Asked & Answered

Food fight for the ages
Gary Paul Nabhan is founder of the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) Alliance and editor of a book by the same name. His work has been honored with a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Ethnobiology. He lives in the desert of Arizona where he raises Churro sheep, heritage turkeys and heirloom crops.

In his latest book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine (2008), Nabhan tells the story of the Russian botanist Nikolay Vavilov, who dedicated his life to collecting hundreds of thousands of seeds from five continents to preserve genetic diversity and guard against hunger. Retracing Vavilov’s path during the early 20th century from Mexico and the Colombian Amazon to the glaciers of the Pamirs in Tajikistan, Nabhan illustrates the changes that have occurred since Vavilov’s time and why global food diversity still matters.

Interview by Heidi Busse, World Ark contributor

WorldArk:What impact has globalization had on the farming traditions and culinary traditions of the places you and Nikolay Vavilov studied?

Gary Nabhan: When I first read about Vavilov, I was impressed that he had discovered that most of our foods originated in just a few biodiverse regions around the world — Ethiopia, southern Mexico, the Mediterranean and Central Asia. But by the time I began growing and conserving crops myself, it had already become clear that many of the crop seeds and livestock breeds he described at the beginning of the 20th century were already extinct or endangered. Because they form the basis of our food supply and potentially buffer us from climate change and diseases, this loss alarmed me.

In your travels to follow Vavilov’s path, where did you find the most vibrant food cultures, and what made these communities so rich?

A few years ago, I helped conservation scientist Ken Wilson of the Christensen Fund shape a global program to support both the diversity of cultures and the diversity of crops in the geographic areas now known as the Vavilov centers. Ken invited me to do on-ground assessments of how and why food biodiversity in these areas has changed over the century and to document the ways that indigenous cultures have, against stiff odds, continued to protect the seed and breed varieties that survive to this day. In essence we realized that wherever there is a diversity of farming cultures in a relatively remote or rugged mountainous zone with high wild biodiversity, there is also a high likelihood that crop and livestock biodiversity have survived as well.

What cultural responses to globalization have you seen?

In some cases, an entirely different way of farming—with groundwater pumping, mechanization and high fossil fuel use—replaces a more resilient, low-impact way of farming. But indigenous cultures are not passive victims of globalization. They resist it in places, selectively filter out its worst effects in others and hang on to what remains of value. For instance, globalization has clearly reached the desert farming oasis of Siwa, near the Egypt-Libya border, causing loss of local control of groundwater pumping and resulting in salinization of lands. At the same time, Siwans tenaciously hang on to their perennial fruit crops—dates, olives, figs and dozens of others—not only because of their salt and heat tolerance, but also because they take pride in their traditional cuisine. To have true food security, folks must have access to diverse, affordable, culturally appropriate foods.

How does this international experience inform your work as founder of the Renewing America’s Food Traditions Alliance?

I realized a long time ago that we can’t ethically express our concerns about the loss of heritage livestock breeds and heirloom vegetable seeds in other lands if we don’t take care of those at our own back door. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture began in the 1880s, it was charged with making a complete inventory of native and immigrant crops, livestock and poultry already adapted to American conditions. It never even finished that fundamental task. In 2005, I asked a number of nonprofits, including the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, Slow Food USAUSAUSA and the Chefs Collaborative, to collaborate not only on completing that inventory, but to bring back the foods unique to America that are on the brink of extinction.

By “bring back,” I mean to take the best, most adapted varieties and bring them back to our kitchen tables, back to our celebrations, back in our bellies, and to pay farmers and ranchers better to enable this restoration. Renewing America’s Food Traditions lists more than 1,200 breeds and seeds at risk in North America, and profiles some 90 foods for which there are already efforts at agricultural and cultural recovery. This is conservation with a human face to it, where not just poultry and fruit tree genes are being conserved, but recipes, stories and management practices are being documented and restored to their rightful places in our rural and urban communities.

How would you characterize the significance of the Forgotten Fruits Summit that you and I recently organized, gathering the country’s experts in conserving heirloom apples?

There are more apple varieties unique to North America than there are varieties of any other individual plant or livestock species, some 14,000 by last count. But more of these are threatened and endangered, possibly 85 percent, than any other food. The dozen or so old-time apple explorers and pomologists at the Forgotten Fruits Summit collectively had some 350 years of field experience finding, grafting, conserving and promoting heirloom apples. We need to draw on their collective wisdom and practical knowledge if the youth of our country are to be mobilized to conserve the remaining preindustrial apple varieties. Today less than a dozen apple varieties dominate American commerce.

We’re beginning an adopt-a-food initiative where apples historically named for particular American places are repatriated to the communities and replanted in every schoolyard and public place. This work has begun for the Newtown Pippin in New York. It is being proposed as the official heirloom for the “Big Apple” itself! It is time to reclaim the flavors and stories unique to American farmers, and re-root them in the American earth.

For more information visit www.garynabhan.com and www.raftalliance.org.

Heidi Busse is a Master of Public Health candidate with the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health, the Center for Global Health. She has worked with the Peace Corps, Heifer International, the Land Stewardship Project and the Department of Agriculture.