Food Heroes: Matthew Dillon, Seed Guy

It all goes back to growing up on his family's small farm in Nebraska just outside of Omaha. That four-acre farm, which his family called a "hobby farm," was where the Dillon family raised vegetables and kept a few cattle. Young Matthew and his siblings would harvest the vegetables from the fields, then carry them up and down the road that ran in front of their house that cut through the heart of Nebraska's rich agricultural land, selling armloads of the crops to their neighbors.

Matthew was a smart kid, and his boredom with school, which he refers to as "an 1890’s model of education," caused him to get a reputation as a rabble-rouser. "I’d definitely gotten in trouble for vandalism, smoking pot and all those things," he said. "That’s why I was getting in trouble—because I wasn’t challenged. I was totally bored."

Mount Michael Benedictine School.

So his parents plucked him out of public school and sent him to a nearby boarding school called Mount Michael Benedictine School. "It was competitive to get in, you had to start as a freshman, he said. "100 percent of students going off to college, 90 percent on scholarships, highest ACT and SAT scores in the state."

The monks also had a three-acre organic farm.

But compared to the vegetables his family grew, "the carrots and the produce were pretty crappy looking," he remembers thinking. "I guess this is good for the planet, but it doesn’t look very edible."

After graduating from Mount Michael, Dillon went to the University of California, studying the evolution of human consciousness through a special outdoor wilderness program on the impacts of the human psyche on ecosystems.

Then his father got sick. Cancer.

"He'd had an agricultural supply business, everything from veterinary health supplies to pesticides, you name it, the whole kit and caboodle," Dillon said.

Matthew dropped out of school to help his mother take care of his dad and worked to help pay the family's bills.

Platte River Valley in Nebraska.

"My dad was so healthy. Why is he, of all people, getting non-Hodgkins lymphoma?" he asked himself. "I started looking into it, and the Platte River Valley of Nebraska has this insanely high rate of non-Hodgkins lymphoma because of nitrates in the wells [from] pesticide runoff."

Dillon's father died shortly thereafter, and it began to dawn on him that the pesticides his father sold and that all the farmers in the area used might have contributed to not only his dad's disease, but to his own serious illness at the age of 12, eventually diagnosed as an endocrine disruption and after which he never grew again.

He became intrigued with agriculture. He got a job working on urban garden projects in and around Omaha, plus a side business running an electronics smuggling operation in Russia (read more about that here).

Working on the garden projects, "I realized that the only way I was going to be close to my dad again was if I started growing food," Dillon said. "The thing that he loved the most was that hobby farm. He liked that more than the business. He just liked growing food, he liked making food, [and] it became really clear to me that I needed to go and get my hands in the soil."

Touring a field study for the OSA.

An internship at an 18-acre organic farm in California's Anderson Valley introduced Dillon to an integrated approach to agriculture, where everything was different from the practices his family had used in Nebraska. But one thing struck him as odd: the seed on the organic farm came from the same sources as the seed that the conventional growers used back home.

"All of the inputs are different, our approach to caring for the soil is different, but the seed was the same," he said. Other than some heirloom seed from the Abundant Life Seed Foundation and the Seed Savers Exchange, which he said was beautiful but not agronomically strong, the bulk of the farm's seed came from conventional sources.

"Why is that?" Dillon wondered. "Where’s the organic seed?"

"So I got kind of obsessed, as I do, about the concept that you breed for the environment of intended use, and you breed for the management system of intended use," he said. "Organic environments and organic management systems were different."

That line of inquiry sent him up to Port Townsend, Washington, to the headquarters of Abundant Life, where he volunteered almost full time, eventually landing a spot on their board of directors. Having lost its executive director, the board asked Dillon to take the position as interim director, which led to his accepting the position of executive director.

And that's when the fire hit. A story in the Capital Press from August 8, 2003, summarized the damage:

"An early Monday morning fire in Port Townsend, Washington, that destroyed a landmark building, home to the oldest grocery store in the state, also destroyed Abundant Life Seed Foundation’s office, its extensive library and thousands of its seeds—hundreds of which were one-of-a-kind varieties. Matthew Dillon, executive director of the foundation, describes it as the loss of 29 years of collecting and stewarding germ plasm."

