Sowing the seeds of food security

A recipe for Nasturtium pesto

The earliest versions of the most common vegetables we eat might astonish you. Some of the infinite varieties of the Incas’ potatoes were purple. Carrots, originally from Afghanistan, were also purple, and some white or black. Orange came much later, hybrids of the yellow, themselves hybrids of the white.

They may look like heirlooms, but these are modern hybrids

If you want to bake an authentic Tarte Tatin, you will need crisp, complex-flavoured Orleans Reinette russet apples that date from 1776. But how likely are you to find any supermarket apples that retain their shape when cooked, beyond the ubiquitous and dreary Golden Delicious?

Yet there are a further 7,500 varieties of apples in the world to choose from that merchants will never give you the chance to sample. You’ll have to grow them yourself.

Most heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables never reach any but the most expensive stores, and even there the choice is insignificant. The majority of us only know our fruits and vegetables from the limited range we confront at the supermarket or in the marginally more interesting selection that comes from farmers’ markets.

Not so Adam Alexander. He’s an ardent collector of seeds from vegetables most of us will never have eaten. But he does, regularly. He grows over 70 of them in his garden in Wales.

An award-winning film and television producer who has travelled the world documenting cultures unfamiliar to most people (Hughesovkia, anyone? A late 19th century mining town in Russia founded by a Welshman), he's produced series on a broad span of subjects from cooking and gardening before these subjects had become cheap and easy entertainment, to documentaries on Russian life by Russian filmmakers. 

Still, it seems the diversity his job provided was not enough. On one assignment, he found himself wandering off set and into the local food market. An inquisitive ‘foodie’ and enthusiastic cook, this visit to the rinok in Soviet Donetsk in 1988 changed his life. An unfamiliar Ukrainian sweet pepper he encountered - “Multi-lobbed (sic) and as red as a movie star’s lips” - turned out to have an unexpected chilli kick. Alexander dried the pepper’s seeds, brought them home to Wales and planted them, with great success and greater pleasure. Wherever he went filming thereafter, in his spare time he scoured local markets for unfamiliar produce, quizzing their sellers on their provenance.

His curiosity and his determination to increase our knowledge in and availability of vegetables with a very local market, has resulted in two fridges lodged in his garage. They’re filled with at least 499 varieties of heritage and heirloom vegetable seeds no longer available commercially. Their discovery is now the subject of a book, The Seed Detective. 

This short video gives you a taste of his mission, and very likely an immediate desire to go travelling.

Initially, he focused on chillies, beans and tomatoes. But the book covers eleven more crops, dividing the vegetable world into two regions: the east as the historical source of peas, broad beans, carrots, leeks, unusual brassicas, asparagus, lettuce, garlic; the west (North and South America along with the Mediterranean), where he discovers rare tomatoes, beans you are not likely ever to have cooked with, the colourful sweetcorn of the Americas, their chillies, squashes and more beans.

Native American Three Sisters planting: a sweetcorn up which climbs a bean, their roots protected by a spreading squash

The origins and development of all these treasures are recorded through Alexander’s encounters with the people who grow them, in places as divers as Palmyra in Syria to Yangon in Myanmar, where he discovered this extraordinary tomato he describes enthusiastically in another short video. It’s not sweet but sour.

Though all about seeds, the book could never be confused with a dry commercial catalogue. It’s as much a story of people as it is the history of vegetables.

Filming ‘Return to Tuscany’, a TV series which followed Katie and Giancarlo’s project to launch Caldesi, a cooking school outside Montepulciano named after their two London restaurants, a cousin of the chef fed Alexander a luscious Tuscan tomato that despite the 70 varieties he has discovered across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia, and the USA, was unfamiliar. Superior, even, to Sicily’s Pachino or the San Marzano of Salerno, it has been grown for generations by Nello’s family - a genuine heirloom.

Then there’s the market seller in Luang Prabang who clearly thought Alexander’s persistent and dumb questions about the sweet, fat pea pods she was selling merited locking him up. The garden peas the rest of us grow have been thoroughly domesticated from three wild species originating over 8,500 years ago, seldom reaching more than 2 metres/6 feet and more commonly only half that. Back in his Welsh greenhouse, those peas from Lao took over, soaring through the glass roof and filling the space with kilos of peas Alexander ate all summer-long, both whole or podded.

Modern cultivars are developed for durability in supermarkets, not for flavour. With a buying public already confused by the difference between Best Before and Use By dates, we have stopped paying attention to the quality and provenance of what we eat. We prioritise the time it takes to cook over the pleasures of food, leaving a good deal of dinner production in the hands of companies delivering ready-chopped and separately packaged ingredients plus an instruction card, as though a meal were a flat-pack bookcase.

In plots large and small around the world, under the spades of dedicated growers, 6000 plant species are being cultivated. Yet according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, 66 percent of commercial global crop production centres on just 9 crops.

This might make economic sense for agribusiness and its investors anxious to upgrade their superyachts. But a lack of diversity makes our food system vulnerable to climate change. Heirloom varieties predating modern agricultural practices have a greater natural resilience to regular climate, along with more intense flavour. Mexicans and Native Americans barely water their sweetcorn, yet across the intensively planted maize fields of Southwest France the mammoth water sprayers need to run all summer long.

The habit of early tribes to develop a wide range of one type of crop such as potatoes or beans or carrots offered a greater chance of overcoming poor weather or disease. It encouraged biodiversity and food security in a manner domesticated crops do not. Natural selection encouraged growers to preserve the seeds of the most successful and intensely flavoured vegetables for planting again. Maintaining seed diversity instead of creating homogenous genetic hybrids provides seeds that can be adapted to regions with similar soils and conditions. Take a look at that over 2-metre high forest of Adam Alexander’s Laotian peas. They came from South East Asia yet flourish in cool Wales.

Intensive agriculture’s focus on artificial selection and genetic modification to produce super-crops with resistance to pests and disease and climate change has left us with a limited choice of varieties, all with far less flavour and nutritional value.

Adam Alexander doesn’t hog his seeds to himself. He gives them to the UK’s Heritage Seed Library. If you are a member, you can select varieties for your own plot. The Seed Foundation in the US and other seed banks teach how to save seeds and welcome donations of heirloom seeds.

Buy your favourite supporters of GM foods and anyone with faith in whoever by Christmas is the latest Minister of Trade or Agriculture a copy of Alexander’s book. It could be life-changing; but in any event they’ll find it as readable as a crime novel.

I can’t call them heirloom, but the enthusiastic nasturtiums in my tiny garden, a flower with more than 80 species that originates in South America, are as close as I get to flowers with a history, being self-sown over several summers. I turn their seed pods into caper substitutes. Their leaves and flowers make this peppery pesto that keeps a couple of weeks in the fridge if covered in oil and zips up fish, chicken, steamed fingerling potatoes or pasta.

Last of my nasturtiums in the first of the autumn rains

90g/3oz flaked almonds
30g/1oz nasturtium flowers
30g/1oz nasturtium leaves
1 clove garlic minced
25g/4 heaped tablespoons grated Parmesan
salt and pepper
60ml/2 fl oz extra virgin olive oil, more if necessary

Toss the flaked almonds in dry pan for 1 minute till gold but not darkening. Pour onto a plate to cool.

Blitz the remaining ingredients in food processor drizzling in the oil to create a loose consistency then store in a sterilized jar in the fridge making sure the surface is covered in oil.