CATACLYSMIC headlines about food shortages, broken supply chains and overwhelming heat in the past few months have brought more awareness of where our food comes from. But decades of industrialisation of production have ensured we are still relatively detached from what we eat.
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Award-winning film and TV producer Adam Alexander wants to fix that, as he makes clear in his book The Seed Detective: Uncovering the secret histories of remarkable vegetables.
While Alexander’s day job involves producing documentaries, his other passion is collecting seeds from around the world. He is one of a number of dedicated enthusiasts looking to uncover and conserve the seeds of edible plants that are feared to be on the edge of extinction.
Alexander isn’t focused on the standard range of vegetables and their varieties usually stocked on supermarket shelves – flavourless, listless tomatoes and watery, pap-like cucumbers – but on rarer or more ancient varieties that have been pushed to the fringes, from the tomato Solanum pimpinellifolium to the Stenner runner bean, which was first grown by Brython Stenner in his garden in the 1970s.
One of the author’s bugbears is the branding of unusually coloured tomatoes and carrots on upscale restaurant menus, or in plastic packs on supermarket shelves, as “heritage” or “heirloom”. They are often nothing of the sort, he says, but are modern hybrids designed to look a little different.
His fascination started with a sweet and spicy pepper he ate on a trip to Ukraine. It was unlike any he had tried before, and it helped him develop his sixth sense for seeking out unusual fruits and vegetables – and their seeds. Rather than be drawn in by colourful varieties or bombastic backstories, Alexander seeks proprietors of market stalls, assuming – usually correctly – that they are growing the oldest, most reliable, least mainstream varieties.
While Alexander doesn’t limit himself to the crops most amateur gardeners will know, he does delve deep into the cultural history of common plants and vegetables, puncturing the myths around them (no, carrots weren’t bred to be orange to honour the Dutch royal family), while providing new insight into things we take for granted.
Take lettuce. In an early chapter, Alexander explains how the tasteless, ubiquitous iceberg lettuce came to be, starting with the Great Lakes iceberg, which was designed to withstand a cross-country train ride. But there are rarer lettuces we should try: his suggestions include bloody warrior, Bunyard’s matchless and Amish deer tongue.
Each chapter takes a theme, focusing either on a specific fruit or vegetable, or on a broader family of plants, looking at their history and telling of how Alexander has hunted down the rarest seeds. The writing is rich, demonstrating his deep integration into the world of seed seekers. He is a board member of Garden Organic, a UK gardening charity, and a seed guardian for the Heritage Seed Library, which asks growers worldwide to distribute, grow and propagate seeds in order to ensure their continued survival.
Alexander argues that we should delve deeper into the more obscure varieties due to their importance in maintaining global crop diversity. Ninety per cent of all fruit and vegetable varieties, he writes, have been lost in the past century as production has become ever more mechanised and standardised.
It is a clarion call to think about our food in new ways and to carefully consider where it comes from. “We are now, I hope, on a journey back to a more meaningful relationship with our soil, our seeds and our produce,” says Alexander. “Long may it continue.”
Chris Stokel-Walker is a technology writer based in Newcastle, UK
