The return of heritage fruits and vegetables | Hacker News Reader

The return of heritage fruits and vegetables

bbc.co.uk

63 pointsgruseom44 comments

As someone who's not too worried about pesticides (though I'm not 100% sanguine) but is quite disappointed with the flavor of many commercial cultivars, this is a bit more like what I hoped the 'organic' movement would've moved into. Some smaller organic producers do produce some tastier fruits/vegetables as a side effect, mostly because they don't pick them as early, but the larger organic producers use the same pick-unripe practices as regular agribusiness does, and more or less all of them use the same high-yield, watery cultivars.

I would personally be happy with something in between on cultivars. It seems that with a heritage tomato, for example, the goal is to get some crazy, knobby looking things from the 18th century in various colors that are clearly different from round, red, commercial tomatoes. But I'd be happy with round, red, commercial tomatoes from less high-yield, more flavorful varieties that produce slower-growing, less-watery tomatoes, like what's grown by the better farms in Greece or Italy. Nonetheless I can see how that'd be difficult from a branding perspective; if you're going to introduce a new cultivar and try to charge more for it, it's easier if it's really distinctive in appearance.

In case you're interested, the thing you're discussing is usually available at heritage tomato sellers (at least in California).

I am currently growing 16 different "heritage" tomato plants that are precisely low-yield less-watery cultivars from Italy and Greece in the round-red style. As you suggest, the person who sold them to me said it was hard to sell those particular plants because everyone expects heritage tomato plants to look "unusual" (as compared to my motivation, which is mainly flavor and aroma).

IIRC the chemicals that plants produce naturally to fight off pests are responsible for some of the flavor, so when you use pesticides that actually reduces the flavor somewhat because the plant no longer needs to spend energy producing those chemicals. E.g. terpenes, which are both insecticides and flavor molecules:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terpene

Unfortunately, large-scale agriculture optimizes for shipping and shelf-life and when organic producers grow large enough, they must do the same. Tomatoes are the classic example of this, but it's true for everything. For example, pretty much all the avocados available in the US are the Hass variety---because they have a nice, thick skin. But there are some really great tasting varieties that are mostly unavailable outside of Central America or the Caribbean simply because they don't transport well.

Several other varieties are available at the farmers markets in California. When I was living there, I frequently found Bacon and Zutano avocados at the Palo Alto market, for example.

This is a significant advantage of the farmer direct produce box enterprises that have sprung up everywhere. Because the fruits and vegetables are spending less time in storage and get to the consumer quicker they are often treated differently by the producer, ripening on the vine/bush/ground for longer.

Lets also not forget that the heritage varieties by nature are not hybrid seeds which means that seed can be kept from the plants and planted the following year.

If you take most commercial seed stock it's hybridised resulting in the seed stock being tied to suppliers and not being replantable.

without trying to sound like a paranoid nutbag from abovetopsecret.com, the latter is a serious risk to the food chain. The moment someone allows hybrids to be patented, we all starve. Monsanto are actively working on this.

I've been growing about 200kg a year of non hybrid heritage vegetables for about 10 years in the London suburbs. Totally different to the crap they sell in the supermarkets.

There's nothing wrong with hybrids for commercial agriculture - we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them. They're tougher, grow faster, and yields are better. There are seed banks where natural varieties are saved, and you can bet Companies like Monsanto have a seed library that covers just about everything on the planet you can grow from a seed (or a bulb or a cutting or whatever).

But for home gardening I stick to heirloom varieties as myself. They're harder to grow, but it's not like you're using commercial farming techniques. If you get a good variety you can trade with your friends.

It's a pain to dry seeds, though, and sometimes you go through all the trouble and for whatever reason they won't sprout when you plant them.

We could grow enough with no problems at all. The issue at the moment is we throw food away by the boatload. We also tend to grow epic amounts of money crops and livestock and nothing else. There's plenty of land to grow non hybrids worldwide.

