24 Sep 2021

Adam Alexander: seed detective

From Nine To Noon, 10:05 am on 24 September 2021

Adam Alexander is on a mission to save rare vegetables. Alexander is a seed guardian at the UK's Organic Garden Heritage Seed Library, which has more than 500 rare, endangered, and heirloom vegetable varieties.

He has saved more than 20 endangered varieties himself, grows about 70 different vegetable varieties every year for collectors, and those keen to conserve genetic food plant diversity.

His interest started 30 years ago when he was wearing his other hat as a television producer and was filming in the Ukraine, he told Kathryn Ryan.

"My crew were staying in an old sort of pre-revolutionary building that was the party hotel. And the staff objected to a bunch of capitalist foreigners pitching up there. And they all went on strike.

"And I said, well, we're not going anywhere. And we stayed and we took over the kitchens. And also being a very keen cook said to my interpreter, 'right, we've got to go and find food', and the only place you could really buy anything decent at that time in Ukraine was in the local markets."

This led to him meeting a woman who was the second only to his wife in importance to his life, he says.

"She was a little old lady. And she was selling her vegetables from her garden just to make a few rubles to survive, because there was no money and very little food around and she had some peppers and I remember buying a few peppers.

"Peppers are very important in Ukrainian cuisine. And we took these peppers back to the hotel, and we made a dish with them. And they were quite remarkable - they were sweet, but they were also spicy and fruity."

Alexander looked for her the next day and bought some more.

"I thought, I wonder how well these will grow back at home. And I kept back some seeds, and I dried them on the windows of my hotel room. And I've been growing them ever since."

It also set him off on his mission to seek out rare seeds - one such find was in north-east Spain in the Catalonian region.

"I stumbled across this guy, Jesus Vargas, and he was a bit like me, in so far as he was growing all sorts of local varieties.

"He had 150 varieties of vegetables that are local, that are grown locally, and a part of that Catalan food culture.

"He has a beautiful, organic, small farm. And I was wandering around his huge vegetable garden and came across what looked like a jungle of peas."

Alexander tasted one and was stunned by its flavour.

"I asked Jesus about it and he said, 'oh well this pea was bred by my grandfather, and named after my grandmother, Avi Joan. And I'm the only person who grows it, there is nobody else'.

"And I said to him so well, what happens when you shuffle off this mortal coil Jesus? And he said, I don't know what will happen, I suppose you know, that'll be it."

Alexander took some seeds home and grew them in his garden.

"I sowed a row and they grew, and they grew, and they grew. And by the time they got to three meters tall, they were just covered in these huge white flowers, and an absolute magnet for bees.

"And then suddenly, these pods arrived in profusion. And I just thought, this is the most wonderful pea I've ever eaten."

That seed has now been through accession, he says, and is being distributed throughout the seed-saver members in the UK.

"I think it's probably in 100 vegetable gardens now, whereas five, six years ago, when I got it it was in just one."

He came across another curious find in Syria, he says, in a restaurant in Palmyra.

"I went into a restaurant, which was right next to the ruins, which were just awesome and brilliant. Palmyra is, in fact, an oasis in the middle of the desert.

"I sat down and the chef brought me this incredible dish of a broad bean salad."

They were, he says, "to die for" and it turned out the man grew them on his farm.

"His family, his parents, his grandparents, going back generations have been growing that bean and I was really excited about it because one of the earliest archaeological sites for fava beans, broad beans, was actually recovered from the Lake Assad before it was flooded.

"Back in the mid '70s, when they were building the dam for Lake Assad, they did some excavations and they found beans that were 7000 - 8000 years old.

"And it's just in the same region, it's just sort of down the road, a couple of hours' drive away. And I thought, I wonder if this bean is connected in some way. And it was, he very kindly gave me a few seeds, which I took home with me. "

It now grows in his garden in Wales, he says.

"That really gave me this incredible sense of continuity and the link back to those very first Neolithic farmers, who would have been looking at the wild parents of so many vegetables that we just take for granted these days, carefully selecting the ones that they could then grow, cultivate and domesticate.

"That bean I've been able to grow it out and share and make it available to Syrian refugees coming into UK and the Europe also Canada."

He found a bean in Myanmar that had connections to the other side of the world, he says.

A woman was selling these large beans in a market, he says.

"I went into a market and there were a number of women who were selling bowls, big, huge bowls, like three-foot across full of these beans that are being boiled in their pods."

He couldn't tell what the bean was, he says.

"My wonderful guide told me he said, 'you know what this bean is? It's called the angry bean'.

"And he said in Shan tradition, if a pregnant woman tries to harvest this bean, it will stop cropping."

Despite being embedded in Shan culture, the bean's origins were far from South-East Asia. It came from Peru, from north-west South America. He brought five beans home with him, he says.

"I was rather nonplussed; I didn't recognise it and so I tweeted about it. And this woman in Slovenia got in touch. She said, 'I know what that is, that's a Christmas lima bean."

Then a grower in Texas got in touch and he found out more.

"The gold rush in California was where people used to grow the Christmas lima bean. And they got it because it was used in the ship stores by those ships trading up and down the Pacific Ocean from South America, up the coast of North America.

"And they would grow it and it became a very important protein store in the winter, hence the name Christmas lima bean."

This humble bean tells a story of food globalisation, he says.

"You have this bean that actually comes from Peru, but which is so important in Myanmar, you couldn't get two more diverse cultures if you tried, Shan culture and American west coast culture."

Genetic richness in food is disappearing, Alexander says.

"In the last 100 years, we've lost at least 90 percent of the genetic diversity of our food crops. And that's not just garden crops that I grow, but the staples like wheat and rice, grains, all of these."

His work, along with other seed savers around the world, aims to counter this trend.

"It's really important to be able to hang on to what's left."