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Ancient Seeds
| Article
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20282 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
2,077 Words |
| Author
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Gregory McNamee
Gregory McNamee often travels in Mexico. He is the author of
The Return of Richard Nixon and six other books. |
On a wide bluff overlooking the Missouri River, a Lakota Indian farmer sows a handful of seeds in a bed of sandy, barren soil. In eleven weeks, tall rows of long-tasseled white corn will obscure his view of the surrounding Great Plains. The crop will be resistant to most of the diseases that affect his neighbors' plants, will have used far less water than theirs, and will have matured far sooner as well, binging him an early harvest and income in a normally money-short season.
In a California desert hamlet, a Mexican-American woman seasons a bubbling pot of chili con carne with a handful of chiltepine peppers, a condiment known to her great-grandmother but lost to later generations. Her fiery-hot chili will bring her praise at the Cinco de Mayo fiesta. And, as she has learned to her delight, the patch of chiltepines she has been raising in her kitchen garden allows her to sell to a nearby grocer small quantities of what is, after saffron, the second most costly spice grown today. Her five waist-high plants will pay several months' mortgage.
In a suburb of New York City--where, strangely enough, drought is now a problem--a retired schoolteacher thins long strands of black-eyed peas that she has grown in pots without adding a single drop of tapwater. The season's scanty rainfall has been sufficient to nourish these arid-lands legumes, whose seeds come from the desert highlands of the Sierra Madre of central Mexico. For almost no effort and a cash outlay of less than two dollars, she will have an abundance of dried peas, rich in protein, to last through the winter.
Preserving Ancient Diets
These are only a few of the stories that members of Native Seeds/SEARCH, an Arizona-based crop conservancy, can relate. For the better part of a decade, the organization has provided high-quality seeds to small-scale gardeners; it has been careful to select varieties that are immune to most pests and diseases, high in nutritional value, and demanding few of the resources--water, fertilizers, and time--that seem to be ever scarcer throughout the nation.
Native Seeds/SEARCH (the acronym stands for Southwest Endangered Arid-Lands Resources Clearinghouse) was founded in Tucson in 1983 as an outgrowth of the federally funded, national Meals for Millions program, which aimed in part to make rural and semirural communities nutritionally self-sufficient. When staff workers Gary Paul Nabhan, Barney Burns, Mahina Drees, and other volunteers discovered that
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