Reflecting on the effect of the devastating loss almost 15 years later, Dillon is sanguine.

At Wild Garden Seed in Philomath.

"By that time I’d met [Dr. John] Navazio and [Wild Garden Seed's Frank] Morton," he said. "All these guys who were saying, yeah, heirlooms are great and everything, but we can have the best heirlooms and we can start breeding in disease resistance and making these crops more workhorses and more robust. And that just intrigued me."

Dillon and the plant breeders and contract growers at Abundant Life had already started to improve some of the heirloom varieties, but their work wasn't without controversy, even within the organic community.

"We’d get angry letters, like 'how dare you not save the seed just as it is, how dare you make a cross or how dare you make a selection!'" he said, shaking his head. "It was intense.

"The whole thing was that heirlooms are not like these gifts handed down by the gods from Olympus to our grandparents. They evolved with those practices, intentionally or not."

Dillon feels that, in general, agricultural history hasn’t given credit to the farmer innovator, saying that farmers and gardeners have always riffed on what they find in their gardens and made selections based on their own preferences. He believes that's where we got the diversity of the heirloom and heritage seed that we find in catalogs and garden stores today.

"Our whole thing was the heirlooms of tomorrow," he said. "That’s all we were doing. In the long run, obviously, a lot of folks have embraced that and it’s become the focus of the alternative seed movement, going beyond heirlooms, still respecting conservation and the need for conservation."

Clif Bar Seed Matters initiative.

Out of the literal ashes of Abundant Life, Dillon founded the Organic Seed Alliance (OSA) with Navazio, a renowned plant geneticist, agroecologist, author and organic seed production specialist. With a belief that seed is part of our common cultural heritage—a living, natural resource that demands careful management to meet food needs now and into the future—the OSA's mission was to support the growing organic seed movement and advance what it calls "ethical seed solutions" to meet food and farming needs in a changing world.

Under Dillon's leadership the OSA educated thousands of farmers and other agricultural community members, conducted professional organic plant breeding and seed production research, and advocated for national policies strengthening organic seed systems.

But, as Dillon said, "I'm not a manager, I'm a start-up guy." Once the OSA was humming along with great people like Navazio, Micaela Colley, Kiki Hubbard and others in place, he said, "I was like, I’m done. I’m ready for something new."

In the field.

That new, shiny thing came in the unexpected form of a job with a candy bar—or what these days is called an "energy bar"—company, Clif Bar. After leaving OSA, Dillon did some consulting, and the Clif Bar Family Foundation was one of his first clients. He found it intriguing because, though only about 70 percent of the ingredients in Clif Bar products were organic, its founders, Gary Erickson and Kit Crawford, wanted to figure out how to get more organics into the system, which meant scaling up the growing organic industry, starting with seed.

"I would tell them things like, the organic movement needs to stop marketing ourselves as being grandma and grandpa’s farm and going back a hundred years," he said. "We’re not going back. We’re using the best scientific principles and practices for our production system to figure out how to move our production system forward. To do that you have to give the farmers better tools, you have to understand cover cropping better, you have to understand soil management better, there’s all of this investment you need to make."

Rather than taking the tack of much of the organic movement, like making investments in fighting GMOs and GMO labeling, Dillon's experience told him that not enough investment was being made in agricultural research. His mission from that point on was clear. "Let’s start with seed," he said. "Let’s focus on a seed initiative that improves organic seed, and then let’s see where we can go from there."

He began his work at the foundation in 2009 by founding the company's Seed Matters initiative, with a mission to improve the viability and availability of organic seed to provide more nutritious and productive crops. It would do this by conserving crop genetic diversity, promoting farmers’ roles as seed innovators and stewards, and by reinvigorating public seed research and education. It meant working with farmers, educators, researchers, nonprofits, public universities, community gardeners and seed advocates, as well as establishing graduate fellowships for students to enter the field of organic plant breeding.

