It's hardly possible to exaggerate the cynicism of this industry. In internal reports, Monsanto notes "growers who save seed from one year to the next" as significant competitors, and allocates a $10 million budget for investigating and prosecuting seed savers. Agribusinesses can patent plant varieties for the purpose of removing them from production (Seminis dropped 25 percent of its total product line in one recent year, as a "cost-cutting measure"), leaving farmers with fewer options each year. The same is true for home gardeners, who rarely suspect when placing seed orders from Johnny's, Territorial, Nichols, Stokes, and dozens of other catalogs that they're likely buying from Monsanto. In its 2005 annual report, Monsanto describes its creation of American Seeds Inc. as a licensing channel that "allows us to marry our technology with the high-touch, local face of regional seed companies." The marriage got a whopping dowry that year when Monsanto acquired Seminis, a company that already controlled about 40 percent of the U.S. vegetable seed market. Garden seed inventories show that while about 5,000 nonhybrid vegetable varieties were available from catalogs in 1981, the number in 1998 was down to 600.
Jack Harlan, a twentieth-century plant geneticist and author of the classic Crops and Man, wrote about the loss of genetic diversity in no uncertain terms: "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine.... The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner."
The "resources" Harlan refers to are old varieties, heirlooms and land races--the thousands of locally adapted varieties of every crop plant important to humans (mainly but not limited to wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes), which historically have been cultivated in the region where each crop was domesticated from its wild progenitor. Peru had its multitude of potatoes, Mexico its countless kinds of corn, in the Middle East an infinity of wheats, each subtly different from the others, finely adapted to its region's various microclimates, pests and diseases, and the needs of the humans who grew it. These land races contain a broad genetic heritage that prepares them to coevolve with the challenges of their environments.
Disease pathogens and their crop hosts, like all other predators and prey, are in a constant evolutionary dance with each other, changing and improving without cease as one evolves a slight edge over its opponent, only to have the opponent respond to this challenge by developing its own edge. Evolutionary ecologists call this the Red Queen principle (named in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen), after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who observed to Alice: "In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." Both predator and prey must continually change or go extinct. Thus the rabbit and fox both get faster over the generations, as their most successful offspring pass on more genes for speediness. Humans develop new and stronger medicines against our bacterial predators, while the bacteria continue to evolve antibiotic-resistant strains of themselves. (The people who don't believe in evolution, incidentally, are just as susceptible as the rest of us to this observable occurrence of evolution. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.)
Plant diseases can attack their host plants in slightly new ways each season, encouraged by changes in prevailing conditions of climate. This is where genetic variability becomes important. Genetic engineering cannot predict or address such broad-spectrum challenges. Under highly varied environmental conditions, the resilience of open-pollinated land races can be compared approximately with the robust health of a mixed-breed dog versus the finicky condition of a pooch with a highly inbred pedigree. The mongrel may not perform as predictably under perfectly controlled conditions, but it has the combined smarts and longevity of all the sires that ever jumped over the fence. Some of its many different genes are likely to come in handy, in a pinch.
The loss of that mongrel vigor puts food systems at risk. Crop failure is a possibility all farmers understand, and one reason why the traditional farmstead raised many products, both animal and vegetable, unlike the monocultures now blanketing our continent's midsection. History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who've ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.
Woe is us, we overfed, undernourished U.S. citizens--we are eating poorly for so very many reasons. A profit-driven, mechanized food industry has narrowed down our variety and overproduced corn and soybeans. But we let other vegetables drop from the menu without putting up much of a fight. In our modern Cafe Dysfunctional, "eat your vegetables" has become a battle cry of mothers against presumed unwilling subjects. In my observed experience, boys in high school cafeterias treat salad exactly as if it were a feminine hygiene product, and almost nobody touches the green beans. Broccoli was famously condemned in the 1990s from the highest office in the land. What's a mother to do? Apparently, she's to shrug and hand the kids a gigantic cup of carbonated corn syrup. Corn is a vegetable, right? Good, because on average we're consuming 54.8 gallons of soft drinks, per person, per year.
Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self." You'd think we cared more about the idea of what we're eating than about what we're eating. But then, if you examine the history of women's footwear, you'd think we cared more about the idea of showing off our feet than about, oh, for example, walking. Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
I wouldn't dare predict what will happen next with women's footwear, but I did learn recently that the last couturier in China who made shoes for bound feet is about to go out of business (his last customers are all in their nineties), and in a similar outburst of good sense, the fashion in vegetables may come back around to edibility. Heirlooms now sometimes appear by name on restaurant menus, and are becoming an affordable mainstay of farmers' markets. Flavor in food is a novelty that seems to keep customers coming back.
