springing forward 49learned to breed varieties that held up in a boxcar, truck, or ship’s cargo
hold. Indestructible vegetables, that is to say: creations that still looked
decent after a road trip. Vegetable farmers had little choice but to grow
what the market demanded. In the latter half of the twentieth century
they gradually dropped from their repertoire thousands of fl avorful varie-
ties traditionally grown for the table, concentrating instead on the hand-
ful of new varieties purchased by transporters, restaurant chains, and
processed-food manufacturers. Modern U.S. consumers now get to taste
less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a cen-
tury ago. Those old- timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on
farms that specialize in direct sales—if they survive at all. Many heir-
looms have been lost entirely.
The same trend holds in other countries, wherever the infl uence of
industrial-scale agriculture holds sway. In Peru, the original home of pota-
toes, Andean farmers once grew some four thousand potato varieties,
each with its own name, flavor, and use, ranging in size from tiny to gigan-
tic and covering the color spectrum from indigo- purple to red, orange,
yellow, and white. Now, even in the regions of Peru least affected by the
modern market, only a few dozen potato varieties are widely grown. Other
indigenous crops elsewhere in the world have followed the same path,
with the narrowing down of corn and amaranth varieties in Central
America, squashes in North America, apples in Europe, and grains in the
Middle East. And it’s not just plant varieties but whole species that are
being lost. As recently as ten years ago farmers in India still grew count-
less indigenous oil crops, including sesame, linseed, and mustards; in
1998 all the small mills that processed these oils were ordered closed, the
same year a ban on imported soy oil was lifted. A million villages lost their
mills, ten million farmers lost their living, and GM soy found a vast new
market.
According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten
some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes,
three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species,
with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy,
and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the
endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops