April 28, 2009
How often in life do we hear that it is wise to diversify? Usually it’s in the form of not putting our eggs in one basket. But what our bodies need is a diverse selection of foods to consume. Few people realize it in today’s stream-lined world, but the variety of vegetables available to the common person in your average grocery store is gut-wrenchingly narrow. I, for one, am as guilty as any other- when I was growing up, a potato was a potato and a tomato was a tomato. Either it was one thing, or it was another, and if something wasn’t on display, it meant that they (as in the figurative They; someone somewhere along the chain of production) were out. Whether or not something could even be “in season” was not something that occurred to me.
In the usual fashion, corporate food production companies have assumed that they know what’s best for us, which coincides suspiciously with what is best for their bottom line. The reason that taking a stand against these companies is currently a faulty strategy is that historically, they have been successful. They have earned their money. They have earned it because people, especially Americans, continue to buy the food that these companies produce. According to Jules Dervaes, renowned micro-farmer and food-diversity advocate, of the ten thousand varieties of food which were available to humans since the beginning of agriculture, only one hundred fifty of those are available to the average person. Of those one hundred and fifty, twelve varieties of food make up eighty percent of the average person’s diet. Of those twelve varieties, there are four which make up sixty percent of the previous eighty percent!
I know that’s a little tricky to follow, but if you go back and read it again, it will be easier to understand. Your math was right the first time. It’s not supposed to sound like much food at all. What this amounts to is that many of us are eating a lot of the same things, over, and over, and over again. For those of you that are wondering, those four varieties are (say them with me) corn, rice, potatoes and wheat. I don’t consider myself an exceptionally religious person, but why, if there were are so many varieties of food made available to us to eat, would anyone think that we should limit ourselves to four?!
Let’s move past the dietary implications for a minute and look at this issue from a food-safety perspective. I don’t think anyone would argue that our planet is changing for a number of societal and environmental reasons at an ever-quickening pace. What happens if there are environmental factors which negatively affect one of our four major food varieties? If we aspire for diversity in what we produce and what we eat, we can help protect ourselves against this possibility.
Beyond environmental possibilities, let’s look briefly at privately-owned seed varieties. One more development for which we have the twentieth century to thank is the patenting of seed varieties in the name of capitalism. There are huge numbers of seed varieties available today which are patented, the same way that any other invention is patented. The problem here is that there are now patents placed upon life, which is a whole separate ethical issue and blog altogether. Where the rubber meets the road is that hypothetically, these major corporations, which shall go un-named for the sake of liability in the Google age, could, in theory, decide to pull these seeds from the market. That would suck pretty bad if that string got pulled, right? Want to get people’s attention and bring them to their knees? Stop making food available to them. Ok, ok, so that’s got quite a bit of conspiracy theory to it, and besides, the biggest of these seed-patenting companies is probably too-big-to-fail anyway, right?
Nothing to worry about there…
If we take it upon ourselves to diversify the food available to us, we can better our health, and protect ourselves and our families from external sources.
Take a look at the following seed catalog links and educate yourselves about new varieties of food and different strains of your current favorites.
Johnny’s Selected Seeds http://www.johnnyseeds.com/
Morgan County Seeds http://www.morgancountyseeds.com/
High Mowing Organic Seeds http://highmowingseeds.com/
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds http://rareseeds.com/
Seed Savers Exchange http://www.seedsavers.org/
These are all reputable seed companies, but remember that there is no harm in asking your seed vendor if they support the sale of patented seeds- in fact, I urge you to check with all your seed sources, including these listed above.
Diversify your food. Spread the knowledge.
Comments
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El_Borak (Bill Hoyt) says…
"They have earned it because people, especially Americans, continue to buy the food that these companies produce. According to Jules Dervaes ... of the ten thousand varieties of food which were available to humans since the beginning of agriculture, only one hundred fifty of those are available to the average person."
Has it really ever been different? At what place or time has more than 150 varieties of food been available to the average person? I have to wonder if Mr. Dervaes' numbers are not just a little bit sneaky here, because the vast majority of people over the vast majority of time in the vast majority of places have relied on a very few staple crops.
For the ancient Greeks it was grapes, olives, and goats. For most Romans, the diet consisted of mostly grains, oil, and wine. The Aztecs had an amazingly diverse diet for the pre-modern world - Bernal Diaz was astonished that they had 2 dozen kinds of fruit - yet for the average person, most of their diet was corn, just like their Mexican descendants today.
I would opine that for the average person, there has never been a time when they ate more than a few dozen different things during the entire course of their lives, and most people relied on one thing, usually a vegetable, for most of their diet. Think Ireland and potatoes.
Fast forward to today and I* can walk through any grocery store and find meats and vegetables and fruits from all over the world. I can have corned beef or bananas or water chestnuts or caviar. I have literally more varieties of food available to me than anyone in history but perhaps an Oriental king or a Roman senator. They could not get them fresh at any cost; I can have a living lobster that's been flown in from 1000 miles away, and that for a couple bucks.
Which tells me you've got your cause and effect backward. People don't eat only a dozen things because that's what The Corporations want them to eat. Rather people only eat a dozen things because that's all they want to eat, can afford to eat, or know how to eat. But because of The Corporations they can choose their dozen things from a virtually unlimited pool.