Partly to supply this demand, and partly because some people have cared all along, national and international networks exist solely to allow farmers and gardeners to exchange and save each other's heirloom seeds. The Seed Savers' Exchange, headquartered on a farm in Decorah, Iowa, was founded by Diane and Kent Whealy after Diane's grandfather left her the seeds of a pink tomato that his parents brought from Bavaria in the 1870s. Seeds are living units, not museum pieces; in jars on a shelf their viability declines with age. Diane and Kent thought it seemed wise to move seed collections into real gardens. Their idea has grown into a network of 8,000 members who grow, save, and exchange more than 11,000 varieties from their own gardening heritage, forming an extensive living collection. The Seed Savers' Yearbook makes available to its members the seeds of about twice as many vegetable varieties as are offered by all U.S. and Canadian mail-order seed catalogs combined. Native Seeds/ SEARCH is a similar network focused on Native American crops; the North American Fruit Explorers promotes heirloom fruit and nut tree collections. Thanks to these and other devotees, the diversity of food crops is now on the rise in the United States.
The world's largest and best known save-the-endangered-foods organization is Slow Food International. Founded in Italy in 1986, the organization states that its aim is "to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and life." The group has 83,000 members in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, France, Japan, and Great Britain. The organization promotes gastronomic culture, conserves agricultural biodi
versity and cultural identities tied to food production, and protects traditional foods that are at risk of extinction. Its Ark of Taste initiatives catalog and publicize forgotten foods--a Greek fava bean grown only on the island of Santorini, for instance, or the last indigenous breed of Irish cattle. Less than ten years after its launch, the Italian Ark has swelled to hold some five hundred products. A commission in the United States now catalogs uniquely American vegetable and animal varieties and products that are in danger of extinction, making the Ark of Taste a worldwide project.
You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations. Many foods placed on the Ark of Taste have made dramatic recoveries, thanks to the seed savers and epicurean desperadoes who defy the agents of gene control, tasting the forbidden fruits, and planting more.
If I could only save one of my seed packets from the deluge, the heirloom vegetable I'd probably grab is five-color silverbeet. It is not silver (silverbeet is Australian for Swiss chard), but has broad stems and leaf ribs vividly colored red, yellow, orange, white, or pink. Each plant has one stem color, but all five colors persist in a balanced mix in this beloved variety. It was the first seed variety I learned to save, and if in my dotage I end up in an old-folks' home where they let me grow one vegetable in the yard, it will be this one. It starts early, produces for months, looks like a bouquet when you cut it, and is happily eaten by my kids. They swear the different colors taste different, and in younger days were known to have blindfolded color-taste contests. (What kids will do, when deprived of ready access to M&Ms.) One of the first recipes we invented as a family, which we call "eggs in a nest," was inspired by the eggs from Lily's first flock of hens and five-color chard from the garden.
Children are, of course, presumed to hate greens, so assiduously that a cartoon character with spinach-driven strength was invented to inspire them. I suspect it's about the preparation. Even poor Popeye only gets miserably soppy-looking stuff out of a can. (Maybe sucking it in through his pipe gives it extra flavor.) The rule of greens is that they should be green, cooked with such a light touch that the leaf turns the color of the light that means "go!" and keeps some personality. Overcooking turns it nearly black. To any child who harbors a suspicion of black foods, I would have to say, with the possible exception of licorice, I'm with you.
Leafy greens are nature's spring tonic, coming on strong in local markets in April and May, and then waning quickly when weather gets hot. Chard will actually put up a fight against summer temperatures, but lettuce gives up as early as late May in the south. As all good things must come to an end, the leafy-greens season closes when the plant gets a cue from the thermometer--85 degrees seems to do it for most varieties. Then they go through what amounts to plant puberty: shooting up, transforming practically overnight from short and squat to tall and graceful, and of course it is all about sex. The botanical term is bolting. It ends with a cluster of blossoms forming atop the tall stems; for lettuces, these flowers are tiny yellow versions of their cousin, the dandelion. And like any adolescent, the bolting lettuce plant has volatile chemicals coursing through its body; in the case of lettuce, the plant is manufacturing a burst of sesquiterpene lactones, the compounds that make a broken lettuce stem ooze milky white sap, and which render it suddenly so potently, spit-it-out bitter. When lettuce season is over, it's over.
These compounds are a family trait of the lettuce clan, accounting for the spicy tang of endives, arugula, and radicchio, while the pale icebergs have had most of these chemicals bred out of them (along with most of their nutrients). Once it starts to go tall and leggy, though, even an innocent iceberg becomes untouchable. This chemical process is a vestige of a plant's life in the wild, an adaptation for protecting itself from getting munched at that important moment when sexual reproduction is about to occur.
