The World In a Seed

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19998/

 

The World In a Seed

By John Feffer, AlterNet

 

Posted on September 25, 2004,

http://www.alternet.org/story/19998/

 

William Woys Weaver is the horticultural equivalent of the book

memorizers of " Fahrenheit 451. " The characters of Ray Bradbury's novel

seared the texts of forbidden books into their memories to save them

from the fires of a police state. William Weaver and his fellow seed

savers are preserving fruits and vegetables against the homogenizing

pressures of agribusiness.

 

" Seeds represent entire civilizations, miniaturized to fit into the

palm of our hand, " he says. When a venerable seed variety perishes, as

with the loss of a valuable manuscript, human culture dies by degrees.

 

One of America's foremost food historians, Weaver lives in a partially

restored 1805 inn on what once was the main route between Philadelphia

and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Along one side of his house is an English

garden. In the back are pots containing a fruit paradise of quinces,

medlars, lemons, pomegranates, citrons, even a limequat that

apparently makes a mean marmalade. Down a slope from the front of the

house, however, is the real treasure; a succession of raised beds

containing a colorful riot of vegetables and flowers.

 

" It's a seed garden, " Weaver explains without a hint of apology in his

voice, " not a Martha-Stewart-kind-of-beautiful garden. "

 

Different varieties are placed in such a way as to diminish the

likelihood of unintended cross-breeding and to ensure that the

subsequent seeds will yield predictable results.

 

The garden is rich in both history and geography. Weaver shows me a

white ovoid vegetable: the original eggplant brought from India to

England where it received its English name. I try a citrus-accented

ground cherry that comes in its own papery wrapper. There's a little

purple potato from Switzerland, a sprawling cardoon of Tours, his own

breeds of tomatoes and dahlias. Colonial Williamsburg and other

historical recreations routinely hit up Weaver for authentic produce

of the period, such as an 18th-century squash grown from seeds passed

down by a Delaware community descended from the Nannacoke Indians.

 

In one corner of the garden grows an Ole Pepperpot pepper, the seeds

of which he found preserved in a baby food jar in the bottom of his

grandmother's deep freezer. In the 19th century, the African-American

community used this pepper to create pepperpot soup, a

Philadelphia-area specialty. Weaver's grandfather received the seeds

from his friend Horace Pippin, the great African-American painter, and

today the variety flourishes in Weaver's garden. " If I could only find

the portrait Pippin did of my father, " he says, " I could finally

restore my kitchen. "

 

Because of the large investments of labor and money, it is " probably

the most expensive garden in Pennsylvania, " Weaver laments. " I used to

complain to my grandmother about the cost of the garden. And she said,

'why are you doing it?' 'I like the garden,' I said. So she said,

'Just take the money out of the equation then.' "

 

The seed garden's diversity and sense of history mirrors Weaver's

wide-ranging professional interests. Encouraged to write by Alexandra

Tolstoy, the daughter of the great Russian novelist, Weaver went on to

study international relations and architecture before seizing on food

writing to pay the bills. He is the author of definitive books on

scrapple, American food ways, Pennsylvania Dutch and Quaker cooking.

 

Jane Lear of Gourmet magazine, where Weaver is a contributing editor,

likens him to a culinary Google – " an invaluable resource of

information " whether providing information on heirloom vegetables or,

for a Gourmet article on artichokes, the intriguing scrap of

information that Marilyn Monroe was once crowned artichoke queen of

1948. Weaver has a novelist's flair for capturing the flavor and drama

of food. " He's describing these tomatoes and you just want to rip them

off the page and eat them, " Lear says.

 

Weaver's life work is an example of connectedness, a term he uses in

his book " America Eats " (1989) to describe the intricate relationships

between growers, cooks and communities. Each of his projects somehow

connects to his own genealogy. His books on Pennsylvania Dutch and

Quaker cooking celebrate that part of his family that has lived in

Pennsylvania for at least 13 generations. His annotations of a book on

Polish medieval cooking connect to his Polish side, represented by his

middle name, Woys. And his work on seeds is a direct continuation of

his grandfather's seed-saving efforts.

 

" When I first got into my grandfather's collection, I didn't know what

I was doing, " he tells me as we tour the gardens, which were

re-created according to their original 1830s design. " This survived

the first round of ignorance. "

 

Much of Weaver's writing is devoted to the context in which food is

grown and eaten, so he is particularly attuned to political contexts.

He has written about the boycott recipes of 19th-century American

abolitionists who refused to use ingredients produced by slave labor;

the challenges of writing about Polish national cuisine in a Marxist

country; and the nonviolent approach to nature of the Quakers. His

approach to food, like that of MFK Fisher before him, embodies a

culinary ecology whereby nothing edible is wasted, which in part

explains his fondness for the sausage-like scrapple. But much of his

writing inevitably returns to that essential kernel of truth: the seed.

