions of cornstalks out of thin dirt, our culture was agrarian. Seeds were currency, seeds were gifts, seeds were steaming bowls of the future.
My grandmother Beulah held stock in this economy. She loved plants and all that they produced. She had an ingenious and fascinating greenhouse—a pit house, dug into a red clay bank beside the dirt road. From the outside, the house looked about four feet high and was covered in plastic sheeting. When you pulled open its little door, concrete block steps led three feet down to a small earth room with a dirt floor and damp clay walls, ferny and mossy, a basement without a house. The pit house was steamy and hot and smelled like geraniums. The air was algaeic, it was so green.
We grandchildren had to ask permission to go into the pit house. A child had to move carefully there. She could not knock off blooms or break stems. She had to watch for snakes. She had to care about what she was seeing.
In a greenhouse, transformation is possible, because the lead tendril of the Willow-leaf Running Butter bean searches for your soul. A garden is the same. The Sunrise Serenade morning glory vine binds you. Maybe transformation is possible anywhere there are profusions of plants.
After my grandmother was too old to care for it, the greenhouse was dismantled and the pit filled with clay. But not yet. For a while I could learn my grandmother’s wisdom. I could observe her movements among African violets, her hands among links of Thanksgiving cactus. I could watch the clear water gushing from the hose.
My heart first opened to gardens in the time of cowpeas. I remember one specific day. It happened before my mother stopped wearing pants, before she adopted a religion tha
t forbade them. On this day she wore dark blue pedal pushers because she had come to her mother’s garden, since she herself did not have one; she had a junkyard, what she and my father called a wrecking yard. She had come to help my grandmother put up peas—field peas, not garden peas.
My skinny, gentle sister was wearing pants with little flowers printed on them and flat-bottom sneakers of light blue. She was six, holding my hand. I was two. My mother was picking, hoping my baby brother back at the house with Grandmama would stay asleep long enough for her to fill her pails. With this many children, three so far, how to even find time to put food by? My uncle was also in the pea-patch with my mother, helping harvest the peas that Mama and Grandmama would shell back on the porch. My sister walked me toward the edge of the garden. The peas had grown out of their lines and tangled together. They made an undulating sea that threatened to wash over us.
“Sis, watch out for snakes,” my uncle called to my sister. All the females in my mother’s family get called “Sis.” “Maybe y’all best go back to the house. I’d hate to see a snake bite you.” The vines smelled like thunder.
I didn’t think there were snakes beneath the big leaves. I stepped into them. I tripped and fell. My uncle looked up but didn’t say anything. I got up, brushed my palms together. My sister grasped my hand again. She listened better than I did. I pulled away. I reached for a long thin fruit. I think it was born in me to eat the fruit—I knew not to eat the leaf or the vine.
My mother was picking, picking. She couldn’t pick one lime-green bean pod and sit down among the upright leaves and begin to chew on it, as I could. Its taste was strange. I arrived at a moist round pea. Its taste was stranger. I chewed it with my new teeth.
“Mama,” my sister yelled. “She’s eating the peas.”
My mother turned her heart-shaped face toward me. It was often turned elsewhere. “You’re going to get a bellyache,” she said.
I was glad she didn’t tell us to go back to the house. I looked at her and smiled and kept chewing. I was so fat my face unfolded when I smiled. I didn’t know how to say what I was feeling. The peas did not need to be cooked.
“I don’t guess they’ll hurt her,” my mother said to herself as much as to my uncle or my sister. She was filling an enamel milk bucket. We would spend the afternoon taking these peas from their shells and tossing the empty pods into bushel baskets. I would try to play in the pods.
I knew my mother was tired. I knew she needed more sleep. But she was young, she was still in love with my father. She would always be in love with him. She had found her calling. I stood unsteadily among the tripping vines, clutching the fat pods with my fat hands.
“Peas,” my mother said. “Can you say that?” I looked at her figure, tall and thin against a blinding sun. I squinted, then grinned the fat grin.
“Pees,” I said.
The only gardening mentor I had was not saving seed because she understood genetic erosion. She was saving seed because she had learned how to do it when she was young, because she had always done it, and because it was the natural thing to do. She moved about her kitchen with her graying hair clipped short, baking lemon cakes and filling her pantry with pear chutney.
I was young in her kitchen when I saw my grandmother scraping squash pulp to dry on paper napkins smoothed on a foil pie plate.
“What are those, Grandmama?” I asked, making my voice small. I knew to be polite. I knew to ask only crucial questions, those to make adults feel important.
“Cushaw,” she said, proudly.
“Cushaw.” A funny word. Like a sneeze. “What is that?”
“Oh, a kind of pumpkin.”
“Do you eat the seeds?”
“No, child, you plant them,” she said. “To grow more cushaws.” She looked at me with a mixture of love and pity. “We’ll dry them and plant them in the garden next year and more pumpkins will grow.”