To be honest I've found the heirloom varieties, especially tomatoes, easier to grow. They don't seem susceptible to the mainstream pest and virus infections.

We use a dehydrator to dry seed. Works wonders :) I've seen a good 70% germination rate. We plant 2 seeds of everything per cell to guarantee success. In some cases such as chillis we germinate in sealed ziplock bags first.

>We could grow enough [food] with no problems at all

Productivity of American agriculture has "tripled" from colonial times, "the result of many factors, including use of fertilizer, and pesticides, introduction of farm machinery, development of hybrid strains, and increased knowledge about farm management practices" [1]. Switching back to archaic modes of production would mean regressing towards a time "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" (versus 3% today producing a domestic surplus).

As the article linked to notes, we need to modify our practices in light of changing energy and ecological realities. A lot of promise towards resolving these issues comes from genetically manipulating our food sources. An essentially Luddite reaction that flies in the face of the broad opinion of the academic agricultural and food science communities isn't rational.

[1] http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/mod-ag-g...

Genetically manipulating our food sources has precisely no effect on the outcome other than the patent encumber the food we eat.

There is no evidence whatsoever on this planet to the contrary. I've dug through EVERY damn academic paper in the last 15 years and found nothing independent, unbiased and not in the pockets of corporations with self-interest at heart. Take the Cornell paper - half the academic staff have part time positions with Monsanto...

To be honest, 99%+ of the crap I've read are like Microsoft writing white papers comparing SQL Server to MySQL.

Find me a paper that isn't sponsored by industry shills or academic shills funded by industry that says otherwise.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a topic of faith, not science.

Technology can and should aid us, but education is far more important.

As for 9 out of 10, I'd rather they were growing food than shoveling high fructose corn syrup into fat Americans in fast food chains...

Here's a simple test to see if genetic modification does anything: buy seeds for one crop (e.g. soybeans) in both "Roundup-ready" and non-modified varieties. Plant both varieties and let them grow. Spray Roundup on both; see which one dies.

It works for that, but Roundup is poisonous to wildlife and plants are developing a resistance to it.

How's your GMO now the rivers are poisoned and superweeds are everywhere?

I'd like to point out that it's also a false dichotomy that we have to switch back to "archaic" modes "when 9 out of 10 working persons were employed on a farm" or embrace GMO. We can still use modern machinery, we can still use our knowledge of alternative pesticides (such as introducing a natural predator of a certain pest), we can still use proper irrigation and crop rotation, we can still use proper greenhouses. Even without modern "industrial" methods, farming has come a long way in the past 150 years compared to it's multi-thousand year history.

edit: I'd also like to point out that cross-breeding seeds with desirable properties (as farmers have done for thousands of years) is also "genetic modification" in some sense, but at a slower and controlled pace, with a large timeframe to observe potential unwanted side effects.

Yes, artificially introducing predators has worked so well in the past (see: Hawaii, Guam, etc.). I'll take my Roundup, thanks.

GMO will feed the world and I welcome them with open arms.

That's as much a straw man as Monsanto is to GMO. Just because some attempts failed doesn't mean it doesn't work.

And besides, that's not even the only way to control pests. Neither do we have to not use pesticides, anyway. That is just one example of how farming tech has improved.

Idiot.

Roundup is a herbicide. There some problems with it:

1. Some plant life has developed natural resistance to it so it's not going to last forever. At that point, the non-roundup supported ecosystem will be dead so there will suddenly be a fallout from using it.

2. The surfactant it's mixed with is toxic to humans and wildlife so you're going to kill everything with the run off and poison the water supplies all over the place.

It's a shitty solution to the problem.

GMO will feed idiots for a profit for a few years and kill the rest of us.

I'm not really against hybrids, but I'm also not sure how much of this is a hard resource limit versus a current economic one. In the latter case, there's considerable headroom for production to ramp up if economic realities made it viable to do so (e.g. if domestic food prices returned closer to 1980s levels). There's a lot of former cropland that's currently fallow in the U.S. because we don't actually need it; prices for staple crops have been driven so low by oversupply that it's just not commercially viable to farm a large portion of formerly farmed land.

