The FarmED Chelsea Green Young Writers’ Prize

Vegetable Varieties

I have been thinking a lot about vegetables recently. Little surprise, perhaps, since I grow vegetables as a means of making my living. Specifically, I have been thinking on the distressing statistic that we have lost an estimated 90% of our vegetable varieties over the last century[1]. Much has been said elsewhere of the impact of this tragedy on our agricultural diversity, and the consequent resilience (or lack thereof) of our food systems in the face of impending climatic change. This is troubling indeed. There is, though, another dimension to this loss that weighs on me—as a saver and sower of seed.

Varieties of vegetables are not just mere accidents. Although, of course, many of them do arise through human collaboration with the randomised processes of genetic mutation, breeding a new variety typically takes between 7-10 years of consistent attention and selection—from sowing to selecting for seedling vigour to potting on to planting out to isolating or hand-pollinating to rogueing to threshing to winnowing to storing and so to sowing again—all of which is to gloss over the manifold complex tasks associated with managing soil fertility, planning and establishing beds, and maintaining plant health over the course of multiple years—before a stable and identifiable variety is established. The care and, dare I say it, love required to see such a process through is remarkable.

Selected for taste, nutritional quality, adaptation to local conditions, resistance to disease and pests, storage characteristics, and sometimes purely for the delight of growing and eating something beautiful and unique, vegetable varieties are vehicles for communicating the joy our ancestors partook of in their food—their care for the land that sustained them—the subtle, intricate knowledge they had of their locale and ecosystem—the ways in which their work was woven into their lives and their understanding of themselves as intimately involved in the dynamic and unfolding processes of the natural world in which they participated and lived. All of this is communicated in the inheritance of a single vegetable variety.

There is a real sense, then, in which our vegetable varieties both reflect and communicate the kind of unsystematised, unthematised knowledge that is the precondition for all meaningful intimacy; of course, it is possible to describe in precise and highly systematic botanical language the concepts necessary for the breeding and preservation of a vegetable variety, but what cannot be thus articulated is the kind of intimate, sensuous knowledge necessary to select for taste, and for texture, and for beauty. What’s more, this inheritance comes to us not as some sterile, static heirloom to be admired; it invites us to become part of a living tradition—to grow and save seed ourselves and thereby imbricate ourselves into an unbroken lineage of human stewardship—to partake in the care and synergistic processes that are necessary to grow good, healthful food—and to attune ourselves to the phenological subtleties of our little patch of earth.

To breed or steward a variety is to enter into an open-ended collaboration with the more-than-human––to take up an invitation to be a part of the mystery that is the living, breathing world, and so to take our place—as gardeners. As such—and certainly when measured purely in terms of cumulative human care and attention—the wealth of vegetable varieties bequeathed to us by our ancestors must rank amongst the great cultural inheritances of humankind. This is to say nothing of the cultural richness of the processes historically associated with saving seed. That these have typically taken the form of communal, culturally embedded traditions is itself an example of the collaborative forces harnessed by agriculture at its best and most ecologically integrated.

What we have so carelessly discarded is—quite literally—the fruits of this beautiful, worldly labour of our ancestors, gifted to us by the grace of nature’s abundance and consistent human care. That we have jettisoned this extraordinary cultural heritage in favour of a monocultural milieu—from the field to our tables via the supermarket shelf—is hard to comprehend as anything other than a grave travesty. Of course, now we can eat strawberries and tomatoes in January; although, given the obfuscation of the human and environmental costs of such choices, one might wonder both how much longer this can remain true, and whether they can meaningfully be called ‘choices’ when their moral consequences have been so far displaced as to almost entirely divorce us from the world in which these consequences exist. In any event, the likelihood is that any ‘choice’ of vegetables you are presented by a supermarket will be limited to a tiny handful of varieties, and so represent the trend towards the bland and the uniform and away from the wonder of the various and the diverse.