A chance to move over to the company and effect what he perceives of as systemic change has placed Dillon in a critical role, as Clif Bar's Director of Agricultural Policy and Programs. For Clif Bar, he said, it was a question of looking at their agricultural supply chain, then figuring out how to make investments that will be good for their farmers but also be good for the company.

Again, for Dillon it goes back to his upbringing in the Midwest in the 1970s.

"What I love about [Clif Bar] is, you hear about companies that are triple bottom lines; Clif Bar was this five bottom line," he said. "They have people, planet, community, business and brands, and agriculture they put under community aspiration, and to me that was really cool.

"As a kid growing up in a rural community, I’d seen the farm crisis in Nebraska in the late 70s—farmers' suicides, consolidation. All of that was alive and crushingly apparent in my community. I was watching people lose farms, family members and friends losing farms in the late seventies and early eighties. So, to me, it was the idea that big ag comes in and extracts value out of communities. It’s systemic."

While Dillon openly admits that Clif Bar is far from perfect, he said that they know they have work to do.

"Because the question of any food company should be, how do our decisions either add value to communities, make communities more robust and healthy and resilient, or how do they detract from that?" he said.

Photo of Dillon at Wild Garden Seed by Shawn Linehan.

Farm Bulletin: The Boutard Manifesto, Pt. 1

I know, I know, it's the holiday season and no one wants to think about politics. Nonetheless, the machinery of politics and the machinations of corporations churn relentlessly. If you don't have time to read this right now, fine, but bookmark it for later when you do, because this is terrifically important information about the future of our state's agriculture and our local food system. (BTW, you can tell how important it is when you hear contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm quoting scripture.)

This autumn's special session of the Oregon Legislature was called to deal with urgent budget problems. Unfortunately, the legislature also passed SB 633, a bill that blocks local communities from regulating genetically engineered (GE) crops—the same bill that had been defeated earlier in the regular session (pdf of full text here). It stuck out like a sore thumb and garnered a measure of national attention. Its sole purpose was to sweeten the budget deal for the Republicans. It was a disturbing indicator of how powerful the biotechnology industry is, even in a state where GE crops play a minor to trivial economic role. As a general matter, we have a deep ambivalence toward local governments regulating agriculture as the laws have often been directed against organic gardeners and farmers. Ironically, even when such laws are prohibited, such as in the case of SB 633, it is still skewed against organic growers. The old heads we lose, tails you win game.

Anthony with his flint corn.

Plants that cross pollinate, whether by wind or insects, are vulnerable to contamination by nearby plantings of GE crops of the same type. Last Saturday, at the suggestion of Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed, a reporter contacted us regarding Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack touting the idea of "coexistence" between organic growers and the biotechnology sector. The USDA is in the comment period for rule-making on coexistence, another indicator of the industry's influence. After the market on Sunday, we sent the reporter this quickly drafted response, reedited a bit for clarity.

* * *

When we hear people use the word "coexistence," we hear the language of the Prophet Isaiah 11:26: "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat …" In life on earth wolves eat sheep and leopards eat goats, and quite happily, at least from the predator's perspective. We agree with Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seeds, the faith-based approach to controlling genetic trespass, cynically named coexistence, isn't reassuring unless the predator is caged, or defanged and declawed.

Bees can carry pollen for miles.

Parts of Oregon have a legal and social structure called "open range." Cattle are allowed to roam without fences and cow hands round them up in the autumn when it comes time to sell them. If you don't want livestock on your property, you have to put up a fence. Ownership is determined by the branding iron not the location of the beast. When you travel in the eastern parts of the state, highway signs advise you that there may be cattle in the road. You hit one, you have to compensate the owner for the dead or injured animal. In the more densely populated areas, that doesn't work; livestock must be fenced.

Up to now, the genetically engineered crops have had their grand romp across the nation with little resistance. Millions of acres in GE corn and soybeans cover the midsection of the U.S. It is the equivalent of open range; the pollen from these crops and the traits it carries can range freely. If your crop acquires a GE trait, even passively because the pollen lands on your crop, you have to pay the company that owns the trait if you want to use that seed. Yes, it is outrageous, and it is the law upheld by the Supreme Court.

Ayers Creek flint corn.

In the Willamette Valley and Rogue Valley with their small area and dense pattern of cropping, open range rules for GE crops are economically destructive to certain sectors of agriculture, and not just the organic growers, also specialty seed growers and crops grown for the export markets. Those agricultural sectors are well established in the state. Oregon is fifth in the nation in terms of number of certified organic farms, and one of the top seed-producing regions in the world. We need the equivalent of a fenced pasture here, in other words, keep your modified genes on your own land.

The inane argument that modified genes are legal doesn't cut it. Cattle and sheep are legal but the state does not sanction our neighbor's sheep trespassing on our land and destroying the value of our crops. In our part of the state, livestock must be fenced, and if one wanders in the road and we hit it or it damages our crops, the owner is liable for damage to our property. Drift from a legal pesticide onto a neighboring farm is likewise trespass if it causes economic damage, even if it is applied according to the label. Unfortunately, in the case of genetic trespass, neither the federal nor the state governments have shown leadership or concern for growers who are put at economic risk.

Table beets.

The next step of the argument is the foundering, hand-waving assertion that pollen is everywhere and no one can control it. This is wrong on its face. Almost every plant species has a mechanism for excluding foreign pollen when it lands on the stigma. That is why you can't cross lettuce with a tomato in classic breeding methodology. If the patent office hadn't granted utility patents on traits in established crops, we doubt we would be at this contentious moment. The industry would have found a way to protect their proprietary traits by preventing their replication in non-GE crops, utilizing one of the many exclusion mechanisms found in nature or maternal inheritance (no modified genes in the pollen). The EPA could have required that pollen from a modified plant be unrecognizable to plants in the same species as a condition of approval. With patent protection, the large corporations exploit the court system instead. The owners of the patent have no incentive to corral their traits, so local governments have no choice but to step into the breach using what authority they can reasonably muster.

Teosinte, ancestor of modern corn.

For every economic crop that is genetically modified, the approving authorities should require that its pollen is unrecognizable to the crop so modified, or that plant is sterile. For example, GE beet pollen should not germinate on non-GE beets. There are many foreign gene exclusion models that occur in nature. Some strains of popcorn have a single gene, GAS, that stops the germination of the pollen tube if is from a different class of corn, and prevents pollination. Some organic seed producers have incorporated this gene into their lines, using classic breeding techniques. In fact, domesticated corn cannot pollinate the wild corn plant, teosinte, which has a similar exclusion mechanism. The industry could also use traits that lead to sterile hybrids.

Just as with fencing livestock in the valley, that burden should fall to the entity profiting from the wandering genes. The companies producing GE seed have the tools and expertise at their disposal to produce seed lines that would not pollute non-GE seed lines with their pollen. But they are not going to do it if they don't have to.

As Frank Morton noted, we produce a great deal of seed on our farm. If our neighbors upwind of us decided to grow GE corn, for example, we would lose that crop and a substantial chunk of income. We have been working on our seed lines for twelve years, adapting them to the climate and soil conditions on our farm. It is incredible corn and if you are in Portland, visit Pine State Biscuits and try their grits. We grow that corn.

Photo of teosinte from Wikipedia.

Garden 2013: The Greens of Summer

Consider the source: Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed has been breeding and selecting lettuce and salad greens for decades on his farm near Philomath. He and his wife, Karen, were some of the original suppliers for Genoa back when it was one of the few restaurants in town featuring seasonal produce from local suppliers.

Cathy Whims, then its chef, remembers the packages that would arrive from the Mortons. "It was the most extraordinary salad, the likes of which I have not seen ever again," she said.

"The salad would come in bags of about eight servings per bag," she said. "The bags would be lined with this beautiful muslin cloth and stamped Wild Salad Mix. There would be layers of 20 different greens that would be stunning, wrapped up like a Parisian chocolate box."

