Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste

      Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia

      Bill Best

      Foreword by Howard L. Sacks

      Ohio University Press Athens

      Foreword

      Howard L. Sacks

      A colleague of mine recently shared an eyebrow-raising story involving her college course “Botany and Botanical Arts.” In an “unknown plant” assignment, students were given different “mystery” seeds that they were challenged to cultivate, observe, and identify. One day my colleague discovered a student in the greenhouse who was at a loss over how much to water the plants; the exasperated student explained that she had never before planted a seed.

      How removed we have become from an act so fundamental to human civilization! Planting a seed—horticulture—prompted our early ancestors to abandon a nomadic life of foraging to take up a more sedentary existence. The newfound dependability of the food supply enabled populations to grow. Individuals could accumulate more possessions, because they were no longer required to carry everything with them from one food source to the next. Differences of wealth emerged, and with that, differences of power. Humans grew increasingly territorial, and hostilities became more commonplace as groups sought to protect their cropland. All this, from the planting of a seed.

      Not so long ago, most Americans still planted a few seeds. I grew up in postwar Philadelphia during the first wave of the new American idyll known as suburbia. On my street, partially prefabricated identical homes were perched like so many Monopoly plastic houses on deforested land. Visitors to our place were directed to “the sixth new house on the right.” The joke was that a drunken husband might walk into the wrong house at night.

      But my mother had grown up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, where houses had been hand built of brick and stone and wood, and the countryside had not seemed far removed from town life. Yet housewives like her and their businessman or professional husbands could not sign up quickly enough for this spot of perfection bearing the fatuous title of “Westgate Hills” (no gates, no hills, but indeed west of the city). Something, though, pulled at my mother, because from my earliest memory she had always planted a few tomatoes against the foundation of our split-level house so that we could taste something fresh. Fresh—the word itself is radical, given the change in the American diet to canned and frozen foods. Peering down from my bedroom window to see my neighbor scratching the dirt in his own makeshift backyard garden, and paying attention to my mother and her fondness for these optimistic young tomato plants, I saw that things could live and grow, in opposition to a profoundly denatured landscape.

      Then, as now, we knew no more about the source of the seeds we planted than about the origins of the food we purchased from the supermarket shelves. Both seeds and foods were identifiable to us by their corporate names, whether Burpee, Gerber, or Heinz. It wasn’t always that way, of course. Our collective ignorance can be traced to the mid-twentieth-century revolution in agriculture that transformed a diffuse, regionally based system of growing food to a highly centralized system of commodity production for a global market. By the late 1940s, tractors and combines had largely replaced machinery drawn by mules and horses, enabling farmers to cultivate more land with less reliance on their neighbors at planting and harvest time. In the following decades, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides were promoted and adopted as the saviors for increased productivity and crop yield—their environmental costs left unquestioned in this campaign directed toward farmers. Most recently, genetic seed modification has enabled new varieties of fruits and vegetables designed specifically for global transport and marketing.

      These technological breakthroughs complemented government policy and corporate interests. In the 1970s, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz admonished farmers to “get big or get out,” and low-interest bank loans enabled many farmers to buy more land and new equipment to produce a single commodity for sale on the global market. Agriculture schools at land-grant universities spearheaded research to develop new chemical and biological innovations, often financed by the very companies that would reap the profits as farmers became increasingly reliant on their products. Promises of an ever-expanding global demand for American agricultural commodities fueled agricultural speculation, and for a short time many American farmers did just fine. Tragically, the bubble eventually burst, and the reverberations have been both devastating and long-lasting. In the short term it meant the wholesale loss of farms and the decline of rural communities, and the farm crisis anticipated the recent housing market collapse that severely battered the American economy.

      In the late twentieth century, American consumers were invited to understand modern agriculture as an unmitigated good. On television, in magazines, in the school systems, and at the university ag program level, the discourse was nearly exclusively that our food supply was abundant, affordable, and convenient. But a growing number of families have begun to question the wisdom and sustainability of handing over our dinner plates to industrial farming enterprises. People are again asking questions about the sources of their food. For some, the issue is health—childhood diabetes, adolescent eating disorders, heart disease, and other diet-related concerns. Others bring agricultural practice under closer scrutiny over food safety, as E. coli, salmonella, and mad cow disease enter our everyday lexicon. And concern about fossil fuels focuses the lens on the degree to which our food supply depends on oil: gas for the combine, petroleum-based fertilizers, and the cost of long-distance transportation, with their corresponding impact on food prices.

      And then there is the matter of taste. Tomato varieties designed for resistance to bruising during cross-country transport and extended shelf life just do not taste very good, particularly when compared with homegrown varieties. Eggs from chickens raised under megafarm confinement conditions often have about as much taste as the cardboard containers in which they are packaged. And while supermarkets contain an astonishing array of products, the apples or greens in those bins actually represent just a few varieties chosen for their consistent, blemish-free appearance. As the song goes, “All made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.” When you take the time to think about it, it is no coincidence that suburbanized uniformity shows up in our food system.

      But consider an alternative world, one in which it is not only professionals who dictate the colors and textures on our plates, and in which memory and local culture go into every child’s lunchbox. This is the world of the seed savers of the Southern Appalachians. From the men and women who practice seed conservation as part of daily life, we can learn important lessons about eating wholesomely and living more holistically.

      Until the advent of commercially available seed stock, the practice of saving harvested seeds for future planting was born of necessity; sustainability of the food supply was an immediate, ever-present concern. The European pioneers who settled in western North Carolina and Kentucky brought seeds from their homelands and the eastern colonies, obtaining others from the indigenous Native people who had long planted varieties of corn.

      The varieties that flourished in the upper South were carefully preserved, and new strains that proved desirable—created through natural mutation or deliberately, by crossbreeding experimentation —were added to the local seed stock. This approach has yielded a diverse array of beans, corn, tomatoes, apples, and other fruits and vegetables prized for their flavor, texture, productivity, suita-bility for preserving, and eye appeal. In short, they both taste good and work well in the locale.

      This localized method of creating, disseminating, and preserving varieties stands in sharp contrast to the commercial system of genetic modification, corporate patents, and global marketing. As the stories in this volume reveal, the preservation of a particular variety of bean can often be traced to the dedicated efforts of a single individual over many years, experimenting with a new variety or simply planting, harvesting, and preserving seeds to ensure that a longtime favorite makes it into succeeding generations. Seed sharing follows the contours of traditional community life, as gardeners distribute a variety to family members, friends, and neighbors. Some growers freely share a prized bean with anyone likely to cultivate it, in order to ensure its preservation. Others more proprietary by nature