This is, of course, no accident, as the massive petrochemical companies that control our food supply (the four largest control 60% of the world’s seed supply[2]) have sought hegemony through homogeny and aggressively bred and engineered varieties selected for all manner of qualities—mechanisation of harvest; uniformity of growth rate, size, and shape; capacity for transportation and storage; tolerance of pesticides; reliance on the agrochemical fertilisers that they produce—that typically select away from taste and nutritional density and diversity.

That we have so readily accepted the narrative that globalisation (and the corporate consolidation that it has served) has furnished us with more choice and more security—in any meaningful sense, a pure fabrication—is both terrifying and tragic. We have surrendered control (perhaps more accurately, control has been wrested from us) of our food system and the rich cultural heritage that both sustains and arises from it, in favour of an illusion—that we have more choice, and that this choice will make us happier. It is particularly perverse that we have so surrendered such an exemplary manifestation of human joy and delight in the world for the sterility and uniformity of rows of plastic-wrapped, identical vegetables all hermetically sealed off from the world and presented to us in a context that could hardly be further removed from the living dynamism of the environments in which plants exist in the world.

This sterility extends to genetically modified and F1 varieties—many of the latter of which have perfectly adequate open-pollinated analogues—which either fail to breed true-to-type or, in the case of GMOs, are governed by contracts preventing the replanting of saved seed, thus foreclosing the possibility of seed-saving. This is, of course, a highly effective strategy for consolidation of supply and control as farmers are denied the autonomy to select and save their own seed, thereby generating dependence on unaccountable transnationals and undermining growers’ relationship with land and natural lifecycles. Monsanto’s ‘terminator gene’—which Monsanto has a patent for although does not currently use, with which plants are genetically modified to be infertile—is the culmination of this logic. This is perhaps the ultimate mode of domination—to so completely control something as to have the power to deny its capacity for reproduction. This is the logic of extermination, and it represents the apotheosis of the corporate consolidation of seed supply to which these companies aspire.

As such, the insidious rise of F1 varieties and GMOs, and the attendant concentration of power over the food system, as corporate executives and lab assistants displace communities of growers and interrupt the heretofore unbroken lineage of seed saving in order to insert themselves, largely uninvited, into the interaction between growers and the natural processes that sustain us, must be resisted at all costs. That we have largely failed to so resist it thus far is what has led to the astonishing loss of varietal diversity and the rapid erosion of the cultural knowledge-base of seed-saving and the communities of growers within which this is enabled. We have thus substituted our cyclical involvement in the systems of life for a logic of linearity and termination that acquiesces to the concentration of power and control of our global food supply.

Saving seed must consequently be understood as one of the most powerful acts of resistance to these hegemonic dynamics; not only is it a refusal to be co-opted into, and thereby subjugated within, the model of domination and concentration of power—it is also the archetypal example of closing the loop, and so rejects the consumptive logic of linearity. To grow from seed to seed is to embrace the extraordinary cultural endowment that we’ve been gifted, to take up the invitation to delight and participate in the cyclical processes within which we are unavoidably embedded, and thereby to move away from the logics of domination and subordination that characterise the relationships of seed conglomerates towards both the plants they manipulate and those they sell seed to—and to move towards a culture of collaboration, with the natural world, with our neighbours, and with the long lineage of nameless growers of the past who simply wished to share their delight in the world.

 

[1] This statistic is taken from an analysis of the decline in commercially available vegetable varieties in the US between 1903-1983 from a representative sample of 10 different vegetables; I assume the UK to have followed a broadly similar trend. The infographic is reproduced here: https://www.fastcompany.com/1669753/infographic-in-80-years-we-lost-93-of-variety-in-our-food-seeds. Separately, the FAO estimates that we have lost 75% of global crop diversity in its report here: https://www.fao.org/3/y5609e/y5609e02.htm

[2] https://philhoward.net/2018/12/31/global-seed-industry-changes-since-2013/