Also inside the bags there would be a handwritten key to the varieties of lettuces and greens, along with pictures of the children and of the various lettuces in the fields. The key would be posted in the kitchen so the staff could check it if guests had questions about their salad greens. The photos were posted there, too, and Whims remembers, "We all felt like we were part of this family we'd never met."

This spring, after I experienced a dismal failure of an initial planting of lettuce seeds from another company (which, admittedly, might have been the result of extremely hot weather right after planting), Carol Boutard shared some of Frank's seeds that she and Anthony planted at Ayers Creek Farm. Those seeds, developed for the climate of the Northwest, have performed stunningly in my garden this year (top photo).

While you won't find packets of Wild Garden Seed in stores in the Portland area, you can be sure that next year I'll get my order in early on their website, and look forward to another great harvest next summer.

Read the profile of Frank Morton that I wrote for Edible Portland.

Garden 2013: Modest Beginnings

The garden this year is off to a slow start, mostly due to some unseasonably hot weather in May followed by temperatures that dipped down into the 40s at night. When the lettuces I planted declined to show themselves after a couple of cold nights, I was feeling a little hapless until some of my greener-thumbed acquaintances mentioned they'd had trouble with germination in their gardens from the chilly nights.

Peas emerging.

After a certain amount of commiserating, I replanted the bare spots with lettuces developed by Frank Morton at Wild Garden Seed in Philomath (near Corvallis), whose excruciatingly beautiful varieties are on regular display at the Gathering Together Farm stands at local farmers' markets. Joining them were radishes like those above, which had no trouble popping out of the soil quickly, making them such a joy to grow. I'll be using their greens in pestos, soups and pastas, and chopping the peppery red roots into salads and sprinkling in tacos.

The tomatoes this year were swathed in their protective jackets of water until a week ago, and they're anxiously waiting for some sunny days to really take off. Aside from that, there are pole beans, sugar snap peas, carrots and basil beginning to poke their heads out of the dirt. It all gives me hope for the days, hopefully some of them sunny, to come.

Canola Controversy: ODA Caves to Canola

One of Oregon's premier organic seed breeders, Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed in Philomath, has been a tireless activist on behalf of agricultural integrity in the Willamette Valley. He and other stakeholders successfully sued and won a case again Monsanto over planting genetically modified sugar beets in the valley. He is currently advocating on behalf of Oregon's critical specialty seed industry, which is threatened by the Oregon Dept. of Agriculture's (ODA) recent unilateral decision to allow canola to be grown here.

On the occasion of ODA accomplishing what it has fought hard to do—that is, allow the introduction of rapeseed production to the Willamette Valley without providing a reason to depart from its previously long-held position that growing rapeseed/canola is incompatible with growing specialty seed—I leave us with this paragraph from the 2007 Crop Production Science in Horticulture publication #14, Vegetable Brassicas And Related Crucifers, by GR Dixon from the School of Biological Sciences, Reading, UK.

Canola field in Boardman.

"Recently in Europe and parts of Asia, greater production of agricultural oilseed brassicas (mainly B. napus) [rapeseed] has increased the incidence of some Brassica pests and pathogens on horticultural crops (Lamb, 1989). This situation is exacerbated as the economic threshold for damage caused by pests and pathogens on oilseed rape is higher than for horticultural brassicas, and therefore less control is used. Consequently, large pest or pathogen populations can develop in oilseed rape in the absence of control and then move en masse on to horticultural crops with devastating consequences. Overwintering oilseed rape (B. napus) provides a substantial 'green bridge' for light leaf spot (P. brassicae) and in consequence it is the major foliar disease of that crop. In turn, rape provides a reservoir of infection that transfers on to vegetable brassicas and can cause appreciable losses of quality to leafy types." p. 194.

Canola blossom.

