There is no despair in a seed. There’s only life, waiting for the right conditions-sun and water, warmth and soil-to be set free. Everyday, millions upon millions of seeds lift their two green wings.
At no time in our history have Americans been more obsessed with food. Options including those for local, sustainable, and organic food-seem limitless. And yet, our food supply is profoundly at risk. Farmers and gardeners a century ago had five times the possibilities of what to plant than farmers and gardeners do today; we are losing untold numbers of plant varieties to genetically modified industrial monocultures. In her latest work of literary nonfiction, award-winning author and activist Janisse Ray argues that if we are to secure the future of food, we first must understand where it all begins: the seed.
The Seed Underground is a journey to the frontier of seed-saving. It is driven by stories, both the author’s own and those from people who are waging a lush and quiet revolution in thousands of gardens across America to preserve our traditional cornucopia of food by simply growing old varieties and eating them. The Seed Underground pays tribute to time-honored and threatened varieties, deconstructs the politics and genetics of seeds, and reveals the astonishing characters who grow, study, and save them.
Daftar Isi
1. More gardens, less gas
2. A brief history of industrial agriculture
3. Me growing up
4. Sycamore
5. What is broken
6. A rind is a terrible thing to waste
7. Losing the Conch cowpea
8. Hooking up
9. Sylvia’s garden
10. Keeping preacher beans alive
11. Oakreez
12. The poet who saved seed
13. The anatomy of inflorescence: a quick lesson
14. Red earth
15. Pilgrimage to Mecca
16. The pollinator
17. The bad genie is out of the bottle
18. Tomato man
19. How to save tomato seeds
20. Sweet potato queen
21. Keener corn
22. Getting the conch back
23. Winning the mustaprovince
24. Basic seed saving
25. Seeds will make you a thief
26. Gifts
27. Seed banking
28. Grassroots resistance
29. Public breeding, private profit
30. Breed your own
31. Wheat anarchists
32. A vanishing plant wisdom
33. Stop walking around doing nothing
34. Last stand.
Tentang Penulis
Writer, naturalist, and activist Janisse Ray is a seed-saver, seed-exchanger, and seed-banker, and has gardened for twenty-five years. She is the author of several books, including The Seed Underground, Pinhook and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a New York Times Notable Book. Ray is on the faculty of Chatham University’s low-residency MFA program, and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She has won a Southern Booksellers Award for Poetry, a Southeastern Booksellers Award for Nonfiction, an American Book Award, the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She attempts to live a simple, sustainable life on a farm in southern Georgia with her husband, Raven Waters.
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