- Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
- Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
- Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
- If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
- Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
- The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from its cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cacao’s traditional growing belt.
- And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.
Fresh out of diversity
“Blueberries are a great example of agriculture as high-tech industry,” argues Daniel Hulls, the boss of AgDevCo, an investment fund. Driscoll’s, an American agribusiness giant, supplies seeds to farmers in Zimbabwe that are the result of years of cross-pollination. Polyethylene covers protect bushes. Storage rooms have optical sorting machines. To maximise profits, firms time production for the summer, after American supply dwindles but before Peru’s picks up.
According to a recent article in The Economist, quoted above, blueberries are just one of an increasing number of examples of Africa’s “industrialisation of fresh,” a concept developed by Christopher Cramer at SOAS with colleagues John Sender and Jonathan Di John. The article suggests that, if it is implemented properly, “there is huge potential for African agriculture to play the sort of role long envisioned for manufacturing.”
It’s a striking phrase. “Fresh” sounds like the very opposite of industrial. Fresh food is perishable, seasonal and associated with local production. Yet, increasingly, fresh fruit and vegetables are being made to behave like industrial commodities. Agribusiness is using breeding, controlled production, refrigeration, packaging, logistics and retail systems to make perishable foods standardized, predictable and available almost anywhere, anytime.
Think of a supermarket apple. It needs to look right, travel well, resist bruising, ripen predictably and remain edible in storage for months. The tomato needs to survive harvesting, packing and a long journey without losing its appearance. The strawberry needs a shelf life that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago. “Fresh” has become something that can be engineered.
There are obvious benefits. Longer shelf lives can reduce waste, extend markets and make nutritious foods available far beyond their traditional growing seasons. Even foods based on so-called neglected and underutilized species — making them truly “opportunity crops.” That could be good for agrobiodiversity.
But there is a less visible consequence that is not so good: the characteristics that make a crop useful to an industrial fresh-food system can also narrow the range of diversity that gets grown.
Industrialized fresh-produce chains tend to reward uniformity. Grading standards, packing-line specifications, and retailer contracts all push toward a narrow set of varieties that perform consistently — the right size, the right shelf life, the right appearance under fluorescent light. That’s efficient for the production process Cramer et al. and The Economist extol, but it’s also potentially a quiet mechanism of genetic erosion: the traits that make a variety a good fit for industrial handling are not necessarily the traits that make it resilient, nutritious, or adapted to marginal land. A diverse production landscape can narrow disastrously once it’s plugged into export-oriented industrial supply chains.
Uniformity is valuable. Predictability is valuable. Long shelf life is valuable. But genetic diversity is valuable too. And not always for the same reasons.
Genebanks maintain thousands of crop varieties that may not meet the specifications of industrial supply chains. At least now. Some may have unusual flavours or colours; others may be poorly suited to long-distance transport. But they may also contain genes for disease resistance, heat tolerance, drought adaptation, nutritional quality, novel textures or other traits that could become valuable as production conditions and consumer preferences change.
The paradox — or is it the conundrum — is that the more successfully we industrialize “fresh”, the more important it will become to conserve the diversity that industrial systems tend to leave behind.
The fresh food in the supermarket may look reassuringly abundant. The genetic diversity behind it is another matter. The Economist could have pointed out that the industrialisation of fresh selects for what works now. For the system to be sustainable, you need genebanks to preserve what might work next.
Nibbles: Museum of Cider, Aport apple, Rattan genebank, Sri Lanka rice, Saudi coffee landscapes
- In the UK, Herefordshire’s Museum of Cider is picking up national recognition for its genebank of heritage apple trees. The BBC’s canonical autumnal apple story comes a little early this year.
- Speaking of iconic apples, Kazakhstan is scaling up efforts to bring back the Aport, the giant heirloom that once made Almaty famous. No word of museums, though. Or cider.
- Over in the Philippines, Department of Environment and Natural Resources is beefing up its rattan genebank to keep pace with demand, with forest stewards in Bukidnon planting seedlings to match. Furniture makers need genebanks as much as cider makers.
- Sri Lanka’s pre-Green Revolution heirloom rice varieties, purana haal, are being eyed for their resilience and disease-management potential. Good thing they’re in the national genebank.
- Saudi Arabia’s Jazan terraced coffee farms are turning into rural and ecotourism hotspots, proving not all agrobiodiversity needs to be in a genebank to survive. But it helps.
Smelling the heirloom coffee
Yet more on agrobiodiversity marketing in Kenya. This time it’s coffee.
Spring Valley Coffee gives out nifty little cards on all its products, providing information on the varietal composition of different blends, and where the beans that go into each are grown.
This decaf from Guji in Ethiopia caught my eye in particular…
…because the variety involved is a heirloom. But also because if you’re going to those lengths, why not quote its local name?
Anyway, still a pretty nice idea.
Nibbles: Apple-banana paradox, Genebanks, Indian wheat, Indian wild rice, Kenya community seed banks, Wild coffee, Macadamia history, Taro research, Cacti
- Why the modern food system prizes uniformity even though resilience depends on diversity. Spoiler alert: follow the money.
- Historic crop varieties are finding renewed relevance as farmers contend with more volatile weather, emerging pests and changing markets. Let’s hope there’s money to conserve them.
- India’s traditional wheat varieties contain diversity that could help breeders develop crops better able to withstand heat and drought. Let’s hope there’s money to conserve them.
- India announces significant progress in conserving its wild rice genetic resources. Great that there was money to conserve them.
- Community seed banks across Kenya are calling for formal recognition and sustained support, arguing that locally managed collections strengthen seed sovereignty, preserve traditional varieties and help farming communities adapt to climate change. Yes, but are they enough without national genebanks?
- Researchers are racing to conserve wild coffee species whose genetic diversity may provide the resistance and resilience needed to secure tomorrow’s morning cup. Is the industry contributing, though ?
- New history of the macadamia traces its remarkable journey from Australia’s native forests to a global crop, while underscoring why conserving the remaining wild populations is essential for the crop’s long-term future.
- Researchers at the University of the South Pacific investigate how taro can withstand climate change, combining research with conservation to help protect one of the region’s most culturally and nutritionally important staple crops.
- Chester Zoo collects seeds from highly threatened cacti, because why not?