So indeed, ODA has accomplished a make-work reversal of its own rule regarding rapeseed canola--it has made work for ODA, it has created work for specialty seed companies as they nozzle-up their perimeter defenses, it has made work for fresh market and organic vegetable producers as everyone tries to play self defense against bigger problems than we had before and, yeah, maybe a half dozen farmers will get to start playing with canola, once they go through a new ODA canola permit maze. Worst of all, this is going to create farm neighbor disputes that never existed before.

There is now a Bill before the Legislature that will do, very simply, what we could not do through years and years of argument with the ODA. Keep canola production out of this one precious valley. I ask all of you to please contact your legislators regarding this issue. Please share the concern you have for Oregon's specialty seed and quality vegetable farmers, and the threat to our reputation as a world class place to grow seeds.

Make your concerns known: You can find your legislator here and get his or her contact information. You can also e-mail Rep. Brad Witt (D), the new Chair of the House Agriculture Committee, with your concerns and tell him to make sure the Bill makes it to the floor for a vote.

Suggested points to cover include:

• Why did the ODA reverse it's reasoning as regards coexistence of rapeseed/canola and specialty seeds?
• Is there any new information that would justify this change in perspective?
• Is this decision a source of risk for Willamette Valley seed and vegetable growers?
• Why Not?
• Doesn't there seem to be some risk involved?  Who bears that risk?

For more information on canola and the issues surrounding its production in the Willamette Valley, read the rest of the series, starting with "Oily Process: Canola Needs Closer Look" (links to other posts in the series at bottom).

Canola Controversy Heats Up

One of the most impressive and passionate people I've ever interviewed was Frank Morton, a nationally recognized seed breeder and owner of Wild Garden Seed in the heart of the Willamette Valley. In a column in today's Oregonian he discusses why the ODA's unilateral decision to allow cultivation of canola in the valley is a "nightmare."

Oregon's Department of Agriculture has made good on its determination to shrink the Willamette Valley canola control district, despite ongoing objections from Willamette Valley specialty seed growers, seed companies, clover growers and the state Clover Commission, fresh-market vegetable producers, organic growers and Oregon Tilth, the state's largest certifier of organic crops. Each group has its own specific objections to canola. These concerns include genetic cross-contamination of specialty brassica seeds, increased insect and disease problems, and weed issues that in turn contaminate clover, grass and vegetable seeds with canola seed that cannot be sorted out from other seed. Organic farmers and certifiers are doubly concerned about the introduction of genetically modified canola, as this opens up multiple routes for contamination of organic foods through seed, animal feed and pasturage.

This ODA decision is a turnaround to its 2009 determination that canola production represents a substantial risk to the specialty seed industry in the Willamette Valley, an industry worth more than $32 million with a global reach. After a three-year study involving Oregon State University scientists and specialists in agronomy, weeds, insects, diseases and genetic drift, ODA Director Katy Coba ordered that a protected zone be established to keep canola production out of the area traditionally covered by the Willamette Valley Specialty Seed Association's seed isolation maps and associated rules. The 2009 rule contained a clause requiring the agency to review the rule at the end of 2012.

Instead, in spring of 2012 the ODA notified the specialty seed industry that it wished to reconvene the canola advisory committee and hoped to find opportunities for Willamette Valley growers to produce canola within the protected zone. Have any of the hazards of growing canola changed?

Read the rest of Morton's column, Canola growing area expands, introducing a seed nightmare to the Willamette Valley. Read the other posts in this series Oily Process: Canola Needs Closer Look, More on Canola: Stakeholders File Suit, A Voice from the Field, Despite Decision, It's Not Over, ODA Caves to Canola, Write Right Now, Seeding Change and Legislature Passes Ban.

Top photo by Kathy Freeborn Hadley for the Oregonian.

Farm Bulletin: The Vegetables of Vinegar & Salt, Pt. 2

Just when I start thinking we 21st Century types are soooooo smart, someone digs up some old dude who had it so much more together than we do. One such old dude is John Evelyn, who was all over a diet of vegetables about, oh, 300-plus years ago. Contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm has been getting to know Mr. Evelyn of late, and shares his discoveries with us. Read Part One here.