But on a brisk April day when the tranquils are up and Jack Frost might still come out of retirement on short notice, hot weather is a dream. This is the emerald season of spinach, kale, endive, and baby lettuces. The chard comes up as red and orange as last fall's leaves went out. We lumber out of hibernation and stuff our mouths with leaves, like deer, or tree sloths. Like the earth-enraptured primates we once were, and could learn to be all over again. In April I'm happiest with mud on the knees of my jeans, sitting down to the year's most intoxicating lunch: a plate of greens both crisp and still sun-warmed from the garden, with a handful of walnuts and some crumbly goat cheese. This is the opening act of real live food.
By the time the lettuce starts to go flowery and embittered, who cares? We'll have fresh broccoli by then. When you see stuffed bunnies dangling from the crab apple trees, the good-time months have started to roll.
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First, Eat Your Greens
BY CAMILLE
I've grown up in a world that seems to have a pill for almost everything. College kids pop caffeine pills to stay up all night writing papers, while our parents are at home popping sleeping pills to prevent unwelcome all-nighters. We can take pills for headaches, stomachaches, sinus pressure, and cold symptoms, so we can still go to work sick. If there's no time to eat right, we have nutrition pills, too. Just pop some vitamins and you're good to go, right?
Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they're not coincidences. Human bodies and their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millennia in response to all the different foods--mostly plants--they raised or gathered from the land surrounding them. They may have died young from snakebite or blunt trauma, but they did not have diet-related illnesses like heart disease and Type II diabetes that are prevalent in our society now, even in some young adults and children.
Our bodies aren't adapted to absorb big loads of nutrients all at once (many supplements surpass RDA values by 200 percent or more), but tiny quantities of them in combinations--exactly as they occur in plants. Eating a wide variety of different plant chemicals is a very good idea, according to research from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. You don't have to be a chemist, but color vision helps. By eating plant foods in all different colors you'll get carotenoids to protect body tissues from cancer (yellow, orange, and red veggies); phytosterols to block cholesterol absorption and inhibit tumor growth (green and yellow plants and seeds); and phenols for age-defying antioxidants (blue and purple fruits). Thousands of the phytochemicals we eat haven't even been studied or named yet, because there are so many, with such varied roles, finely tuned as fuel for our living bodies. A head of broccoli contains more than a thousand.
Multivitamins are obviously a clunky substitute for the countless subtle combinations of phytochemicals and enzymes that whole foods contain. One way to think of these pills might be as emergency medication for lifestyle-induced malnutrition. I'm coming of age in a society where the majority of adults are medically compromised by that particular disease. Not some, but most; that's a scary reality for a young person. It's helpful to have some idea how to take preventive action. My friends sometimes laugh at the weird food combinations that get involved in my everyday quest to squeeze more veggies into a meal, while I'm rushing to class. (Peanut butter and spinach sandwiches?) But we all are interested in staying healthy, however we can.
Leafy greens, like all plants, advertise their nutritional value through color: dark green or red leaves with a zesty tang
bring more antioxidants to your table. But most any of them will give you folic acid ( folic equals "foliage"), a crucial nutrient for pregnant women that's also needed by everyone for producing hemoglobin. From Popeye to Thumper the rabbit, the message that "you have to finish your greens" runs deep in kid culture, for good reason. Parents won't have to work so hard at bribing their kids with desserts if they don't serve slimy greens. When fresh and not overcooked, spinach, chard, kale, bok choy, and other greens are some of my favorite things.
Here are some recipes that bring out the best in dark, leafy greens. These are staple meals for our family in the season when greens are coming up in our garden by the bushel.
EGGS IN A NEST
(This recipe makes dinner for a family of four, but can easily be cut in half.)
2 cups uncooked brown rice
Cook rice with 4 cups water in a covered pot while other ingredients are being prepared.
Olive oil--a few tablespoons
1 medium onion, chopped, and garlic to taste
Saute onions and garlic in olive oil in a wide skillet until lightly golden.
Carrots, chopped
1/2 cup dried tomatoes
Add and saute for a few more minutes, adding just enough water to rehydrate the tomatoes.
1 really large bunch of chard, coarsely chopped
Mix with other vegetables and cover pan for a few minutes. Uncover, stir well, then use the back of a spoon to make depressions in the cooked leaves, circling the pan like numbers on a clock.
8 eggs
Break an egg into each depression, being careful to keep yolks whole. Cover pan again and allow eggs to poach for 3 to 5 minutes. Remove from heat and serve over rice.
SPINACH LASAGNA
1 pound whole-grain lasagna noodles Prepare according to package directions.
4 cups chopped spinach Steam for 2-3 minutes, let excess water drain.
16 ounces tomato sauce
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Page 7
