The best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation is not with a monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself. [...] The counter to Monsanto Corporation’s genetic engineering and agricultural patents isn’t just anti-GMO and antipatenting activism and legislation, it’s local farmers, farmers’ markets, seed diversity, organic crops, integrated pest management, and other practices that work best on a small scale. A farmer’s market selling the produce of local farmers isn’t an adequate solution but ten thousand of them begin to be. This creates alternatives that are far less visible and individually far less powerful; domination by Monsanto is news in a way that the arrival of the first chiles or peaches at the farmers’ market is not. The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers [....] Decentralization and direct democracy could, in one definition, be this politic in which people are producers, possessed of power and vision, in an unfinished world. (Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark p 100)
Scalability /
An individual garden will never be the solution to systemic problems with how we get our food as a nation here in the U.S. Growing a few vegetables, particularly on a rented plot of land, won’t suddenly safeguard anyone’s food security.
But what if we scale that up to a hundred individual gardens? A thousand? Even millions?
Amid the rationing of World War II, average Americans created 18 million “victory gardens,” including 12 million in urban settings. Think what that means: millions of ordinary people otherwise surrounded by concrete, actively reconnecting with the dirt underfoot, carving out spaces within cities to cultivate their sustenance from scratch. A backyard here, a curbside patch there, a row of potted plants lining window ledges—lots of little pieces adding up. At their peak these home gardens grew some 30% to 40% of the nation’s produce. As farmer and author David Buchanan puts it, “This shows what’s possible, at least when someone is shooting at us” (Taste, Memory p 133).
What’s to stop us from recreating these productive home gardens today with as much enthusiasm and pride as the country’s “Greatest Generation” had back in the 1940s? Do we really need the catastrophe of war to drive us to take responsibility for our own food?
Consider the significance of individuals cutting their reliance on commercial agriculture from 100% down to 70%, 60%, or beyond. People who grow a significant portion of the food they eat no longer count solely on monetary income and the vagaries of the markets to feed themselves. They no longer rely on the soil quality, water stability, and weather systems of farmland fifty, five hundred, or even five thousand miles away. They’re no longer dependent on distant infrastructure and distribution systems that are themselves vulnerable to violence and political forces.
Instead they rely on themselves, their neighbors, and the manageable conditions of the block where they live. As they become that much more self-sufficient, you might even say they’re that much freer and more sovereign in life.
Self-Sufficiency /
“So what do you think we should do?” I asked Joe. “In terms of national policy, to address the way our whole agricultural system has gotten unsustainable in the last forty, sixty years? To take some control back from the few big corporations? To protect against food shortages, have more food security?”
“In terms of policy?” He sighed and shook his head. “I think things are too far gone.”
“So... we should all just grow our own food?”
“We should all just grow our own food.”
Freedom /
There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to be free. (Wendell Berry, Bringing It to the Table p 229)
Sovereignty, Continued /
Toasted Sister Podcast, episode 6: “Dr. Elizabeth Hoover — Food Sovereignty” (02:42)
Andi Murphy (Navajo):
Let’s take it back a little bit. Food sovereignty seems like it’s maybe a new thing, a new issue we’re having to think about today. We were sovereign, a long time ago. How has our food system changed to where now you’re [researching the concept of food sovereignty]. I’m pretty sure a long time ago we didn’t focus on food sovereignty because, you know, we were sovereign.
Dr. Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk and Mi’kmaq):
Yeah, if you were a sovereign nation, you were food sovereign, right? So, there are a number of different factors over the years that have been part of the settler-colonial process that is the formation of the U.S., that has led to tribes becoming less food sovereign.
George Washington's orders to General Sullivan, 1779: “The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."
So if you think about scorched earth battle tactics that had been used, first by the French against the Haudenosaunee for example in the seventeenth century, and then you think of Sullivan’s campaign [that] General George Washington sent out that essentially just burned millions of acres of corn and people’s food supplies and orchards [....] The idea was, how do you make indigenous people reliant on the government for foodstuffs?
Or if you think of your own nation during the Long Walk, those Navajo people that refused to relocate, Kit Carson and his men went and burned their sheep and burned their fields and made sure that they didn’t have access to their foods. [...]
You think about tribes that were relocated, so tribes that were taken out ot the Southeast and marched on the Trail of Tears off to Oklahoma. When you’re suddenly removed from the ecosystem and the climate that you’re used to, and then sent to a whole different place, you know your seeds might not grow there, you might not be familiar with those plants and animals that are there, and that’s going to interrupt your ability to be able to feed yourself.
