Tastebud time machine

How to channel your inner archaeologist via a humble packet of seeds

A friend of mine works in conservation at a major museum here in the UK. While she isn’t the one delicately dabbing some gold leaf onto a centuries-old bit of woodwork, or painstakingly stripping a millimetre-thick layer of lacquer from the surface of a painting to reveal some previously unappreciated detail below, she is responsible for managing the people who do.

The museum has tens of thousands of artefacts in its public-facing galleries, and many more in its stores and archives. Making sure that these are perfectly preserved for future generations to appreciate, enjoy and study is my friend’s responsibility.

She modestly shares stories about when the museum has loaned items to galleries abroad. Occasions on which she has had to chaperone, across international borders in the back of a van, a painting valued in the millions of pounds, and of an unquantifiable value to British art history. One slip, one bump in the road, and a priceless national treasure is cracked and torn and effectively lost forever. It is quite the burden, and one my friend does not take lightly.

And I get it. I studied Classical Civilisation at university, so I’m naturally inclined to treat old bits and bobs – which is what archaeologists spend most of their time studying – with a great degree of respect. These carefully preserved items from our species’ past don’t just offer an insight into people’s one-time day-to-day lives, pastimes, follies and foibles; they can also help us understand the world as it is today. For all our nuclear reactors and satellite communication systems and content streaming platforms, humans really haven’t changed that much in the past few millennia.

But it’s not just famous works of art and artefacts that are worthy of preservation. I am not a hoarder, but I do find it difficult to part with items from my past. Long before Marie Kondo or Stacey Solomon took it upon themselves to help people declutter their homes via our television screens, artist and social activist William Morris said: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Sorry Will, but I disagree. There is a whole category of stuff that isn’t accounted for by purists, minimalists and aesthetes, and that is items that are meaningful.

No object exists in a vacuum. When a thing comes into our possession, its history, its story, becomes subsumed within our own. My wife and I have a small collection of undeniably tacky salt and pepper shakers, most of which were purchased in souvenir shops and airport Duty Free zones. They are, by and large, hideously ugly objects. A pair of featureless black lighthouses picked up in Dungeness; a Cypriot donkey carrying little glass seasoning pots on its flanks; a pair of sea turtles engaged in a romantic liaison. They are horrible, and I love them.

William Morris and Marie Kondo alike would bin these on sight. But they are meaningful to me, because every time my eye lands on one, an entire tiny chapter of my life plays out within my subconscious, just as it might do were I to listen to an old favourite song, or leaf through a photo album.

It’s not that I think the past was better than the present. I am not someone who believes that everything was better in the old days. But for good or ill, the past is worth preserving, remembering and revisiting – there are treasures to be found there, be they artistic, intellectual or anthropological. Or botanical.

As gardeners, we have an opportunity that most museum conservators could only imagine in their wildest dreams. For not only can we study the past via pressed flowers or botanical illustrations or the texts of medieval herbalists and Victorian plant-hunters; no, we can actually bring the past to life and watch it flourish before our very eyes.

I’m talking about seeds.

Seeds offer us an incredible connection to the plants of yore. Or at least, they can. There are an estimated 10,000 varieties of tomato. By variety, I don’t mean cherry, salad, vine, or whatever other classification might be displayed on supermarket packaging. I mean ‘Moneymaker’, ‘Gardener’s Delight’, ‘Black Russian’, ‘Orange Santa’, ‘Sungold’, and all the others that we’re used to seeing in garden centres, seed catalogues and articles rounding up the best tomatoes to grow at home.

10,000 is a lot of tomatoes. And yet, realistically, how many of these have any of us heard of, let alone tasted or tried growing ourselves? Possibly some of the ones listed above, maybe a handful more, or two handfuls if you’re an experienced gardener or grower.

