From full-flavoured rare breed meats and the freshest, just-caught seafood, to hand-picked heritage vegetables and traditionally made mature farmhouse cheeses, at Peyton and Byrne we are proud to champion the unsung heroes of British food production.
This place is 130 meters above sea level because, if the worst happens, and global warming melts all of the polar ice-caps, this project will still be safe. […] In these remote mountains, this place is meant to be a safeguard against apocalypse.
(Report on Svalbard Global Seed Vault, BBC News at Ten, 12 January 2016)
These two quotes, captured to my project database, at first sight appear to have little in common, but they both, in their different ways, draw on a fairly recent concept, namely that vegetables and seeds can be a kind of heritage, an essential part of our civilisation just like great buildings and works of art and, like those, in need of protection from forces of change and destruction. A large and growing number of people and organisations take the view that protecting this heritage is an urgent and important cause. Globally, millions of seed and tissue samples are now being stored in thousands of gene banks, while thousands more botanical gardens and conservation farms propagate heritage plants (FAO, 2010, p. 55). Calls to conserve crop heritage by agricultural scientists have fed, over the twentieth century, into agricultural policy via the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other supranational research and development bodies. Despite all that activity in the agricultural science sector, 20 years ago the idea that vegetables or seeds could be heritage would have seemed very strange to most consumers. Now it hardly seems to merit explanation, and a packet of supermarket tomatoes, a raspberry yoghurt or a restaurant salad might simply be labelled ‘heritage’ or ‘heirloom’ and generally seem a little tastier or more special as a result.
That growing familiarity with the idea of ‘heritage vegetables’ is disguising a complex and contradictory set of values, activities and interest groups that has only become more complex and contradictory over those 20 years. If we take the UK context for a moment – and this book does focus on that country’s relationship with the idea of a heritage of vegetables – gene banks and research labs work to arrest the loss of genetic diversity in human food crops, and help future-proof agriculture so we can feed an expanding global population even if conditions should become more adverse, as the report on Svalbard Global Seed Vault above claims in rather dramatic terms. At the same time, consumers might come across the idea of heritage vegetables in seed catalogues, newspaper features, TV cookery programmes and books, as well as on menus and supermarket packaging. They might also encounter it through the work of heritage conservation bodies like the National Trust, who have opened heritage gardens and collections of rare fruit and vegetables to visitors. Perhaps they will encounter a poster or seed swap organised by anti-capitalist group, Reclaim the Fields – the case for protecting and growing heritage vegetables is often made in anti-capitalist terms – as part of a pushback against the corporate food system. Agricultural specialists continue to address each other and agricultural policy makers, but this now very wide range of interest groups taking up the cause are addressing the individual consumer-subject. And that consumer-subject is being asked to act in various ways – donating, shopping, visiting, gardening, protesting and volunteering – to help preserve this new kind of heritage.
Heritage vegetable discourse has expanded outwards, in other words, from its scientific origins and as it has done so has become enmeshed in a range of popular discourses of alternative food politics, environmentalism, thrifty living, tradition and authenticity with instagrammable aesthetics. It is a highly mediated discourse, playing out not only in fields and gene banks but on websites, in magazines, newspapers, leaflets and posters, and on menus and packaging. For all these reasons a cultural studies approach can make an important contribution to understanding crop conservation, not least in paying equal respect to popular culture and its ephemera as to the digified work of scientific institutions. This book, based on a database of around 400 heritage vegetable texts,1 aims to map the discursive field, and tease out some of its contradictions (I will come to these in a moment), in order to better understand what it means to heritagise food, and to do so as a way of solving problems with the food system. The aim is not to evaluate different conservation strategies with regards to their success at saving this heritage, which others have already done, but rather to question this as a cultural and social phenomenon; to ask what the politics of heritage vegetables are in practice, both those openly declared and those more latent ones, which emerge in the everyday practice of heritage activism and conservation.
