The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

by Ray, Janisse

  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 changi
ng 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.

  — 16 —

  the pollinator

  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.

  “I taught myself to hand-pollinate when I was eight years old,” he says to the group. “It’s easy.”

  Why would a person want to know how to do this? Because hand-pollination allows a gardener to grow many varieties of squash and at the same time maintain the purity of their seeds by eliminating (or at least reducing) the chances of cross-pollination. Hand-pollination allows the gardener to become a very discerning bumblebee.

  Cavagnaro begins with the basics. “What we call squash are not just yellow squash and zucchini. By squash we mean the entire genus of cucurbits.” (The cucurbit family includes many other plants, including watermelon, cucumbers, and luffa.)

  He says squash are divided into four main species, plus two minor additions.

  1.Cucurbita pepo has prickly stems and leaves, and its stems are five-sided: summers, crooknecks, scallops, zucchinis, spaghettis, acorns, cocozelles, Delicata, vegetable marrows, small gourds, jack-o’-lanterns, and many pie pumpkins.

  2.Cucurbita maxima has the longest vines and spongy, hairy stems: bananas, buttercups, Hubbards, turbans, Delicious, Hokkaido, marrows.

  3.Cucurbita moschata is tropical, with large, hairy leaves and a widely flaring stem next to the fruit: butternuts, cheese types, sweet potatoes, Kentucky Field, Tahitian, tromboncinos.

  4.Cucurbita mixta has slightly lighter leaves than C. moscata and the fruit’s stem is less truncated—it includes most cushaws.

  A fifth species, Cucurbita ficifolia, is a white green-striped pumpkin known as Malabar gourd or chilacayote from Oaxaca’s mountains. Seeds of Cucurbita foetidissima, the sixth, known as buffalo gourd, are made into oil, but the fruit is not eaten.

  Different varieties of squash within a species will cross-pollinate, meaning that a Hubbard will cross with a banana. That can be exciting if you’re a plant experimenter or breeder. But in order to keep varieties pure and save their seed, a gardener either must choose to grow one squash from each species or hand-pollinate.

  The sun was climbing up the forehead of the sky. “Well, we better get moving if we want to catch the flowers,” Cavagnaro says. He looks around. “They definitely start to go limp at this hour of the day.”

  We acolytes trail him to the squash patch, where Cavagnaro teaches us to hand-pollinate. I had to watch him to learn how. But you don’t have to. You can read and learn.

  First, you plant some seeds of a squash you want to keep going. Then you watch the growing plant and note when it starts to put out flowers. Squash flowers are yellow. They are substantial, as flowers go—about four inches long and six inches in diameter, for the most part, at their zenith, about the size of a lily. There are two kinds of blossoms, female and male. The female flower has a small replica of the squash at one end. The male flower is plain.

  The first bloom on a plant is usually not a female; squash put out a lot of male flowers before the first female opens. (Who knew that? Not me.) Exceptions can be prolific bush summer squash, Cavagnaro says, which may make a few female blossoms before any males appear; those won’t set fruit and can be picked with blossom intact and eaten young and tender. (Okay.) There’s a male or female blossom at every leaf node. Once the plant starts flowering, this is usually the lineup on a stem: male, male, male, female, male, male, male. (Cavagnaro is obviously not just book-smart about plants. He’s spent a lot of time paying attention in the garden.)

  You go out and watch for the first female flower. You wait until it starts to turn yellow and looks as if it’s going to open imminently. This is important. On the female flower, the stigma is not receptive until she opens. Recognizing an imminent blossom is not easy at first. Over time you’ll figure out how a blossom looks the night before she opens.

  On the night before the blossom should open, go out and tape the female flower shut, a chastity belt, and then tape shut a few male flowers, so that they can’t open. To ensure greater genetic diversity, choose male flowers from different plants of the same variety. You will be hand-pollinating the next morning.

  The next morning you go back out, untape the flowers, and pollinate by brushing the anthers onto the stigma. Go early. Squash blossoms are done by noon. Watermelons, which also attend family reunions with the cucurbits and are pollinated in the same manner, open later. The flowers of cukes, another member, last one day.

  Cavagnaro leads us to a C. maxima. Sweet Meat squash is the variety, not a very exciting name. We crouch around the vines.

  “Yesterday afternoon, around 5 p.m., I came out to the squash patch and located male and female blossoms,” Cavagnaro said. “I sealed them shut with masking tape.”

  “I always open my males first,” he continues. “Those bees can get in and out in a ji
ffy.” He means that if you open the female, a bee can pollinate it with pollen from another variety of squash before you get the males opened. He picks a leaf like a surgeon and smooths it on the ground. Then he plucks three male flowers and lays them taped shut on the leaf. With each male flower, he carefully peels off the tape and tears off the hoop of petal. What’s left are three small yellow rods an inch or so long in a row on the leaf.

  The female flower Cavagnaro leaves on the vine, of course. He untapes it and parts its petals tenderly, until the stigma is visible. Then, very gently, he brushes each anther across and around the stigma. “Some people use a paintbrush to do this,” he said. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. This is a gentle process.”

  He uses three males for the one female. “This ensures some diversity, if there is any,” he says.

  Once pollinated, he tapes closed the female flower all the way to its base. “Use masking tape, don’t get painting tape,” he says. “You need good, sticky, firm drafting tape.” Of course the tape damages the delicate petals, but it doesn’t matter because the flower will fall off when it sets fruit.

  Last, Cavagnaro labels what he’s done. He ties a length of marking tape around the plant stem—loosely, so as not to constrict. On the tape is written the squash’s identification number and the date, then 3♂1♀, which is Greek for three males and one female blossom. The symbol reminds a young woman who is watching about something she’s heard—that the sign for female, a cross topped with a circle, means “rooted in earth.”

  “If you don’t have masking tape,” Cavagnaro says, “you can use a male blossom to cover the pollinated female. Turn the female petals inward, then cover the whole thing with a sheet of male petal.” He demonstrates the process. Turning the female flower’s petals inward makes it look like an ice-cream cone rather than the bell of a trumpet. To create a limp sheet of petal to use as a roof, Cavagnaro picks a male blossom and tears off the calyx. Now it looks like a crinkly funnel. He slits the petal and opens it to make a small rectangle. He utilizes the opened petal to cover the female flower, a bit like a diaphragm. As the petal-wrap wilts in the sun, it will more tightly cling to the female flower, barring admission to insects.