The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food Read Online Free

of evolution and the mystery of life, then, we developed food. It was both a process of discovery and creation, a process that deserves a verb of its own. Maybe creacover. Our ancestors creacovered food in legitimate acts of creation, humans in tandem with nature, no technology required, our fates intertwined.
    Over millennia, as humans became dependent on food that we domesticated, the food became dependent on us, a symbiosis of epic proportions. Humans coevolved with food plants like maize and now it cannot exist without us. Human intervention has removed maize’s ability to self-perpetuate and it is no longer a “natural” plant. It needs humans. Without humans to care for the maize, the species would soon die out.
    And what amazing food we milked from nature. Walk with me through a farmers market, and look at what we can eat. It’s a mind-boggling diversity: sugar snap peas, snow peas, carrots, lettuce, arugula, radish, beet, mustard, rhubarb, bok choy, and much more—with multiple varieties of each plant food. In the twenty-first century, we find ourselves—as John Swenson, an elder archeobotanist, put it—sitting at the end of a rainbow. We have pulled our chairs up to a feast, a wealth of plant foods, a groaning board with heaped trenchers.
    My son Silas invites me to eat with him in the dining hall at his university and I am rocked by all the choices—pizza or sushi, wrap or grinder, stir-fry or burger. But the real feast I’m talking about is not processed food, boxes and bottles at the supermercado. It’s the whole food from which the dishes are concocted: wheat, melons, broccoli, rape, apples, peaches . . . you get the idea.
    Behind this food wealth are legions of mostly unnamed and unknown plant breeders across the globe who for millennia shook pollen onto certain corn silks and not others, onto certain stigmas and not others, producing a spectacular fare.
    Thanksgiving constantly dwells in my mind.
    My saying this may seem crazy when you think about the bounty of the farmers market or the availability of boxes and bottles at the supermarket, but we are, in fact, losing food. Thousands of distinct varieties worldwide, especially ancient breeds, are threatened; fewer and fewer farmers are growing them—and in many cases, no farmers are growing them and varieties are dying out, the seeds for them no longer found. Foods are going extinct. University of Georgia researchers Paul J. Heald and Susannah Chapman searched 2004 US seed catalogs for varieties that had been commercially available a century before. To obtain the names of the vintage varieties, they used the United States Department of Agriculture’s comprehensive American Varieties of Vegetables for the Years 1901 and 1902 , published in 1903. Heald and Chapman found that 94 percent of the 7,262 seed varieties from 1903 were no longer available in 2004 seed catalogs—430 were. This 6 percent survival rate meant a stunning loss of diversity. This study does not even take into account the thousands upon thousands of heirloom varieties never sold commercially.
    Surprisingly, Heald and Chapman’s study also found that the diversity of varieties available commercially actually did not fall much in the century between 1903 and 2004. A total of 7,100 varieties among the same forty-eight crops were listed in 2004, as opposed to 7,262 in 1903. This stasis in commercial numbers is due to varietal replacement—mainly introductions of new varieties, but also imported varieties and heirlooms rescued by preservationists and returned to the market. But here Heald and Chapman were comparing apples and oranges. Open-pollinated varieties that evolved over millennia and whose seed has been saved for generations do not equal scientifically produced varieties. What Heald and Chapman did not analyze are numbers of open-pollinated varieties today that were available a century ago. This figure would have more accurately portrayed what we are really losing. A variety lost