What are heritage vegetables, then? To add to the confusion, there is a large range of terms used to label the seeds, plants and produce that are the focus of this book, and ‘heritage’ is only one of them. In lifestyle and retail contexts, the term ‘heirloom’ is sometimes used (though it is more common in the USA, Canada and Australia than the UK). Official documents produced by the UK government use the European Union terms ‘conservation variety’ and ‘amateur variety’, which reflects their status as an exception to the normal rules for the testing and registering of agricultural varieties. ‘Plant genetic resources’ is the term favoured by conservation specialists in the agricultural science sector. This sector also uses the terms ‘landrace’ (Camacho Villa, Maxted, Scholten & Ford-Lloyd, 2005; Tiranti & Negri, 2007), ‘folk variety’ (Berg, 2009) and ‘farmer’s variety’ (Saxena & Singh, 2006). ‘Peasant’ variety is found in materials by La Via Campesina, which describes itself as an international peasants’ movement. These differences in terminology may seem arcane, but they are politically significant because they attribute the application of skill, knowledge or effort, which are central in arguments over who may ‘own’ the rights to these resources (see, for example, Saxena and Singh (2006) on the development of plant breeders’ rights for farming communities). The terminology used is one aspect of an ongoing project on the part of these social actors to produce some food resources as heritage, establish whose heritage it is, and to seek to enrol others in a project to safeguard those resources. Through this they also create themselves or others as legitimate guardians of that heritage. This is the strategic process of heritagisation.
Heritage, though a notoriously capacious concept, is tied to certain seeds and vegetables themselves, and not all vegetables and seeds are called heritage. So what is special about those that are? Outside the scientific literature, vague or contradictory definitions of heritage make it difficult to pin down what people understand by it. Many texts speak simply of ‘heritage’ seeds or varieties in general, without tying the idea down to certain types or defining terms. Where writers specify particular varieties they limit their attentions to ‘open pollinated’ (not hybrid) ones and to older types, dropped from commercial catalogues or never included in them, developed through older, informal seed breeding practices. Rare attempts to formalise definitions are made by organisations managing collections, in order to set the scope for what should be included in the collection. For example, the Heritage Seed Library, run by Garden Organic at Ryton, UK, divides heritage vegetables into three categories as follows, in its 2012 catalogue:
Heirloom variety: Handed down from one generation to the next, its origin often lost in family history.
Ex-commercial variety: Once on a European National List, but it has now been dropped by the maintainer.
Local variety: with particular reference to an area. Perhaps it is supported by a local tradition and/or is attached to a story associated with the area or grown/bred by local people.
Asserting control over the naming and definition of heritage is a fascinating discursive activity, one closely connected with expert status. But definitions like these also tell us something about how heritage value is understood. For example, the connecting of heritage with stories and family histories suggests a personal, domestic, intimate idea of the value of heritage at risk. The Heritage Seed Library’s three-fold framework above also divides varieties according to the status of the groups who bred them, something which is, as in the examples already mentioned, linked with claims about who has rights over them. Classifying is one of the four kinds of heritage activity Harrison (2013) associated with formal kinds of heritage practice and is an ontologically significant act. Acts of naming, describing and ranking entities following scientific observation are at the base of modern knowledge systems (Foucault, 1972). They enable the identification of ‘natural’ resources of all kinds, including human others (Moore, 2015), in order to harness them for the extraction of value and the accumulation of capital. Yet these knowledge strategies are also deployed in order to critique and mitigate the damage of capitalist excess, in the form of gene and seed banking, heritage educational work and so on. Chapter 3 will explore in more detail the contradictions of expert-led heritage and its classification, collecting and the institutions and discourses of heritage food they produce.
Other discourses of heritage vegetables are far less involved in precise classification and description or in the formation of collections, yet they do all discursively produce value through heritagisation. Varied though they are, they are all structured around a fundamental conceptual framework of loss, risk and guardianship. This book primarily approaches the politics of heritage vegetable discourse as a matter of this value creation, appropriation and redistribution. Loss and risk are used to produce value or increase value of items (as Chapter 2 investigates). The remaining chapters of this book will investigate the way three different heritage discourses produce varying kinds of value – not all of which is focused on genes – and then assert claims over that value through guardianship. These discourses produce knowledge and understanding about heritage and guardianship, which structure approaches to crises in the food system caused by the efficient extractivism of capitalism.
