Midwinter mix-up

Is it suppertime already? As the year winds down and the days grow shorter, I’m having trouble adjusting. The positive side of this seasonal shift is that there will be more time for cooking. In the summer, when everyone’s doing stuff outside, our main meal of the day sometimes gets pushed to 10 p.m. That may be fashionable in Madrid, but it’s not conducive to maintaining the rhythms of family life and work schedules – nor to good digestion and restful sleep (if health professionals are to be believed). When darkness comes at 4:30, outdoor productivity may be curtailed, but there’s a better chance that food prep will get underway in a timely fashion.

As the days get colder, we’re also more inclined to fire up the oven – and once the oven’s hot, you may as well throw together a crisp or a cobbler for dessert. (I like to put a fistful of frozen elderberries or black currants on top of the apples, for a little zing.) For the main course, I’m inclined to cram a great quantity of vegetables into the roasting pan with the chicken. (It’s the culinary equivalent of carpooling.) The highly flavourful leftovers never go to waste. In addition to spuds, onions, garlic, squash, carrots, and parsnips, I recently tried adding florets of cauliflower. (I picked up one that was discounted, and shaved the brown parts off. Don’t tell anyone.) A couple days after this one-pot feast, I took all the extra roasted vegetables out of the fridge and ran them through the blender with some stock and a couple cups of milk, which made a killer soup.

It occurred to me that a purée of any description may have been considered a luxury or a novelty in pre-industrial times, because it would have been pretty labour-intensive. Perhaps, in this season of reflection and celebration, we should take a moment to remember Stephen Poplawski, who is widely credited as the inventor of the electric blender. In fact, we could raise a smoothie to the (approximate) centenary of this mechanical marvel.

Born in Poland in 1885, Poplawski came to the U.S. with his parents at the age of nine, amid a wave of immigration that helped meet burgeoning labour demand in Racine, Wisconsin – a factory town on the shores of Lake Michigan. He founded his own tool company in 1918, and the next year he was hired by Arnold Electric Co. to develop a mixer for restaurant use. (Racine was the headquarters of Horlicks, the company that popularized malted milk – and in the prohibition era, malt shops were seen as a wholesome alternative to establishments that served malt beverages of the intoxicating type.) Poplawski filed several patents for such mixers, then went out on his own to develop a home kitchen version, which became known as the Osterizer after he sold his business to the John Oster Manufacturing Co. The product was wildly successful, though Julia Child still preferred her food mill, declaring, “There is something un-French and monotonous about the way a blender reduces soup to universal baby pap.” Go figure.

DIVERSITY AND RESILIENCE

In addition to being a time for preparing and enjoying comfort food – both substantial and smooth – winter is the time when farmers and gardeners alike look back on the past growing season, and consider what to plant in the year to come. We are well served by seed companies in this region, and many of us take great pleasure in perusing their catalogues, ogling the photos and reading the enticing descriptions of new offerings or standby favourites. Globally, however, there are legitimate concerns about the availability, accessibility, and sustainability of seed supplies.

In November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published guidelines aimed at conserving diversity in crop genetics. The resource deemed to be in need of protection is the vast range of “farmers’ varieties,” or “landraces,” which are adapted to local growing conditions and practices. Farmers’ selection and exchange of these seeds “maintains a reservoir of continuously evolving genetic variability,” says the FAO. The resulting crops may not match the yields of varieties developed through formal plant breeding, but they “often have preferred agronomic or culinary qualities, or relate to locally important cultural values, and make an important contribution to food and nutrition security, rural livelihoods, coping with climate change, and even human survival.”

Bukar Tijani, assistant director-general of the FAO’s Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department, warns that a great many of these landraces are being lost as growers switch to a narrower range of crops and varieties. In the face of climate change, global food systems “must become resilient to shocks,” he says. “The more diverse a crop production system is, including within and among species, the more unlikely that it would be affected uniformly by biotic and abiotic stresses.”

The new voluntary guidelines – intended as a template for national governments acting to support farmers’ use and conservation of landraces – were launched in conjunction with negotiations surrounding revisions to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture – taking place in Rome as this issue of Rural Delivery was going to press. These negotiations were widely seen as a showdown between wealthy countries and developing nations, which tend to have different views of plant genetics.

The treaty, which came into effect in 2004, calls for the shared use of genetic material from 64 key crops, which account for about 80 percent of global food consumption. This creates a vast pool of genetic material, from gene banks around the world, available for use by scientific institutions and private-sector plant breeders – on the condition that they either share any new developments resulting from this work, or pay a percentage of the profits into the Global Crop Diversity Trust. This fund supports conservation and development of plant genetics resources, to help farmers, especially those in the developing world, adapt to climate change.

A dispute has arisen, however, because the genetic sequencing of plants has become technically and economically feasible, and “digital sequence information” (DSI) can now be used to identify specific traits. This means the desired strands of DNA can be produced in a “gene foundry,” and then introduced into a plant through gene editing technology. For breeding purposes, the biological form of the trait may no longer be needed, because it exists as data. Developing countries, which are home to many of the plants in question, want the scope of the treaty expanded to include DSI. Wealthy countries, which have a bigger stake in commercial crop breeding and seed production – including Canada, the U.S., Australia, Germany, and Japan – have rejected this proposal.

Groups representing small farmers have come out swinging, accusing Canada and the other rich countries of seeking to undermine the treaty – under which millions of samples of genetic material have already been shared. “The major seed companies believe that they no longer need the physical seeds pooled by the treaty,” reads a statement from La Via Campesina, a coalition of 182 peasant organizations in 81 countries. “It is true that, in recent years, most of their financial profits have shifted from the market for physical seeds to the market for dematerialized information and patents that confiscate them. But this virtual market is leading us to disaster. Genetic technologies are dramatically accelerating the erosion of biodiversity and thus threatening our future.”

Among affluent consumers in the West, discussions about genetic engineering often hinge on speculation about potential adverse human health effects directly related to the consumption of GM food crops. This actually distracts us from the more critical issue, which is seed sovereignty. Seed companies should, of course, be allowed to continue to make money from producing and selling seeds, but we should be wary of how intellectual property rights are applied in this sector, where we are seeing consolidation of control over plant genetics.

In Canada, large industry players have pushed for a scheme requiring farmers to pay royalties on the seeds they save, but farmers are pushing back. Unlike novel designs for small kitchen appliances, the genetic diversity that exists in agricultural crops is part of humankind’s shared heritage, resulting from centuries of on-farm production and selection. In this period of dormancy – in this season of fellowship and good will – we should try to articulate what we really believe about privatization of the commons. In the year to come, we should demand stronger leadership and higher principles on the part of our government. DL