The Good Seed

My neighbor Dave came across the alley the other day to say that our heirloom tomato plant could "win the county fair." The fruit on this particular plant is huge and gorgeous and tastes like sunshine, and though we were warned that it might only produce two or three tomatoes, we've had at least half a dozen already. As we mentioned in an earlier post, we're novice gardeners and we are tickled pink with our tomatoes.

Aside from tasting like nothing you have ever found in a supermarket, heirloom fruits and vegetables are really important. Heirlooms, according to Barbara Kingsolver (in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) are open-pollinated, bred the way nature intended, by the birds and the bees. Gardeners save the seeds of the best plants from year to year (as we hope to do). Hence, the name "heirloom."


Savoring a few slices of our very own heirloom tomato, with some fresh mozzarella and basil leaves, I began to wonder: what it is that makes our supermarket produce taste so very much like sand?

Here's what I've learned so far:

Supermarket vegetables are bred for commerce, not for eating. Someone has decided that we don't want tomatoes with oddball shapes and colors. We want 'em smooth, round, uniform. Tomatoes, for example, need to fit into packing boxes, and they should be able to ripen in the truck, as they're transported from one side of the country to the other.

Vegetables are also genetically modified to resist certain pests—and pesticides. Yes, you heard correctly: genes are spliced in so that the plants will not die when the fields are sprayed with poison to kill the caterpillars or weevils or whatever might be eating the plant. The plants don't die... but what happens to our bodies, I wonder, when we eat the fruit of those plants?

These hybridized, genetically engineered seeds are evidently owned by the companies who "create" them. The companies that play God can patent the seed. Patented plants are often genetically engineered to contain a "terminator gene." What that means is: if a farmer might want to save some seed from a genetically engineered and patented plants, that seed will not germinate—it simply will not reproduce the following year. The farmer has to ante up the bucks and buy more seed every season.

According to Kingsolver's book, six companies—Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis and Dow—at least some of whom also produce pesticides, "now control 98 percent of all the world's seed sales." And the FDA does not require labeling of genetically modified foods. So we're probably eating them even when we aren't aware of it.

Suddenly, saving and planting seeds from our heirlooms—not to mention shopping at farmers' markets and buying non-genetically-engineered produce and plants—seems like a revolutionary act. Viva la revolucion!