 

Seeds, like books, are repositories of information. They contain

important genetic material that can replenish stocks damaged by

disease. When blight hit the U.S. corn crop in the 1970s, genes from a

disease-resistant wild variety of maize in Mexico, which was

incidentally down to its last 25 acres of habitat, saved the day. The

Irish, as Weaver writes in " 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, "

were not so fortunate when blight ravaged field after field of lumper

potatoes in the 1840s.

 

Fruit and vegetable varieties are rapidly disappearing and not simply

through changes in taste or fashion. As part of its efforts to

standardize trade, the European Union has outlawed the sale of

thousands of heirloom varieties. Agribusiness supports monocropping to

maximize efficiency. Biotechnology firms are patenting new genetically

modified seeds that may well threaten older varieties through

unintended crossbreeding. And seed companies are downsizing their

catalogs to save money.

 

Four years ago, the seed company Seminis eliminated 2,000 varieties

from its catalog. As Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney relate in their book

on seed politics, " Shattering, " nearly 90 percent of the varieties of

pears and apples once grown in the United States in the 19th century

are now extinct.

 

Weaver expresses concern about the Russet potato monoculture of

McDonalds and the way Chardonnay is replacing many unusual grape

varieties across Europe. It's not exactly the police state of

" Fahrenheit 451, " but the sheer loss of information contained in the

lost seed varieties is staggering.

 

Inside his kitchen, as he chops green tomatoes, peppers and carrots

for a Pennsylvania Dutch-style pickalilly and we sip a slightly

fermented lemonade kefir with fig flavors, Weaver tells cautionary

tales about seeds. He recently bought some kohlrabi seeds at a local

store, and with a little sleuthing, traced the chain of ownership from

the name on the packet (Miracle Grow) to the parent company (Scott)

and from there to the shadowy corporations OMS Investments and

Delaware Corporate Management. This is a far cry from the farmer who

carefully saves seeds from one harvest to the next, strengthening ties

of stewardship rather than ownership.

 

" We're collapsing the ownership of the land into the hands of very few

people, " Weaver tells me. " We're indenturing farmers in a very

different way. Farmers are now indentured to the land and the bankers

own the ground. "

 

This has reduced farmers to little more than modern-day serfs or, as

Weaver says, " facilitators of technologies owned by a third party, "

and " the ownership of seed makes it more absolute. "

 

Farmers are dependent on large seed companies for the latest varieties

of hybrid seeds, the fertilizer and pesticides that work best with

them, and even the specialized machinery to harvest the crops. Five

companies control 75 percent of the global vegetable seed market,

according to Helena Paul and Ricarda Steinbrecher's " Hungry

Corporations, " and this concentration of the marketplace threatens

global genetic diversity.

 

The new patterns of ownership add up to what Weaver calls the " new

feudalism. " Genetically modified seeds, because they preclude seed

saving and threaten to contaminate conventional stocks, are only a new

variation on an old theme.

 

" GMO and patented crops have shifted the economic risk to the farmer.

This was like the Middle Ages when all the economic risk was shifted

onto the serf, " Weaver says. " It doesn't matter to Monsanto if the GM

fails. You bought it. It's your problem if it fails. "

 

In opposition to this corporate control over farmers, Weaver has

emphasized " connectedness. " Seeds provide one means of connecting to

history and culture. Seedsaving, too, brings people together, not in a

spatially defined community but in one of affinity, knitting

organizations like Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa and Kokopelli in

France to thousands of individual gardeners and farmers.

 

Seed savers range " from anarchists to the person who found Jesus in

the garden, " Weaver says. " The country is so divided now and this

brings people together and we realize we have a common goal. "

 

He's quick to qualify his idea. " You can get too romantic about

connectedness, too gooey and touchy-feely, " he says. And he points to

his latest focus of research: Cyprus. Weaver hopes that through his

ethnographic research and sifting of archaeological evidence, he will

help to rewrite the history of the Middle Ages when Cyprus served as a

key source and conduit of food ways to Europe.

 

" Cyprus is the ultimate break – no connectedness, no genealogical

link. It's a liberating topic. " And yet, Cyprus appeals precisely

because it connects to many of his preoccupations as a food historian.

When he's doing his research, he says, " I feel like I'm up on some

elevated platform and I'm looking down on the whole Eastern

Mediterranean and seeing all these connections. "

 

I am eager to hear more about his latest research in Cyprus, but I

also don't want to inadvertently poach the new material. " The more

people talk about Cyprus the better, " he reassures me. Weaver is as

generous with information as he is with his seeds. He makes the point

explicitly with a horticultural example – the dependency of corn on

human propagation.

 

" People didn't sit on the corn, " he says. " They traded it around. They

shared the seed. "

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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