| Vol. 7 | No. 4 | Fall 2005 |
 |
Close to Home
An Edible Legacy |
You probably know what vegetables and fruits you’ll see at a grocery store before you even walk inside. Want a melon? Your choices are usually limited to watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew. Most of the produce in stores has been bred to look relatively uniform, travel well over long distances, and survive on the shelf for an extended time. But what we get in durability, we often sacrifice in flavor.
Fortunately, nature’s bounty reaches far beyond the supermarket. Heirloom fruits and vegetables whose seeds have been passed from one generation of family farmers and gardeners to the next offer a variety of textures and tastes, and have the added benefit of preserving agricultural biodiversity.
Amy Goldman, a member of UCS’s Henry Kendall Society and author of The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower’s Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds (Artisan, 2004) and Melons for the Passionate Grower (Artisan, 2002), describes heirlooms as “‘oldies but goodies,’ treasured for generations for their performance in the garden, or other qualities people want to preserve—the foremost being flavor.” Examples include large, pumpkin-shaped Brandywine tomatoes with low acidity and a sweet taste, blue-tinged banana squashes with an 800-year-old pedigree and a rich flavor, and melons that smell or taste like pineapple, mango, or peach.
Flirting with Famine
Another important benefit of heirloom crops according to Amy is that the seeds collected from the fruit you eat can produce the same fruit the following season. That’s not necessarily true for hybrid and genetically engineered crops grown for the mass market, forcing farmers to purchase seeds every year. Because there is little demand for heirloom varieties from supermarket chains, and large seed companies offer only the most profitable varieties, most farmers have limited options. And that, in turn, has resulted in the loss of thousands of heirloom varieties—in the past century alone, about 75 percent of the global genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost.
Not only is this bad for our taste buds, but for our food supply as well. The potato famine in 1840s Ireland offers a striking example. Farmers there subsisted on only one staple crop—a single variety of potato. When disease wiped it out, about a million people died of famine-related causes. As agricultural pests and diseases evolve, a diverse array of seed varieties is critical to preventing a similarly disastrous crop loss.
Save Our Seeds
As a consumer, there’s a lot you can do to help preserve this needed diversity. For starters, seek out heirloom fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets or ask for them at your local grocery store. Patronize restaurants whose chefs feature heirlooms on their menus.
If you have a garden, plant your own heirloom seeds. Seek out smaller seed companies that are committed to promoting heirlooms—Seed Savers Exchange (www.seedsavers.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of heirlooms, is one good resource. Amy urges gardeners to “adopt” a variety in danger of extinction. By growing, saving, and distributing its seeds, you can help preserve our agricultural heritage for generations to come. Your taste buds will thank you, and so will the earth.
Also in this issue of Earthwise:
Dialogue
Some say diesel fuel is "dirty." Is biodiesel a better alternative?