And then during the late 1880s, during the allotment era, you have the Dawes Act in 1887 where reservation land bases are shrunk even further than they had been, the privatization of land. And then the quote-unquote leftover land gets given to settlers and people lose their allotment to settlers, and it’s a lot harder to be food sovereign when you have a much smaller land base.
And then you think about the boarding school era, and people’s children who were taken out of their homes and out of communities and sent off to boarding schools. You develop a much different relationship with food than you would have home with your family. Now you have kids that aren’t being fed enough, that are kind of crowded around these tables and all of a sudden being fed a lot of bread and butter for example, that they wouldn’t have been eating at home. So people’s types of foods that they’re eating changes, and your habits around food changes, you’re scrambling at these schools to make sure that you’re getting enough food before somebody else takes it. And people have talked about how their relatives came home from boarding schools with a very different relationship to food.
In the Southwest you have access to water changes, and so people went from having the skills and the knowledge around dryland farming [...] people developed corn different and were able to grow it right out of the sand, it looks like. But then the BIA [federal Bureau of Indian Affairs] comes in and says “No no, this is how you should be farming, not in the way that you’re doing,” and develops this system of reservoirs that don’t end up working out. And then it’s “Oh wait, this didn’t work out, I guess you all should have kept the techniques that you had.” But [by] then people have become more reliant on these other types of farming that are more water intensive, and now tribes [are] just fighting to get the rights to that water back.
Sovereignty /
Yesterday I summarized some rather unsettling information imparted to our seed-saving class by Joe Hall, who practices traditional Osage farming in Oklahoma. Here are a few more quotes I copied into my notebook over the course of the weekend, as spoken off the cuff by classmates or shared secondhand from others around the world:
“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”
Declaration of Nyéléni
first global forum on food sovereignty
Mali, 2007
“When just a couple of corporations control your seeds, they control your whole ecosystems.”
Anne T.
grew up on a large family farm in Nebraska
that continues to practice industrial agriculture
“If you control the food, you control the people.”
Vandana Shiva
activist and author
“If you control the seeds, you control the food.”
Melissa Kruse-Peeples
PhD, Anthropology
Education Coordinator at Native Seeds/SEARCH
“As a Native American man, if we don’t save seeds, just like our languages, it’s gone.”
Loren Emerson
chef and owner
Emerson Fry Bread
“Tribes can’t truly be considered sovereign unless they’re able to feed themselves.”
Keir Johnson
Pacific Region Technical Assistance Specialist
Intertribal Agriculture Council
Seven /
Do I seem overly dramatic with this talk of surviving at the mercy of strangers? Why does it matter that I depend on anonymous farmers elsewhere to produce food for me? After all, isn’t that type of interdependence the foundation of complex societies, the economic diversification that allows people to pursue meaningful cultural activities beyond constantly seeking out sustenance?
That has certainly been the general trend over human history, but never has our food system been as complex and far-flung as it is today. And consider this: while American farms churn out more food than the population even needs at a seemingly endless pace, the system is not invulnerable.
According to Joe Hall, one of my classmates at Native Seeds/SEARCH this past weekend, who runs his own farm in Grayhorse, Oklahoma, virtually all large-scale commercial agriculture in the U.S.—corn, soy, wheat, etc.—relies on genetically modified seeds that are imported from China. Seed-saving is not practiced on industrial farms; entire harvests are shipped for sale without conserving any portion of the seeds to replant, not just because it’s easier and less time-consuming for farmers simply to purchase new seeds, but because large-scale seed suppliers often stipulate this practice as a requirement in their contracts. In other words, for each round of crops planted, farmers must start from scratch, and as far as whether they’ll be able to obtain the next batch of seeds, it’s China or bust.
Meanwhile, Joe told our class that the entire American agricultural industry has, at any given moment, about seven days’ worth of food crop in the “pipeline,” that is, approaching harvest, stored in silos, or in distribution. If something were to disrupt the country’s commercial food production—wide-scale droughts or monoculture-killing blights, an attack on our infrastructure, or maybe an economic breakdown due to, say, trade wars with China… the American public could potentially be hit with food shortages in a matter of weeks.
Surviving /
The seed-saving workshop opened with that fundamental question, Why Save Seeds? But this is an extension of the even more fundamental question that drove me to undertake my “food garden” project in the first place: why grow your own food at all? Why not rely entirely on supermarkets and restaurants to produce food that you can then purchase at your convenience?
