The New Art of Sustainable Food: Heirloom Seed

Sustainable food is finding its way into the Art market. As food is one of the main components to a developed culture, it is a logical extension of the international art house to follow the consumer trend of sustainability. Culture is developed around the daily practices of people and food, like language, is central to developing culture; it is our common cultural ground with regional variances that create the differences that make life interesting.

With a recent renewed interest in seed saving, seed banks have been seeing an increased demand for heirloom seeds as globalization poses a genuine threat to this integral part of cultural practice. London's The Independent article reports, "Some consumers seem driven by the desire to maintain traditional English strains in the face of increasing globalisation."

Heirloom varieties often are strains of fruits and vegetables that the commercial industry finds to be difficult to produce effectively and uniformly for a myriad of reasons. For example, in the case of tomatoes, many heirloom varieties are much more delicate and are quick to ripe once taken from the vine. They often grow in monstrous shapes that can hardly be defined as "round" all while sporting colorful jackets from the lemon-yellow Basinga to the blood-red Krim. With literally thousands of types of just one fruit, we can easily see how disparate the commercial market is from the natural world. The Sotheby's auction in the UK was more clearly focused on apples. Like tomatoes, there are literally hundreds of kinds of apples. Unlike tomatoes, the "seed" for apples is often in a graft, as technically, many very tasty apples are hybrids crossbred by the art of grafting.

The Independent quotes Joan Young of Brogdale Farm: "There is definitely a trend towards people planting more of the older varieties of fruit, particularly apples. We're getting more people asking for them ... The plants are used as a genetic bank, both to preserve rare varieties, and to provide materials for research into disease-resistant fruit that doesn't need chemical inputs to thrive ... It is looking forward and looking back, There are varieties in our collection that date back to the 1700s. People just want to keep them going. All we need to do is give them a graft and they can grow them themselves."

New York's event was held just a few days ago, and the New York Times claims that over $100,000 were raised which will "benefit the GrowNYC New Farmer Development Project, which identifies, educates and supports immigrants with agricultural experience to become local producers and establish farms in the region, and The Sylvia Center, a program that inspires and teaches children to eat well through hands-on experience at Katchkie Farm and in school and community centers all over New York City," according to Sotheby's mini website.

Sustainable food has never been so fashionable.

Photo credit: Sotheby's Art of Farming website