What Makes Homemade Wild Blackberry Jam Real Food — and Worth the Thorns

Enlarge Image Image Gallery  While so many people wonder what their purpose is in life, Harriet Fasenfest has discovered that the ultimate purpose may lie in our country’s agricultural roots. In "A Householder’s Guide to the Universe" she passes through a seasonal year dedicated not only to helping you grow and preserve your own food, but also to better understanding why the honest work of laboring to directly provide for yourself and your family is so fulfilling.  COVER: TIN HOUSE BOOKS

The following is an adaptation from A Householder’s Guide to the Universe: A Calendar of Basics for the Home and Beyond by Harriest Fasenfest (Tin House Books, 2010). In her book, Fasenfest leads readers through a year in her garden, kitchen and home on her continuing journey to self-reliant householding. The basis of her homemaking decisions lies in her dissatisfaction with industrial agriculture, commodification of our crops and food system, and the replacement of handmade, artisan foods with genetically modified food-like substances. This excerpt comes from the chapter “June.”   

The Real Food Fight

While some genetically modified seeds or plants can never reproduce naturally, others do. And that is where the real fight comes in. When, for example, a farmer takes the bait and grows genetically modified seeds, he is unwittingly participating in a sad chain of events. By planting those seeds, he is introducing some of the traits of those seeds into the wild. The pollen from genetically modified seeds can, unfortunately, cross with a native variety and infect it. Its pollen can fly over to the plants of a neighboring farmer (one who may have been raising a particular heirloom variety for generations) and alter the plants’ gene pool. That, for a traditional farmer, is a tragedy.

But worse than the destruction of an established hybrid or heirloom seed stock is the ensuing legal nightmare. It is a nightmare from which we can only wake up once generations of good farming practices and lifestyle have been destroyed. Strange as it may seem, if the errant pollen of the genetically modified seed makes its way to the farm next door, the traditional farmer must pay. Once his seeds or his plants carry a single trait of the genetically modified seed (whether he wanted them to or not), he must pay royalties to the manufacturers of the GM seeds. Unlike those who use the natural process of selection (hybridization, or cross-pollination in the wild), those who genetically modify seeds do so for profit — big, big, monopolized profit. The companies that modify seeds genetically (or the corporations that support their research) patent the seeds they develop. They sell them to farmers (or even supply them free, at first) by suggesting the seeds will produce disease-resistant crops and an increased yield. They convince farmers that the return will be great. Sometimes, over the first year or two, it is true. These plants yield big, disease-resistant crops. But over time the return is not as great as the farmers have been led to assume it will be. When there is a bumper crop, the commodity price (what big companies pay for crops) may go down. Big yields lead to surpluses and poor returns. At that point, not only must the farmer keep paying for the next crop of patented seed (now at a higher cost), but he also begins to question this logic. He begins to wonder, from both