NOSTALGIA YOU CAN EAT

Image Gallery BRUCE FRITZ/SEED SAVERS EXCHANGE

When it comes to heirlooms, the taste's the thing.

by Brook Elliot

That was my introduction to heirloom vegetables. Now, like thousands of other home gardeners, these old-time, open-pollinated varieties are all that I grow. Hybrids do not appear in my garden.

Whets wrong with hybrids? After all, haven't the seed companies been telling us for more than 50 years now that hybrids are the only way to go? Well, while it's true that anything you grow yourself will taste better than something you buy in the market, hybrid varieties are not designed to meet the needs of the home gardener. Rather, they are developed to meet the needs of monocultural factory farms and to best fit into the food distribution network. Among the traits fostered are resistance to certain diseases; the tendency to ripen simultaneously; uniformity of size, shape and color; and the hardiness to withstand the rigors of transportation, storage and display in markets. Taste is rarely a criterion. (For some notable exceptions, see " And The Winners Are... ")

Moreover, hybrids lock you into the seed supplier. W ho's got the seed controls the feed," says Gravel Switch, Kentucky, farmer Jeanne Lane. In this, she sums up one of the prime objections to hybrid varieties: since they don't breed "true" - that is, their seeds do not produce replicas of the parent - you have to keep buying them from the company that holds the patent. Not only does this marry you to a particular company, it leads to a diminishing number of available varieties.

Take tomatoes, for instance. While there are several dozen varieties available through seed catalogs - an impressive number at first glance - they barely - come dose to the 600 tomato varieties known to exist.

Nowadays, even where farmers are producing during several crop varieties for the market, these varieties are more often than not very nearly genetically identical. The resulting monoculture can lead to sometimes serious problems: for example, a new disease can easily wipe out the entire crop.

The most well-known example of this is the 1840s ' Irish potato famine. In her book Heirloom Vegetables, Sue Strickland observes: "The epidemic happened because all the varieties of potato growing in Europe at the time were derived from just two parent varieties. They produced reliable yields in the cool wet conditions of Northern Europe... but had never encountered blight, and so had no resistance to it."