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By Root 848 0

of a pink tomato that his parents brought from Bavaria in the 1870s. Seeds are living units, not museum pieces; in jars on a shelf their viability declines with age. Diane and Kent thought it seemed wise to move seed collections into real gardens. Their idea has grown into a network of 8,000 members who grow, save, and exchange more than 11,000 varieties from their own gardening heritage, forming an extensive living collection. The Seed Savers’ Yearbook makes available to its members the seeds of about twice as many vegetable varieties as are offered by all U.S. and Canadian mail-order seed catalogs combined. Native Seeds/ SEARCH is a similar network focused on Native American crops; the North American Fruit Explorers promotes heirloom fruit and nut tree collections. Thanks to these and other devotees, the diversity of food crops is now on the rise in the United States.

The world’s largest and best known save-the-endangered-foods organization is Slow Food International. Founded in Italy in 1986, the organization states that its aim is “to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and life.” The group has 83,000 members in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, France, Japan, and Great Britain. The organization promotes gastronomic culture, conserves agricultural biodiversity and cultural identities tied to food production, and protects traditional foods that are at risk of extinction. Its Ark of Taste initiatives catalog and publicize forgotten foods—a Greek fava bean grown only on the island of Santorini, for instance, or the last indigenous breed of Irish cattle. Less than ten years after its launch, the Italian Ark has swelled to hold some five hundred products. A commission in the United States now catalogs uniquely American vegetable and animal varieties and products that are in danger of extinction, making the Ark of Taste a worldwide project.

You can’t save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They’re kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they’ll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations. Many foods placed on the Ark of Taste have made dramatic recoveries, thanks to the seed savers and epicurean desperadoes who defy the agents of gene control, tasting the forbidden fruits, and planting more.

If I could only save one of my seed packets from the deluge, the heirloom vegetable I’d probably grab is five-color silverbeet. It is not silver (silverbeet is Australian for Swiss chard), but has broad stems and leaf ribs vividly colored red, yellow, orange, white, or pink. Each plant has one stem color, but all five colors persist in a balanced mix in this beloved variety. It was the first seed variety I learned to save, and if in my dotage I end up in an old-folks’ home where they let me grow one vegetable in the yard, it will be this one. It starts early, produces for months, looks like a bouquet when you cut it, and is happily eaten by my kids. They swear the different colors taste different, and in younger days were known to have blindfolded color-taste contests. (What kids will do, when deprived of ready access to M&Ms.) One of the first recipes we invented as a family, which we call “eggs in a nest,” was inspired by the eggs from Lily’s first flock of hens and five-color chard from the garden.

Children are, of course, presumed to hate greens, so assiduously that a cartoon character with spinach-driven strength was invented to inspire them. I suspect it’s about the preparation. Even poor Popeye only gets miserably soppy-looking stuff out of a can. (Maybe sucking it in through his pipe gives it extra flavor.) The rule of greens is that they should be green, cooked with such a light touch that the leaf turns the color of the light that means