Some very peculiar heritage seeds
Meeting Angelo Giordano, seed keeper, a bean the Moche painted on their pottery, and the idea that plant breeding should return to communities.
During the course I taught at Casa Centofoglie, in Puglia, I met one of the most knowledgeable and best-known keepers of seeds and heritage varieties in Italy: Angelo Giordano. Angelo told me about, and showed me on his phone, a wealth of fascinating varieties from all over the world: green Thai aubergines, very sweet, highly productive and tender; determinate ribbed tomatoes with thin skins and excellent flavour; zebra-striped beans; watermelons of which only the white part is eaten, creamy and with an unusual taste; and many more. Of them all, the one that struck me most was a black-and-white bean, beautiful and with a very particular history.
The calendar bean
It is a pallar, the large-seeded Lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus), domesticated in pre-Columbian times along the Andean coast, where it played both a food and a ritual role. The Moche culture, which flourished on the northern coast of Peru between 100 and 800 AD, depicted it obsessively on its pottery: pallares with arms and legs, bean warriors, seeds covered in dots, lines and spots, of which the Larco Museum in Lima holds the largest collection. It was from those markings that, in the 1940s, the archaeologist Rafael Larco Hoyle developed the hypothesis that the painted beans were a kind of writing, used to convey messages and for astronomical and ritual calculations; other scholars later read them as a possible means of recording numbers, lunar cycles and the dates of the farming calendar. It remains an interpretation, not a deciphered script, but it conveys well how much a seed could matter.
For years several seed savers had been looking for that bean, having seen it depicted on museum pottery; it was thought to be extinct, but this very year a brave and resourceful member of the network managed to find a community that still kept it. Angelo told me that the proportion of black to white on the seeds depends on how many hours of direct sun the pods receive, and that for this reason some peoples used it as a living calendar.
Plant breeding, from the ground up
Ever since I started growing vegetables, I have nursed a creeping desire to devote myself to variety research and plant breeding: two things I know little about and would like to learn, following an obsessive passion for the tastes, flavours, colours and field behaviour of many different plants, from fruit and vegetables to support plants for agroforestry and ornamentals. Perhaps, deep down, every first-generation grower dreams of doing this one day.
In any case, meeting Angelo reminded me that the search for the right varieties for our contexts should not stop at yield, field performance and the resistances that suit our work of growing and selling, and that the flavour, the appearance, the way a vegetable cooks and above all its story are perhaps far more important.
Without taking anything away from the excellent work of companies such as Sativa, from which we buy a good share of our seed, I believe variety research still has a long way to go. The large multinationals are busy turning out ever more performant and ever more standardised hybrids; companies such as Sativa focus on open-pollinated (OP) varieties, trying to make them professional and suited to commercial production. In both cases the incentives are commercial, even if the virtuous seed companies set themselves important ethical limits.
Perhaps, and it is just a passing thought, it would be important for communities themselves to take plant breeding into their own hands, starting from, but not only from, heritage varieties adapted to their bioregion, in order to create cultivars that perform well in the field, are OP, and have remarkable and traceable flavour and cultural qualities.
I would love to be part of this revolution one day. For now, I celebrate Real Seeds, Vital Seeds and the seed-saving networks around the world, and I thank Angelo Giordano, Max Nunziata and the many other seed savers who over these years have regularly rekindled my desire to work in this world.
Comments