![]() But take a drive across the American Midwest, and you’ll find fields planted in homogenous swaths of hybridized, genetically modified corn and soy. We imagine ourselves safe from such deprivation. When blight eradicated the crop, millions starved. ![]() English landowners forbade growing crops other than the potato. The Irish learned this hard fact during the Great Famine of the 1840s. As the biodiversity of our agriculture declines, so does food stability. As the hybridized or genetically modified cultivars favored by large-scale farms have taken over, many heirloom varieties are at risk. Heirlooms matter because over the past century, as industrial agricultural ate away the patchwork quilt of family operations that once fed us, we’ve lost more than 90% of the variety of our food seeds. But when I learned the story behind an heirloom tomato with a spectacular African-American lineage, Aunt Lou’s Underground Railroad Tomato, I began to consider that heirloom seeds carry more than the distinctive colors, nutrients, flavors-and yes, stories-for which they’re loved. Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, Molly Bean, Cherokee Red, Old Greek Melon. Heirloom catalogs are filled with as many stories as seeds. We did it to eat, or to preserve a taste we’d come to love, or to remember our people back in the bayou or holler.Īs the seeds traveled, so did their stories: about who grew them and why. Since the dawn of agriculture, we have saved seeds and carried them great distances. Photography by Julie Kramer A group of local seed savers is working to preserve an heirloom tomato variety brought to the Ohio Valley via the underground railroad.
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