California Garden & Potager: Learnings from “The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables”
Reading Time:2minutes
Adam Alexander is a Welsh gardener and award-winning film & television producer who brings us along his journey to collect and preserve rare and endangered heritage and heirloom vegetables.
Alexander’s passion is in engendering a feeling of connectedness to the land. He achieves this by reintroducing people to their own food culture & heritage and provides encouragement to eat more locally-produced food.
The Seed Detective is a story of “globalization, political intrigue, colonization and serendipity – describing how these vegetables and their travels have become embedded in our food cultures.”
The Seed Detective: an introduction
“Thirty years ago, I never thought of vegetables as being rare or endangered, or how they were embedded in the social traditions of their native food culture — that they had their own stories to tell.
Within a few short years I started to think of myself as a seed detective: someone on the trail of local varieties that, first and foremost, were delicious and which I could grow in my own garden.
I realized that many vegetables that were an intrinsic part of local diet were in great danger of being lost forever. They needed to be saved from possible extinction. Gradually I started to build a library of the varieties I had come across, either in a local market or from a farmer, a gardener or a chef I met on my travels.” (3)
Highlights from Part One: Vegetables from the East
A brief history of food in the east…
Romans — food export culture through their empire
Writings
Fertile Crescent by Herodotus, geographer with insight into food culture
Pliny the Elder – wrote about agriculture and crops
Dioscorides – botanist, medicinal and culinary purposes, wrote De materia medica
Arabic thinking and innovation influence on European food culture
Irrigation systems from Moorish conquest of Spain –> food can be grown in arid areas
Ibn al-‘Awwām – wrote al-filā-hah (Book of Agriculture)
European academics and philosophers
Dioscorides – De materia medica
Robert Dodoens – how should science classify and describe food crops?
Influenced by Otto Brunfels, Jerome Bock, Leonhart Fuchs, Carl Linnaeus (botanist, zoologist and “Father of Taxonomy”)
16th century food revolution coincides with two technological innovations: invention of the printing press and woodblock illustrating
Food now can be admired for scientific, aesthetic and cultural value
Horticulture becomes a science
Plants discussed in this section
Peas
Beans
Oranges
Leek
Cauliflower, Krambē and Braske
Asparagus
Leafs
Garlic
Highlights from Part Two: Vegetables from the West
A brief history of food in the west…
Agriculture dates back 12,000 years
Hunter-gatherers lived off foraged food and small prey
Edible plants systemically foraged
7,000 years ago, 10% of diet came from cultivated crops
3,000 years ago, people started to grow almost everything they ate
500 years ago foods from South America made it to the ‘Old World’ (Europe – Spain, Portugal) via European explorations & conquest of Bahamas, Mexico and Central America
Challenges the belief that only the Greeks knew about botony
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