Before Karen and Frank Morton veered into the seed business, their Wild Garden Seed salad greens were cherished by Portland restaurants. We love hearing Cathy Whims [when she was the chef at Genoa in the late 90s] describe the careful attention the Mortons paid to preparing the ever-changing mixture of greens, every leaf perfect, delivered in a damp muslin bag. Evelyn (above, by Robert Walker) demanded the same attention for his mixture; "let your herby ingredients be exquisitely cull'd and cleans'd of all worm-eaten, slimy, canker'd, dry, spotted or in any ways vitiated leaves." He specifies spring water for washing and, after draining, swinging them gently in a coarse napkin to draw off excess moisture.

The carefully gathered greens need the finest couture de cuisine. For oil in the dressing, he commends omphacine pressed from olives native to the Republic of Lucca, now a province of Italy and still producing superb olives. Olive oil had a range of uses and grades, including lighting and lubrication, as well as food. Omphacine is the first pressing of green olives, what we call, implausibly, "extra virgin" today. For the contrasting acid, the best wine vinegar is specified, though lemon and the tart juice squeezed from verjus grapes also meet his approval. If that special grape type is not available, the freshly squeezed juice from other small, unripe grapes will do. For salt, he favors the "brightest bay grey-salt," what is sold today as fleur de sel and sel gris. The seasonings are English mustard, preferably from Tewksberry, and pepper (black or white). The yolk of a freshly laid egg, boiled moderately hard, is allowed as desired.

He finishes up with the tools needed. These include a willow or osier basket with partitions to separate the various salad greens as they are collected so the correct proportions are used, a silver knife to trim them, and a porcelain or Delft-ware bowl for serving. The iron knife, pewter and silver bowls in use at the time would leave the salad with an unpleasant metallic flavor. In his attention to detail and proportion in preparing and presenting his salad, Evelyn has no rival even among the most fussy modern chefs and gardeners.

The latter half of "Acetaria" deals with seasonality and health, and what we refer to as "industrial food" today. Evelyn inveighs against the flaccid vegetables raised in urban hotbeds prepared from over-rich stable muck and other filth collected from the city streets, favoring instead the healthy vegetables grown in the rich humus of the countryside and hedgerows. He also disparages "forwarding," pushing the vegetable and fruit growth outside of their natural seasons and into inferior quality. He promotes the merits of a diet of vegetables.

Evelyn was not a vegetarian per se; he was an ardent lover of vegetables and a southern diet, what we refer to as the Mediterranean diet. He advocated eating mostly plants, and was appalled by the slaughter methods in London's abattoirs, much in the same spirit as Michael Pollan pushes us to think about our food's origin and quality. However, he was not wantonly dogmatic, so he leaves the question of whether salad should come before or after the savory dishes convincingly explored and learnedly unresolved, as it still is more than three centuries later.   

In addition to the original 1699 edition, "Acetaria" has been reprinted at least four times. In 1934, the Women's Auxiliary of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden published the complete work in an edition of 1,000 copies, nicely bound with hand cut signatures. This version is available electronically on Gutenberg. Still Point Press of Dallas, Texas published a numbered edition of 1,000 on high quality French paper (1985) along with a few illustrations, bound with a leather spine. Unfortunately, this handsome edition leaves out the Greek and Latin passages and the margin notes, and the artsy illustrations have no botanical merit. A 1996 version of "Acetaria," published by Prospect Books, now in paperback (2005), retains the whole text and translates the Greek passages, a more satisfactory approach. Finally, The Grand Salad (Peacock Vane, Isle of Wight, 1984) is a book based on passages from "Acetaria." Sadly, it is hard to read as it is handwritten in a calligraphic style. The work also has egregious deletions and some additional dry text that adds nothing to Evelyn's original, despite its good intentions.

Read The Vegetables of Vinegar & Salt, Part One.