“Oh.”
After supper, I knew, my grandmother would go out to rock and watch the hummingbirds in the impatiens lining the screened porch, and she would let me climb up onto her lap. My grandmother had a soft bosom. Her housedress felt electric against my cheek. She smelled like the talcum powder in the round container on her dresser.
“Grandmama, will you show me how to grow cushaws?” I asked.
She laughed. “I will,” she said. “But I don’t know how much growing you’ll be able to do, with you starting school this year.”
I am immensely grateful for everything Beulah taught me. Without her, where would I be? “The branches grow because of the tree,” says a native Hawaiian proverb. We are here because of our ancestors.
Later, a ubiquitous first-grade experiment in germination—bean-growing in a milk carton on a classroom windowsill—affected me deeply. A kid has no power, everybody knows that, and yet when I planted a hard little round rock in a handful of soil, after a week or two something started to wend up out of the dirt. Two pages of a green book opened and rose skyward on one slender green leg. Days passed, more leaves opened, and the thing kept growing. I wanted to run and shout the news. Wizardry had happened, all because of me.
How could something so small shape-shift into something so big? Because seeds contain more than they are, life’s design held in a speck of germplasm. They are the source of all life, miracles in tiny packages. Magic. Just add water.
I am crazy about seeds in part because they are metaphors for so much: innovation, potential, multiplication, plenty, the future. I am also crazy about the literalness of seeds, the bundles of energy that have propagated plant life since flowering plants first appeared on the earth.
As a child who grew up isolated, without television, I sank deeply into stories. My father, a junkman, brought home loads of miscellany that sometimes included boxes of books. In one such outfit arrived a discarded collection of stories, a literature textbook for elementary school students. I read this book over and over. In the stories, someone’s very life was always at stake (just as it is in real life, now). A servant would be beheaded if he didn’t invent a new dessert to please a young spoiled prince, who wanted something both hot and cold (voilà! the ice-cream sundae). In another, a boy tried to take off his hat to honor the king, except a new hat kept replacing the one he took off. The hats became more and more elaborate. The boy was climbing the stairs of the death tower when the thousandth hat, the last and most magnificent one of all, appeared on his head. When the boy removed this crowning glory, finally his head was bare, and now he could bow down properly to the king. The king was so taken with the bejeweled, beplumed hat that he forgave the boy’s impertinence, spared his life, and made him a prince.
My favorite story was of a pioneer family who lived in a log cabin in the West, eking out crops. One evening, looking in his mother’s sewing basket for a button, the hero of the story found a single seed. Excited, he showed his family, who encouraged him to plant it. When spring arrived, he did exactly that; the seed germinated, and it grew into a pumpkin vine. The boy’s family was able to eat pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.
I have never forgotten the story of the wealth in a single seed.
Some years later my grandmother gave me the first heirloom seeds I ever began to save, although neither I nor she knew the terms heirloom or vintage at the time. I was spending Saturday with Grandmama. By the time my sister, brothers, and I had trooped through the front door that morning, she had picked a hamper of Zipper Cream peas and we spent the morning helping to shell them. At lunch I noticed a handful of strange seeds in a cut-glass bowl on a buffet in the dining room.
I waited until Grandmama finished cooking. I waited until after lunch. I waited until my sister and I washed all the dishes in the low sink, the one built for a woman who was barely five feet tall.
“Grandmama, what are these?” I asked. The beans were large as eyeballs; they looked like eyes, white with
dark irises.
“Sis, Ermalou gave me those. She called them Jack beans.”
“Can you eat them?”
“Ermalou said she thought you couldn’t. I don’t think I’d attempt it.”
At home, I’d claimed a section of a flower bed for my own garden. I wanted one of these eyeball seeds to plant in it. To steal one would be a sin. I needed to word my questions carefully.
“Are you going to plant them?”
“I did already.”
“Are these extra?”
“You might say that.”
“I’d like to try planting one.”
“Well, honey, help yourself.”
That was all I needed. The seeds felt like oblong marbles in my hand. “Why are they called Jack beans?” I asked.
“After Jack and the beanstalk, I reckon.”
“They grow very high?”
Grandmama laughed, “You’ll have to plant them and see.”
“Thank you, Grandmama.” Then I asked her if she knew what was orange and half a mile tall.
She didn’t.
“The Empire State Carrot,” I said.
She laughed. “I hope you get a Jack bean that high.”
“The Empire State Bean.”
Within a couple of years I’d set a brush fire clearing land for my second garden. It was a patch of ground about as big as an American bathroom at the periphery of the junkyard. I was twelve and went around talking about George Washington Carver, one of my heroes—a man who healed sick plants, painted with clay and pokeberry, and invented peanut butter. His influence would lead me to find amity and lasting friendship in the company of botanists and seedspeople.