Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [25]
Genetic modification (GM) takes the control even one step further from the farmer. Seed companies have made and sold hybrids since the 1920s (starting with the Hybrid Corn Company, now a subsidiary of DuPont), but GM is a newer process involving direct manipulation of genes in the laboratory. Freed from the limits of natural sex, the gene engineer may combine traits of creatures that aren’t on speaking terms in the natural world: animal or bacterial genes spliced into the chromosomes of plants, for example, and vice versa. The ultimate unnatural product of genetic engineering is a “terminator gene” that causes a crop to commit genetic suicide after one generation, just in case some maverick farmer might want to save seed from his expensive, patented crop, instead of purchasing it again from the company that makes it.
By contrast to both GM and hybridization, open-pollinated heirlooms are created the same way natural selection does it: by saving and reproducing specimens that show the best characteristics of their generation, thus gradually increasing those traits in the population. Once bred to a given quality, these varieties yield the same characteristics again when their seeds are saved and grown, year after year. Like sunshine, heirloom seeds are of little interest to capitalism if they can’t be patented or owned. They have, however, earned a cult following among people who grow or buy and eat them. Gardeners collect them like family jewels, and Whole Foods Market can’t refrain from poetry in its advertisement of heirlooms, claiming that the tomatoes in particular make a theatrical entrance in the summertime, “stealing the summer produce scene. Their charm is truly irresistible. Just the sound of the word ‘heirloom’ brings on a warm, snuggly, bespectacled grandmother knitting socks and baking pies kind of feeling.”
They’ve hired some whiz-bang writers down at Whole Foods, for sure, but the hyperbolic claims are based on a genuine difference. Even a child who dislikes tomatoes could likely tell the difference between a watery mass-market tomato and a grandmotherly (if not pie-baking) heirloom. Vegetables achieve historical status only if they deserve it. Farmers are a class of people not noted for sentimentality or piddling around. Seeds get saved down the generations for a reason, or for many, and in the case of vegetables one reason is always flavor. Heirlooms are the tangiest or sweetest tomatoes, the most fragrant melons, the eggplants without a trace of bitterness.
Most standard vegetable varieties sold in stores have been bred for uniform appearance, mechanized harvest, convenience of packing (e.g. square tomatoes), and a tolerance for hard travel. None of these can be mistaken, in practice, for actual flavor. Homegrown tomatoes are famously superior to their supermarket counterparts, but the disparity is just as great (in my experience) for melons, potatoes, asparagus, sweet corn, broccoli, carrots, certain onions, and the Japanese edible soybeans called edamame. I have looked for something to cull from my must-grow list on the basis of its being reasonably similar to the supermarket version. I have yet to find that vegetable.
How did supermarket vegetables lose their palatability, with so many people right there watching? The Case of the Murdered Flavor was a contract killing, as it turns out, and long-distance travel lies at the heart of the plot. The odd notion of transporting fragile produce dates back to the early twentieth century when a few entrepreneurs tried shipping lettuce and artichokes, iced down in boxcars, from California eastward over the mountains as