Category: Vegetables

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Competing for heirlooms

The Independent has launched the Great British Butterfly Hunt.

In the Great British Butterfly Hunt we will seek to find and report on each one of our 58 varieties (56 residents and two Continental migrants)… We will report from right across the country on every single species.

But most importantly we are inviting you, the readers, to join us, and to see how many you can observe for yourselves. As the different species emerge at different moments of the spring and summer, we will be offering extensive guidance on identification and on how to find them. Some may well be in your back garden or local park. Others, especially the rarities, may involve a journey – albeit to the most beautiful parts of Britain.

To give an edge to it all, we are introducing an element of competition, and an unusual prize.

The person or group (such as a school class) which records the most species will win a special safari in late August, conducted by The Independent in conjunction with the charity Butterfly Conservation, to find the last butterfly of the summer – the most elusive of all the British species: the brown hairstreak.

A nice idea. Would it work for heirloom fruits and vegetables, say? Or pollinator species for that matter. Jeremy says they tried it at the Henry Doubleday Research Association ten years ago without a great deal of success. Any other examples out there?

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Nibbles: Asparagus, Eels, ICT, Dingoes, Phoenix dactylifera, Apples, Bear-pit

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Farmers’ market fails to market diversity

Wandering around London on Friday, we came across the Pimlico Road Farmers’ Market. A couple of dozen stall selling everything from fruits and vegetables to cheese to all kinds of meat products, mostly sourced locally, meaning within 100 miles of the M25, the motorway that goes all the way around London. Friendly people. Beautiful produce, beautifully displayed. All impeccably organically certified — signs to that effect were everywhere. Made artisanally, naturally, according to traditions which no doubt trace their origins back to the mist-shrouded times of, well, the last Tory government, probably. And yet, and yet…

Apart from one stall selling tomatoes

tomato

and another one selling apples and apple products

apple

there was really no indication that agrobiodiversity was in any way valued, either by the sellers or buyers.

None of the stalls had more than one or two varieties of any of the fruits and vegetables on display. Ok, I thought, fair enough, we’re not dealing with a huge catchment area. But there was not even any mention of variety names on the labels. Maybe they’re all rather boring commercial cultivars and breeds, and the stall owners don’t want to draw attention to that fact. The European Union doesn’t make it particularly easy to grow heirlooms, as we’ve pointed out here before. And indeed a brief chat with a couple of stall holders did in fact reveal that none of the veggies on display were particularly noteworthy local varieties. Pity. It seems that the fact that produce is organically grown is an immeasurably more important selling point than its status as an ancient landrace, at least in this market in an affluent part of London, which I found surprising. I wonder if some enterprising student is making a study of all such markets across London.

Excellent pork pies though.

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Nix that fruit. It really is a vegetable

I’ve always adopted a somewhat disdainful approach to those “fruit or vegetable” arguments that occasionally beset the tomato (and other things). Different realms of discourse, obviously. But no! It made a difference, back in 1893, when differential tariffs were bunged on fruits and vegetables. In the US, imported vegetables were taxed. Fruits were not. The Nix family sued Edward L. Hedden, Collector of the Port of New York, for taxes paid under protest — and lost.

In Nix v. Hedden the Supreme Court, after hearing readings from several dictionaries, opined that:

“The passages cited from the dictionaries define the word ‘fruit’ as the seed of plants, or that part of plants which contains the seed, and especially the juicy, pulpy products of certain plants, covering and containing the seed. These definitions have no tendency to show that tomatoes are ‘fruit,’ as distinguished from ‘vegetables,’ in common speech, or within the meaning of the tariff act.”

Useful ammo.