This Seed Week, we’re sharing stories each day about the powerful role of seed in building our climate resilience. Thanks to the Big Give’s Green Match Fund, we’re also raising £20,000 for seed diversity between 22 – 29 April, with every donation doubled! ➡️ Share or follow this link to help us reach our target.
With any kind of change, it’s easy to think about what we might lose. But how about the gains that could come from a climate-resilient food system? Katie, our Wales Coordinator, has teamed up with chef Sam Black to unlock the rich world of flavour that beckons from a future of seed diversity.
When we think of the joys of eating, it is easy to imagine the array of different ingredients we could cook with. But we rarely go deeper than this. We rarely drop into the complex and rich world of tastes that can be contained in the diversity of varieties within a crop.
A tomato isn’t just a tomato. There are sour tomatoes, tart tomatoes and citrus tomatoes. There are tomatoes with hints of earth, nuts, acid, candyfloss. Tomatoes called Brandywine, Peacevine, Orange Banana, Burmese Sour and Clementine Cherry. Tomatoes to pair with basil, with cheese, with apricots or cinnamon. Opening the door to diversity within a crop can reveal a universe of new taste possibilities.
Aside from the very important matter of joy and pleasure in eating, flavour is only the tip of the iceberg. Crop diversity extends to shapes and colours. It roots into growth habits, suitability to different soil types, resilience to climate conditions. The diversity that we see with our eyes is the icing on the cake. Genetic variability can offer disease resistance, drought tolerance and wet tolerance. Crop diversity is the foundation of a healthy food system.
The journey to caring about crop diversity often starts on the tongue. In getting people excited about the feeling and experience of eating different crop varieties, we are initiating them into the club of those who want to protect that crop diversity. Taste leads to change.
A much repeated but wildly important statistic is that 75% of our global crop diversity has been lost in the last 100 years. Before this time, crops were grown and stewarded locally. Seeds were saved year on year and adapted to the regions in which they grew. There were as many wheats as there were farms, as many beans as there were people to grow them. Local varieties were adapted to local climatic conditions. But perhaps more exciting than this, local varieties would all have a local taste. Bread grown in one valley could taste different to bread grown in another valley. Beans grown in one region of the UK would be cooked in dishes unique from beans in another region.
It is vital that we hold onto this foundation of local adaptation if we are to grow food in the unpredictable climatic conditions of the future. It is vital that we hold onto these flavour experiences in order to inspire us to eat these diverse crops.
At the Seed Sovereignty Programme, we work regionally, responding to the needs of the seeds and people in a place. In Wales, we have been working with a group of farmers, both old and young, wanting to revive some of the oat diversity that used to exist in Welsh fields of the past. Working with Aberystwyth University to access the oats preserved in their seed bank, we discovered a plethora of Welsh oat varieties almost extinct. We started to grow them, marvelling at the different sizes, shapes and ripening times. The black hulls of some of these almost forgotten oats captured imaginations; but would they taste different?
We conducted ‘blind’ taste tests on some of these rare oats. Bringing farmers together in a barn on the Pembrokeshire clifftops, we tasted crackers made with four different oats; standard white oats from the supermarket, black oats from two different Welsh farms and an old oat called Hen Gardie. On eating these oat samples, my preconceptions about oats being bland and tasteless went out the window! These oats had distinct flavours, with the black oats tasting more earthy and full bodied than the supermarket oats. Our minds were opened to the flavour diversity that springs from seed diversity.
Earlier this month, I spent a humid afternoon with chef Sam Black on his growing site Dan Yr Onnen in West Wales. Together we were sowing rare black oats into freshly tilled soil– Dyfed, Radnorshire Sprig and Ceirch du bach. The motivation for sowing these oats is the key to seed revival. Sam works with fermentation, making Japanese shoyu, a fermented soy sauce condiment. Using oats as a base, Sam asked the million-dollar question; would using different oat varieties change the flavours in the shoyu? In sowing these diverse seeds, we hope to open the door to this untapped world of new flavours.
Taste is a deep motivator. We want to enjoy our food. When we revel in the joy that food diversity brings, we are revelling in the foundation of that diversity – seed sovereignty. In growing and eating local crop varieties, we are rebuilding our local foodways. And as anyone working in climate change resilience knows, local systems are powerful!
Working with seed diversity, I have learnt very fast that seeds never stand alone. Not only do they connect us to the past and the generations before us who have stewarded those varieties. They connect us to the entire food chain, from the grower to the harvester, the processor to the cook, and finally, the eater. Reviving seed diversity involves bringing diversity into every step of the process. Local food chains are more resilient in the face of climatic, political and economic challenges. And thank god for that because the beautiful array of flavours that can come out of diverse seeds, local food systems are more tasty too!
At the Seed Sovereignty Programme, we are working to weave taste into all our seed work. Last year, we ran two special tomato tasting events, inviting chefs and growers to experience the incredible diversity of flavours emerging across different tomato varieties. We have hosted special oat feasts, in which Welsh farmers have tasted for the first time the rare oats that their grandfathers grew. Our variety trials take flavour as a serious criterion. Our crowd breeding project aims to create genetically diverse crops with flavours unique to the regions they are grown in.
We are often asked to imagine the world we want to create. When it comes to imagining a more just, resilient and climate friendly food system, we can get sucked down a path of thinking about what we might lose. I invite you to think about all that we could gain in building a food system founded on seed sovereignty. Old flavours, new flavours, divergent colours, regional dishes and a diversity of experiences. When you think about building a food system rooted in genetic diversity, ask yourself, ‘What does seed sovereignty taste like?’. Hopefully, the answer speaks for itself.
All donations doubled until 29 April.