Seeds of Life: David vs. Goliath

This interview with organic seed grower Frank Morton of Wild Garden Seed in Philomath was done before the landmark decision in favor of the organic growers who sued the USDA over the deregulation of Monsanto's Roundup Ready sugar beet seeds. It's a great explanation of the suit (based on a previous court ruling on GMO alfalfa), and a portrait of someone I consider a state treasure.

Getting Schooled

"Cucurbits were bottle-necked a long time ago."*

- John Navazio, senior plant breeder, Organic Seed Alliance

There were moments during last week's Organicology conference, as when I heard the comment above, that I felt like I was seriously in over my head. And not just because there were seminars titled "Fertilizers and Amendments for Organic Farming: Making Sustainable Choices" and "Sustainable Business Performance Measurement Tools and Reporting."

Fortunately for me, there were other topics available, too, on organic seed production (with seed guy and rabble-rouser Frank Morton, left) and the farmer-chef connection (with the irrepressible A. Boutard).

But it was definitely targeted to those seriously committed to organic and sustainable practices, with the initial keynote from Claire Hope Cummings, author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds.

The second was from writer and journalist Paul Roberts (right), whose book The End of Food says that, because living systems can't be industrialized or commodified, our current food system is doomed to fail. And I loved it when he tweaked this very committed crowd when he stated that there has to be room to acknowledge those who may not be completely organic in their practices but are moving away from conventional methods, like the farmer who has reduced his use of pesticides and fertilizers by 70%. You could have heard a pin drop!

The final word was left to Vandana Shiva (top and left), a leader in the struggle for global justice and author of Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, as she laid out the case against the corporatization and privatization of our genetic heritage as it is expressed through seeds and culture. She believes that the ability of farmers to save their own seed is absolutely necessary for local, sustainable economies to be nurtured. And you should have seen some of the grown men crowding around after her talk and getting their "fan boy" pictures taken with her!

After three days, all I can say is that there are some truly exciting people on both sides of the plow, the pen and the plate, and I hope to be letting you know more about them in the near future. In the meantime, I'll pass on a few of my favorite bits from my notes:

• At breakfast the first day, I knew it was a different sort of gathering when I saw hot maple amaranth and a tofu scramble on the steam table.
• Spinach plants mature and can bolt quickly because of daylight, not heat (though heat can facilitate the process)
• Flowering plants arrived much later than other types (like ferns) but evolved much more quickly because of their ability to produce seeds
• The number of silks on an ear of corn is equal to the number of kernels on that ear, and the silk is the stamen of the plant, (i.e. a hollow tube that carries pollen)
• Seed companies grow little or none of their own seed, though they may do trialing (or testing) of the seeds they sell
• All canola labeled "non-GMO" is contaminated with genetically modified organisms
• According to Ken Roseboro of the Non-GMO Project in Eugene, "92% of soybeans, 73% of corn and 87% of cotton is GMO"
• The key to sustainability is developing relationships. With food, that means seed growers building connections with farmers, who connect with food producers and consumers who then connect to their larger communities and the world.

Too pie-in-the-sky? If you believe these folks, not if we take it one decision at a time, one day at a time.

* "Cucurbitaceae is a plant family commonly known as melons, gourds or cucurbits and includes crops like cucumbers, squashes (including pumpkins), luffas, melons and watermelons. The family is predominantly distributed around the tropics, where those with edible fruits were amongst the earliest cultivated plants in both the Old and New Worlds." - Wikipedia

Seeding the Future

"I'm going to give you a generalized genetic breeding program for the future of agriculture. Step one: Save seeds from your favorite free-living plants. Step two: Resow those seeds in a seed bed. Step three: Keep the seeds from your most productive plants. Step four: Resow those seeds in a seed bed. Keep selecting for every change that increases yield and usability. If you repeat that process 400 times you can go from a big bushy grass to a primitive corn. You do it 400 more times, that primitive corn can move out from one teeny tiny little valley in Mexico and it can adapt from Chile to Minnesota, from sea level to 10,000 feet elevation. Just doing those four things."

- Frank Morton, Wild Garden Seed

You can read the profile of Frank that I wrote for Edible Portland magazine.

Photo by Karen Morton.