Clearly there are many different answers for different people. Gardening and seed-saving can be a cultural or family tradition that you’ve inherited, a sacred practice of connecting directly to the earth, a political act to protest fossil-fueled agribusiness, a passion project for botany enthusiasts, a hobby for those who enjoy working outdoors. But among these various lines of thought, all of which are threads in my own reasoning, I keep coming back to the idea of sheer survival.
Consider the line from Roxanne Swentzell’s book that we quoted last month:
If our economy dried up tomorrow, if the stores closed, what could you make to eat with the resources you have now? (The Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook p xiv)
We’ve already established that as a species, humanity’s survival depends on the health of the land.
Atop that reality, there’s the fact that as an individual, my survival depends on the practices of my fellow humans.
The more I’ve read and learned about how our food systems have evolved over the last hundred years in the U.S. and continue to evolve across the globe, the more conscious I’ve felt of the fact that I am incapable of feeding myself. I am entirely dependent on others to produce food for me. Or as Wendell Berry puts it, although less than 2% of Americans are directly engaged in agriculture these days (down from some 20% a century ago), eating is itself an agricultural act: since we all eat, we “are all farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by somebody somewhere in some fashion.” (Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food p 69)
Since I don’t live on or even near farms, I neither know who’s serving as my proxy farmers, nor witness how they’re going about farming on my behalf.
In other words, I’m surviving day by day at the mercy of unseen strangers engaging in unknown practices.
Seed-Saving /
Back home in Albuquerque after a whirlwind weekend, I’m surrounded by souvenirs from my time in Tucson at Native Seeds/SEARCH: a hollow gourd whose neck we snapped open to extract its rattling seeds and fluffy chaff, a tiny ear of glimmering silver corn, several packets of dried seed that we scooped wet from squash whose flesh we then roasted for lunch on Sunday. Connections made and conversations shared with some seventeen classmates from California to Oklahoma, the Navajo Nation to Zuni Pueblo. A plethora of photos—see below. My notebook of scribbled information on plant biology, and a folder full of class materials.
Among those materials is a 70-page booklet called “Saving Seeds in the Southwest: Techniques for Seed Stewardship in Aridlands,” co-authored by our course instructor, Melissa Kruse-Peeples—yes, that Melissa Kruse-Peeples! (Who knew two months ago that I’d end up taking a course from her.) Its introduction eloquently captures the foundation for all we learned in our fourteen hours together, so I’m happy to pass it on to you directly:
Why Save Seeds?
Seed saving is crucial for food security and cultural preservation. As 21st-century farmers and gardeners with easy access to low-cost commercial seeds, we may ask why it is still worthwhile to preserve older varieties, or to take the time and effort to save seeds for our own use. In fact, the time-honored practice of seed saving is more relevant and useful today than ever. At the same time that global food production is higher than ever before in human history, people have less and less access to the diversity of amazing flavors and nutrition present in heirloom crops. A healthy, resilient local seed system is one that provides growers and consumers with crop plants that are adapted to local soils and climates, support sustainable growing practices, are culturally relevant, and serve the economic well-being of smaller farmers and communities rather than industrial agribusiness.
Seed banks like Native Seeds/SEARCH are important, but they are only one part of the solution. People who save their own seeds not only contribute to conserving valuable genetics and cultural heritage, but on-farm growing allows varieties to continue to evolve to specific local conditions and provide a dynamic genetic basis for future crop needs. It is only when a variety is grown, eaten and shared with others, that it is truly alive.
Seed saving is powerful. The rich crop diversity we enjoy today is the culmination of thousands of years of partnership between our human ancestors and their natural environment. Through the simple act of saving seeds, ancient peoples succeeded in one of the greatest bioengineering feats in human history: domesticating wild crop species. This boosted crop yields, made them easier to harvest, and adapted them to farms, providing the foundation of the emergence of civilization.
This process continues today on farms and in gardens throughout the world, creating new and valuable diversity. Seeds are living time capsules that record thousands of years of travel throughout diverse and changing lands, seasons and cultures. Every trait of value to us, no matter how small, is still present with us because someone, even just one person, loved it enough to save seed. And so by saving seeds, we honor the stories of those who stewarded them before us, and we weave ourselves back into the cloth of human history.
Gems /
I’ve got pages and pages of hand-jotted notes to process from the two-day Native Seeds/SEARCH workshop I attended over the weekend, but for now I’ll just say this: the experience was full of gems. The people who participated and shared their vast and diverse experiences were gems; the bits of knowledge I raced to collect were gems for sure. And then there was the glass gem corn, one of many kinds of plant and seed we handled, and one of my favorites. Look at those kernels: truly jewels, like strings of pearls, gleaming in deep purples, greens, and golds. Is that like any corn you’ve seen at the supermarket?