That's what I call culinary diversity.
* A pretty average person.
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mikeryan (Mike Ryan) says…
El-Borak-
You make several interesting points.
I believe Mr. Dervaes' assertion that there were several thousand varieties of food available since the beginning of agriculture was not that these thousands of varieties were available to any one average person.
I agree with you that most people in recorded history had a relatively small selection to choose from, however most of the people you mentioned had hundreds if not thousands of years of history behind the selections from which they had to choose.
I disagree with you that an Oriental king or Roman senator would have any trouble getting fresh produce under normal settings.
An interesting investigation would be to find another time in history when industrial-sized food production companies operating under free enterprise made the selection of available food to the average person rather than hundreds or thousands of years of culture and tradition.
I commend you for being aware of the array of food available to you. If we can encourage the average person to pay a little more attention to possibilities of how to feed themselves, rather than what a company deems to be appropriate, I believe the average person would be better for it.
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El_Borak (Bill Hoyt) says…
"I believe Mr. Dervaes' assertion..."
I think you are correct, absolutely. But you have to admit that it sounds a bit conspiratorial when juxtaposed in the same paragraph with the 150. How many kinds would there be available to you and I without corporations willing to ship whatever we wish halfway around the world? Half that? And would we have anything available that we do not have now?
You are also correct that it might be "An interesting investigation ... to find another time in history when industrial-sized food production companies [controlled] the selection of available food to the average person." Yet keeping with the potential-conspiracy theme I suggest it would be far easier to find a time when governments did so.
If one is going to worry that an organization might bring people to their knees by denying them the ability to eat, it makes a lot more sense to me to be concerned about an organization that consistently does so and the kind of ideology under which it does so*.
Your last paragraph is right on. America has lost too much of the ability to feed itself, not in the loss of types of food, but in the loss of the knowledge needed to grow it, to store it, and even to cook it. We DO rely on food companies more than is in our best interests. We even write newspaper stories** about people who keep as much food on hand as our grandparents did as a matter of course, knowing as we do that neither sleet nor rain nor dead of night will keep the food delivery trucks from their rounds. What a quaint faith that is.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/...
One can truly take division of labor too far; should it fail us, we will be in a world of trouble. That in itself is enough reason for concern and reason for each of us to change how we live.
* Hint: It ain't Ayn Rand.
** In the "Offbeat" section, of course. Those crazy preppers...
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that_will_do_pig (Jenny Kratz) says…
I think it's interesting that the four most consumed foods are starch and grains. As someone who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and a strange amalgam of food allergies, the debate about switching to a gluten-free diet is something I recently started paying attention to. It's an intensely hard diet to fathom, because what you've said here is so true--we survive on the cheapest, easiest to mass produce millet, ground down and processed to every end that science has allowed us. The irony here is that the industry fools us into assuming we're the lucky recipients of a varied diet by smashing and molding these four ingredients into unimaginable numbers of food forms and tastes.
Vegetables are really amazing things, then. Though I don't have the space to grow nearly the amount of veggie patches I wish I could, I have to admit that seed catalogs are a guilty pleasure. But I think the "eat variety" concept can be so much simpler and less scary than fighting the big seed companies (at least I like to think so... being someone who tends to give up on big battles if I feel it is futile).
One of the easiest ways to help this situation is to just buy the variety. Swiss chard instead of iceberg; purple costa rican potatoes instead of Idaho. Asian eggplants. Heirloom tomatoes of all colors. Anaheims instead of jalepenos... it's really pretty endless, and often if you just look NEXT to that head of iceberg you're about to buy, you don't even have to try hard to find some sort of variety in your veggie diet. Farmer's markets are even better options, where vendors can explain to you just what to do with that purple bell pepper, or how to eat a beet and not feel like a 60 year old Russian (just kidding, I love beets).
As a consumer and not necessarily a gardener, these are all important practices to adopt, and an industry to watch out for. As quoted in the link Bill provide, "Sales of vegetable seeds and transplants are up 30% from 2008 at W. Atlee Burpee, the USA's largest seed company. The National Gardening Association says 7 million more households will grow food this year than in 2008 — a 19% rise. A book on building root cellars is the top seller at Johnny's Selected Seeds in Winslow, Maine."
I'd like to think that Mike and company are on to something here. Maybe sometime soon variety will be the way such an individual, homemade organic garden industry will survive. I know I've got my monetary support behind it. Bring on the squid-like tubers and the forty varieties of apples!
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mitzibel (Misty Nuckolls) says…
Jenny, don't take this the wrong way, but I am developing the biggest damn crush on you.
Please allow me to buy you the non-allergenic drink of your choice should we ever meet IRL.
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mikeryan (Mike Ryan) says…
Jenny-
You're right on. One of the things I enjoy most about starting to control my own food source is that the benefits are two-fold. I physically benefit immediately from my selection (whether it's from my own garden, the farmers market, or another reputable source) and also, this is a great opportunity to vote with dollars. I too feel that it's a bit daunting and idealistic to "take on" a huge company or corporation whose legal budget is more than I'll probably make in my lifetime, but see, we don't have to buy their stuff. If we're careful, we can make that choice, and there's nothing they can do about it.
I like what you said about just looking near the typical choices at the store. Even that can make the average person more aware of what's out there to choose from.
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