It is impossible to understand the politics of heritage vegetable discourse without teasing out the interest groups engaged in protecting and promoting that heritage. Heritage seed conservation is heavily influenced by its origins in the field of scientific crop improvement but, along the way, the discourse has been adapted and reshaped in line with the needs and interests of the other groups including anti-capitalist activists, celebrity chefs and supermarkets. The next section is a brisk tour through the history of heritage vegetable discourse, which is not a simple linear narrative, rather a tangled web of related ideas, arguments, materials and people, in which some overall trends may be seen. Of course there is no disinterested history, so the following draws on the shared accounts of the history of crop heritage, found across the different interest groups identified in the book.
Vegetables as heritage: a short history
Hand in hand: modern crop breeding and its critique
Humans have been selectively breeding plants for tens of thousands of years, by choosing seed to sow from those which display favoured traits. This method of plant breeding tends to produce diverse populations of plants, and this is a bonus if growers cannot control the conditions in which the crops grow – some of the plants will be adapted to whatever challenges are posed by the weather, pests and soil conditions. During the nineteenth century, along with improvements to agriculture that enabled greater control over growing conditions, people developed methods to achieve maximum homogeneity of crops, and diversity within a field of crops began to be considered undesirable. Intuitive or informal seed selection – choosing seed from the best plants – has been gradually replaced by increasingly specialist techniques, from controlled pollination to gene mapping (Breseghello & Coelho, 2013). It is this shift that produced the conditions for food plants and their genes to be seen as ‘heritage’.
Diverse traits, and the genes that produce them, are of course the raw materials for the scientific crop improvement project. So its successful spread to farms around the world, in reducing unwanted genetic diversity, immediately began destroying the basis for its own future work, as crop scientists began pointing out in the 1930s (Scarascia-Mugnozza & Perrino, 2002, p. 2). The fact that the idea of crops as heritage in need of conservation emerged within the scientific plant breeding community has had profound consequences for the conceptualisation of significance or value of this heritage, that is, as one largely about genes and seeds as containers of genes. Even beyond crop science, the politics of heritage crops has often been conceived of as a battle for ownership of those genes, a battle explored in detail in activist heritage vegetable discourse in Chapters 2 and 4.
Critically questioning the conceptual framework of heritage and conservation is generally beyond the remit of crop science, but there are been interventions from researchers working within organisations tasked with international development (Eyzaguirre & Watson, 2002; Eyzaguirre & Linares, 2004; Friis-Hansen & Sthapit, 2000; Friis-Hansen, 1996; Mooney, 1980, 2017 and the work of the ETC Group), as well as in the fields of anthropology (Nazarea, 1996, 1998, 2005, 2006) and social science or science and technology studies (Breen, 2015; Carolan, 2007; Peres, 2019). A particularly important point made by these critical voices has been the tendency of conventional agricultural research culture to consider farmers as passive recipients of scientific knowledge and its outputs (Friis-Hansen & Sthapit, 2000), thus failing to acknowledge the role they have played in producing and protecting genetic resources (Friis-Hansen & Sthapit, 2000, pp. 11–12; Nazarea, 2005, pp. 62–63). This has led to the development of some more participatory plant conservation strategies and research programmes, which take into account the complex factors that impact on farmers’ maintenance of older landraces (Jarvis & Hodgkin, 2000; Raggi et al., 2017; Sthapit & Rao, 2009; van Etten et al., 2016; Yadav et al., 2018). Such work could help develop future crop breeding in the interest of small farmers and diverse local food cultures globally.
Though these researchers often engage with the ways genes and seeds are intertwined in complex networks with people and their food cultures, traditions and local environment, they are all directed ultimately to successful propagation of genetic diversity for future plant breeding. The focus on the gene as the end point of successful programmes has led to calls for legal recognition of the role of farmers or horticulturalists in creating genes that have value in the marketplace. This is acknowledged in the use of terms such as ‘farmer’s variety’ in India (Saxena &a...