Considering first the US alone: given surplus production and low utilization of potential resources means efficient use of existing resources. This is empirically validated by US farm output growing 1.63% annually from 1948 to 2009; input use over the same time grew only 0.11% [1]. Using less land for farming is logistically and ecologically sound.

Expanding to the world, why are low income countries, in aggregate, exporting agricultural products (but not raw foods) while the local population starves [2]? I do not understand the nuances of the global grocery supply chain to answer this definitively but my background in finance intuits me to believe it is a distribution rather than agriculture problem - witness how "it costs more to truck a container from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, than to ship the same container from China to Djibouti" [3].

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/agproductivity/

[2] http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServ... (See Annex Table 1 and Annex Table 2, pages 25-28)

[3] http://www.economist.com/node/21553050

we couldn't grow enough food to feed everyone without them

We'd just eat more potatoes compared to wheat/fruits.

I'm not sure I'd say that most commercial seed stock is hybridised. I'm in the UK too and in my experience most varieties you can buy are still the kind where you can harvest seeds and plant again the following year.

That said, I ignore the hybrid F1 varieties too. Mainly because I enjoy harvesting my own seeds and selecting the best (or weirdest mutations) each year that are best adapted to conditions where I live. Hybrids can be pretty expensive too and you generally only get a few seeds.

Try http://www.realseeds.co.uk/ - great people and very cheap and generous.

Thanks for reminding me about them! I ordered a catalogue from them a couple of years ago but never got around to ordering anything. I'll definitely take another look.

Good stuff - I recommend their 'Cherokee Trail of Tears' beans, 'Frise Vert Fonce' Parsley and 'Reine des Glaces' lettuce (which is the most awesome thing I've grown in quantity - I spilled some seed in my lawn and loads popped up so I left them as well!).

Any advice on getting started? How do you bootstrap (get seeds etc.)?

You search for societies aimed at sharing seeds. There are weird EU laws around selling seeds - any seed has to be on a list and many heritage seeds are not. Thus, people do not sell seeds, but sell access to a club through which you'll get seeds.

(http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/members/seed_saving/introduc...)

(http://www.ukabc.org/seedawrd.htm)

(http://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/articles/psss-want-to-buy...)

I did some voluntary work on an allotment, and I met some of the old geezers working on nearby plots and we'd share potatoes and tomatoes. It was great fun, and we got some great food from it.

There are quite a few forums out there that do seed swaps/parcels for established members. You can often get rare varieties for very little cost, while passing some of your own collection on for others to grow. It is probably something to try later on, but worth joining gardening forums that do it (so that you can have enough posts) to take part.

Amazon has a large selection of Heirloom seeds, but there are many other niche clubs out there that trade the seeds globally. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

This book on tomatoes has gotten pretty good reviews: Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato

There are a bunch of sites where you can get 300+ different tomotato species, and there are also some websites that list all the various seed companies from around the world.

Also, the NYT just had a favorable interview with the author of Heart Of Dankness, a new book about growers who travel to exotic countries to find new landrace strains of marijuana and then breed them to compete in the cannabis cup. That requires a much larger commitment to the craft that just growing tomatoes though.

Roses. I was buying roses not long ago and asked lady why they didn't smell like they used to. To which she literally said - "the smell has been traded for longevity." the same I guess goes for lots of veggies and fruits too. Crispy and brightly colored, but tasteless.

I'll use this article as an excuse to point people to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov who set up one of the first seed banks, and whose followers protected it through the siege of leningrad; some even starving to death surrounded by bags of rice. Seeds in a bank in Syria were recently moved out of the country to a nuclear bomb-proof vault in Norway protect them from damage. Preserving biodiversity is serious stuff.

