Gone To Seed

This morning I read a disturbing article in National Geographic that completes a thought that I had when I read a complementary subject in Sunset Magazine months ago. Beginning with the Sunset article, the author shared a wondrous tale of a California food company that has laser-focused its business of providing packaged, dried beans to restaurants.

The company refers to their beans as heirloom beans. Seemingly by accident, many years ago, a buyer for the small company found eye-catching beans in an obscure market. He tracked down the source, a small, local farm family, and he acquired all of that type of beans that the family had available for sale. This particular cache of beans was packaged and sold in small quantities to several restaurants. The beans became quite popular with customers in every restaurant! The reason for this was that a talented chef in each of the restaurants had highlighted the appealing look of the bean and had coaxed out a taste that was unique enough to set the beans apart from the commercially produced beans normally prepared by the chefs. Of course, the restaurants wanted more of these beans. There were no more - from any source!

The food company contracted with the rural Mexican single source farm family to acquire all of the beans in the next growing season. They also purchased seed from them, and they attempted to establish contracts with other small farmers in that region of Mexico to plant it. No other farm family that they contacted would plant this type of beans! Instead, each small farmer tried to convince the food company to acquire the peculiar variety of beans that the family had planted for generations - more unique natural strains of bean. In many cases, the food company did that. Guess what? All of them were commercial restaurant successes like the first one that had been turned into table fare! Now, let me tell you about the National Geographic article, which raises an alarm. Apparently, worldwide, crops of every type have been cross-bread in order to create modern strains of vegetables that are more disease resistant. When a strain is successful, it becomes mass marketable. Once a cross-bread strain is proved to be a mass marketing success, the seed producers of that vegetable tend to stop providing anything but that particular strain. The farmers who purchase seed can only get that strain, unless they keep some seed of the natural vegetable that they used to plant. But, why would they do that when they know that they will be asked if their crop is the new "popular" variety. If their answer is not yes, they may not get the sales contract.

Now, the concern: As world climate changes, it is not possible to restrain the seed of an already DNA-altered vegetable. The agricultural research must begin on a natural seed. Between 1903 and 1983, the available varieties of natural seed produced crop types, like the heirloom beans grown by isolated Mexican farmers, has shrunk from nearly 2,000 to less than 30! It seems that mankind, in its zeal to engineer perfection in crops, has caused an extinction of natural food sources that dwarfs the natural extinction of animal types. Guess who might pay a terrible price for that? Us; if the commercial crop should massively fail, due to a virulent crop disease, a change in weather patterns, and possibly due to climate change, there are few natural source seeds available to study to attempt to develop a new strain to recover lost food sources. World populations might starve. Aside from such a catastrophe, we have unknowingly paid a terrible price all along: In the name of mass production and sales, variety has been destroyed in tens of thousands of food crops. If it is true that hundreds of varieties of beans yield a unique and pleasing taste to the palate, a wondrous fragrance, and they are pleasing to see, then beans are like the many varieties of fine wine. Can you imagine being given only a single choice of wine? That is what has happened with corn, squash, and a myriad of other food varieties. Wow! What a shame.