Forgotten foods

Indian pearl, sweet chocolate and elephant trunk - that’s what some of the salads and pepper varieties at Berlin’s famous urban gardening spot “Prinzessinnengarten” are called. They are planted in plastic containers packed tightly together on a wooden table under a canopy of trees.

A banner reads “exchange market.” Here, visitors can swap plants and gardening tips. A bit further at another table, gardening enthusiasts learn how to sort out individual seedlings and fashion a DIY container from a piece of newspaper, putting in some earth, making a hole, carefully laying down the sapling and patting down the earth.

Once a year, the organization Social Seeds organizes this exchange platform for plants and seeds. “Our aim is to preserve the diversity of plants in Berlin’s gardens,” Alexander Becker from Social Seeds says.

The group also wants to preserve knowledge of old, near-extinct varieties of fruits and vegetables by providing information about where the seeds can be bought, what to consider during planting and growth and by drawing attention to forgotten varieties with its display vegetable patches featuring New Zealand summer spinach or amaranth.

The organization seems to have struck a chord as ever more people join its network. “Interest in old varieties of vegetables has literally exploded in the last four to five years,” Becker says.

Hybrids dominate market

Despite the growing interest, the market is still dominated by hybrid varieties produced by large seed corporations. For instance, a typical gardening center in Germany today only sells the seeds of a few standard tomato varieties despite the fact that there are 10,000 varieties around the world.

Only a few seed initiatives in Germany offer some of the others on a non-commercial basis. That’s because laws don’t allow trade in varieties that have not been officially approved.

The relentless march of hybrid varieties is largely thanks to industrial agriculture. Modern varieties are better than old ones in many ways - they’re often more resistant to pests, are easier to transport and leader to higher yields.

Stringy beans, small tubers and thin peels often don’t look very appealing and thus don’t lend themselves to selling on a large scale. That explains why hybrids have gradually knocked off older varieties from supermarket shelves.

The trend isn’t just confined to Europe. In Mexico, for instance, a country considered the cradle of corn cultivation and home to over 60 traditional varieties, cheaper imports from the US are threatening diversity.

Growing awareness about lost food

Michael Hermann from the organization "Crops for the Future," which champions the use of forgotten varieties of fruits and vegetables, says a change in lifestyles in some parts of the world has also led people to turn their backs on older varieties. “A part of the diversity is lost when people migrate from the countryside into the cities and stop eating traditional foods.”

But there’s a growing countermovement in some places. For example, Peruvian gourmet cook Gastón Acurio has helped popularize his country’s traditional cuisine with its trademark ingredients.

Older varieties are also perfect for direct marketing by regional companies and lend themselves to home garden plots or vegetable patches. Hybrid varieties have also come under fire in recent years with critics saying they’re problematic to grow with the result that farmers need to constantly buy new seeds and thus rely on seed companies.

There’s also a growing awareness among consumers that the loss of older varieties is a blow to diversity. “There are mealy tomato varieties that are perfectly suited for preserves and then there are others that are well suited for salads and they can have a wide variety of taste - either sour or a bit sweeter,” agricultural scientist Gunilla Lissek-Wolf says.

'You can eat everything'

But it’s not just that the spectrum of varieties has shrunk. Entire species, that earlier used to be a part of everyday meals such as salsify, a herb, have simply disappeared from fields and gardens.

That’s why Gunilla Lissek-Wolf works for Social Seeds and the group VERN to preserve old, near-extinct plants. “We call it the preservation of genetic resources for the future because we simply don’t know what will come.”

Holding on to old varieties is also what community gardens such as the project “Himmelbeet” in northern Berlin do. The group set up a garden last year in a former wasteland between a sports field and high walls. Surrounded by tall trees, half the area is divided into an allotment garden and community area. Rows of high vegetable beds are planted in wooden crates. There’s a long waiting list for a vegetable box.

The garden is covered with many old plant varieties such as Spanish salad or strawberry spinach. Even medicinal herbs such as Glechoma hederacea (ground ivy) or alant (also known as scabwort) are grown here.

“We want to show that you can eat everything,” Anja Manzke, the gardener who oversees the project, says. “Many visitors who come here have never heard of anything like that.”