Many of the seeds that are sold to us in all the usual places these days, however, are what are known as F1 hybrids. You’ll see this marked fairly clearly on the seed packets. These are hybrids developed by specialists seeking to create a sort of Nietzschean supertomaten. F1 seeds are bred, marketed and widely grown for a number of reasons: sometimes it’s their productivity; the length of their growing season; the size or flavour or colour of their fruits. They can promise to deliver all sorts of desirable traits and qualities. Just as ornamental cultivars are bred to meet the changing needs and tastes of gardeners, so too are fruit and veg crops.

If you’ve ever grown something like a ‘Sungold’ (F1), as I have with excellent harvests over the years, you’ll know that the results speak for themselves. But these modern hybrids – or rather the systems that they represent – are not without their problems.

With an F1 hybrid, you cannot grow next year’s plants from the seeds produced by this year’s plants. This is because F1 hybrids do not grow “true to type” from saved seed. This is fine if you’re a domestic gardener who doesn’t mind spending a few quid on a new packet of ‘Sungold’ seeds each February, but if you’re a farmer, the need to buy new seed every year (or pay a licence fee for their use) can lock you in a financially crippling cycle of debt and dependence with major seed producers (who by the way happen to be a small collection of multinational agrochemical conglomerates – just four companies own the rights to an estimated two-thirds of the world’s seed sales).

Why don’t farmers just break the cycle and grow something else? Well, international regulations have something to do with. As does the nature of global distribution networks fuelled by supermarket demand fuelled by our own shopping habits. All of which combines to mean that only a small handful of varieties are actually marketable.

For all our technological advances, it is estimated that in the last 100 years we’ve lost 90% of the diversity in our food crops globally. New seeds, new cultivars, new pesticides and fertilisers, all might serve to make food production more efficient and therefore more profitable for a small minority, but it is making the rest of us much, much poorer. 

If you’re a small-scale farmer in the Global South, there’s not a lot you can do about this. If you’re a home-grower, however, there is, because you can grow varieties known as heirloom and heritage (synonymous words that basically just mean “old”). Thanks to a little something called The Internet, we have access to an overwhelmingly huge proportion of those 10,000 toms, including loads and loads of heirloom varieties that won’t just make your growing experience more enjoyable, but do something towards promoting biodiversity and keeping that botanical gene pool topped up.

I’m not suggesting the only reason to buy and grow heirloom veg is out of duty. We are not all museum conservators, nor are we all historical reenactors. And that’s fine. But heirloom varieties also allow us to experience sights and flavours that go beyond the norm. Yellow carrots! Purple carrots! White carrots! Yes, ‘Nairobi’ (F1) carrots are sweet and reliable, but you can buy a kilo-bag of them in the supermarket for 50p. How much more enjoyable and exciting to stray beyond the high street shelves, into a whole world of old-school carroty goodness.

Looking beyond the world of seeds, commercially, our dependence on an ever-narrowing pool of cultivars is creating disaster-prone monocrop plantations. There are around 1,000 varieties of banana in existence. Of these, the entire global export market is dominated by only one: the Cavendish banana.

If anything were to happen to the Cavendish, like, say, if it were to succumb to a new strain of Panama disease, such as the one tearing through plantations right now, then it is entirely feasible that our supermarket shelves would be banana-free for years, before the world’s bankrupt banana growers were able to bounce back with The Next Big ‘Nana. This could feasibly happen in the very near future. (See also: olives and the resulting oil.)

A diverse and thriving gene pool is good for plants, good for biodiversity, and good for us – for our health, for our economy, for our palates.

So, what can we humble grow-your-owners do? Well, we can have a bit of fun searching out heirloom varieties that we have never grown before, by perusing the offering of companies here in the UK such as Real Seeds, Vital Seeds, and others, to find some new-to-us historical gems. 

Some of these heirloom vegetables might not end up being as useful as modern hybrids, some of them might not even end up being as beautiful, but I know that for me, growing them will be that much more meaningful.

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Wondering how to pick the perfect tomato? Check out this post over on Rootbound, in which various gardeners (including yours truly) share some of their favourites.

Header image credit: Vince Lee on Unsplash