Seeds to save our food heritage (YES!)

Read at :

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/why-the-most-powerful-thing-in-the-world-is-a-seed?utm_source=wkly20130405&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mrQuillen

Why the Most Powerful Thing in the World Is a Seed

“The Seed Underground” is a love letter to the quiet revolutionaries who are saving our food heritage.

by Abby Quillen

Janisse Ray celebrates the local, organic food movement but fears we’re forgetting something elemental: the seeds. According to Ray, what is happening with our seeds is not pretty. Ninety-four percent of vintage open-pollinated fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished over the last century.

Ray begins The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by explaining how we lost our seeds. Feeding ourselves has always been a burden for humans, she explains. “So when somebody came along and said, ‘I’ll do that cultivating for you. I’ll save the seeds. You do something else,’ most of us jumped at the chance to be free.”

But, according to Ray, when the dwindling number of farmers who stayed on the land gave up on saving seeds and embraced hybridization, genetically modified organisms, and seed patents in order to make money, we became slaves to multinational corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, which now control our food supply.

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