I'm a historical re-enactor, and one thing we get to have a bit of fun with is fruit & veg. Aside from sneaking totally inauthentic fruits into displays to see if people notice ("why that coconut floated across the atlantic" etc), we do have a few members who belong to a heritage seed club. One of my friends brought along some Victorian breed of plum (mottled yellow/purple), which I can honestly say was better than any other I've had.

Glad to see them making a comeback!

"One of my friends brought along some Victorian breed of plum (mottled yellow/purple), which I can honestly say was better than any other I've had."

Speaking just for myself as very much not a gardening person, that is why I personally am interested in "heritage" plants. Heavy-duty commercial breeding over the past ~50 years has generally disregarded taste as a driving factor in selection, or at least given it a lower priority. Personally, I don't even disagree. There is something to be said for a reliable food supply. (If you don't know what that thing to be said is, try not having one.) But if you're going to grow it yourself, why not shoot a little higher?

Both my grandparent's place and the place I moved into a few years ago have some apple trees that I can't identify what they are, except to say they are certainly not what you'd find in a grocery store. (My grandparents claim their trees are "Anoka", which I can barely find references to on the internet, and I have no idea how to identify what's in my backyard, except that it's definitely not the same.) In both cases, the applesauce these trees produce is like nothing you can buy in the store. It's not even close. And I don't mean, "Oh, it's a little bit better but I'm going to use hypobole", I mean, it's barely recognizable as being covered by the same noun. Store-bought applesauce is something you drink, this is something you eat. Also makes good baby food (for extra bonus hippie points).

While I'm not sure why this is on HN, historical re-enacting does interest the amateur historian in me. How did you get started?

The natural environment of the re-enactor is the pub; you just have to know which one to loiter in ;)

Actually I got started by looking for local groups near me. There are three main types of groups; battle re-enactors, living history, and the SCA.

Battle re-enactors are generally larger groups like the Sealed Knot or The Vikings, who field quite large battles and maintain a pretty high level of authenticity.

Living History is more about showing how people lived and explaining it to the public. This is generally what I do (though we also do fighting). There's a high level of authenticity and most people hand-make their clothing.

The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) is an American thing which is quite popular. Not authentic and somewhat closer to LARPing; it can, however, have some really dedicated authenticity nuts in it. Fun if you're looking for something less accurate.

In all honesty if you're curious; just go along to any local re-enactments (<shamelessplug>if you're in the UK then you might turn up a few on my current project: http://daysoutnearme.com</shamelessplug>) or search around on Google for some local groups. Their sites will be universally awful, but you can normally get through via email.

It's great fun and a really good way to see various castles and manors without having to pay :)

Living History sounds cool. I'm a big fan of all the different UK series such as Tales from the Green Valley (1), Victorian Farm, Victorian Pharmacy, Edwardian Farm, etc. I've seen them all, some several times.

(1) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJkXkog9MwM hint: the others mentioned are also on Youtube.

If you love that sorta thing then you may enjoy being a barber-surgeon/doctor in a living history group. It involves a bit of expense in acquiring all the tools and knowledge, but you'll be by far the most popular person with the public.

One of my friends does it in our group; he constantly has a crowd of 5-10 people gathered around his stall listening to the gory details. Everyone's interested in the weapons and fighting, but they're -really- interested in seeing how a trepanning tool works.

On a related note: the UK startup Growington is doing a great job. http://growington.com/

In a similar vein, I'm curious what thoughts hackers have about Monsanto.

Being able to destroy a farmer for unknowingly growing Monsanto patented crops (via contamination of an otherwise non Monsanto field) seems really fucking lousy.

I agree, and have no love for Monsanto, but from what I recall the huge class-action lawsuit brought against them was recently thrown out for, among other things, lack of evidence that that was in fact happening to a significant degree.

They're the Microsoft of food: they create things, they have the potential to help the world, but their legal practices can be pretty shitty.

I've got nothing but hope for the future of genetically modified food, I just hope that Monsanto can learn to relax a bit more.

Interesting...

http://www.monsanto.com/food-inc/Pages/default.aspx

Nothing but vitriol.

The company should not exist.

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