Ed. note: Gary Nabhan was recently given the honor of presenting the biennial Vavilov Memorial Lecture in Moscow and offering a similar lecture in Saint Petersburg, and was further honored with the gift of the Vavilov Medal. These are his reflections after years of retracing Vavilov through the centers of food diversity, while writing the book Where Our Food Comes From, and after spending time with the staff of the Vavilov General Genetics Institute in Moscow, and VIR in Saint Petersburg.

I sit overlooking Saint Isaac’s Square, a few hundred meters where Nikolay Vavilov managed the first and perhaps the most massive effort in human history to document and conserve the world’s food biodiversity. I have had the rare opportunity of seeing the seedbank in the basement of Vavilov’s institute, and of leafing through the herbarium where one can see the master’s hand on collections of plants from the deserts, the steppes and the rain forests. And I have seen the photos there of those who perished while protecting the seeds for the benefit of all of humankind.

I have also spoken with his surviving descendants: his own living son, Yuri; and VIR’s director, Nikolay, who continues to manage the tremendous scientific effort begun many decades ago. They remain committed to Nikolay Vavilov’s vision, but why? Political and economic support for such conservation has waxed and waned over the years, and there are always new challenges and frustrations.

Oddly, it seems that a certain emotional, philosophical and perhaps spiritual commitment to this work has seldom waned among its participants. One quickly realizes that these people are not necessarily in it for the money, the social approval of professional peers, nor the fame, if any!

Instead, they find something inherently and immensely satisfying about saving the remaining living riches of the world’s agricultural landscapes and cultures: the seeds, fruits and roots which feed us. They are working for a higher purposes, for the good of humanity, and if the work is done properly, the good of the earth itself.

If any scientist wished to be inspired to a higher cause, perhaps no one was more equipped to do so than Nikolay Vavilov. He was breathtakingly handsome and elegant yet field-worthy; he was visionary, yet articulate and a lover of detail; he was charismatic, tireless and intense, yet approachable. He would listen to farmer, muleskinner, camel drover and evolutionary biologist, and absorb their stories.

And yet, what ultimately inspires us today to continue with such efforts is not Vavilov’s ghost from the past, but the promise of a more equitable and nourishing food community for the future. We hope that our children and their children beyond them will eat well without damaging the very soil and soul of the earth itself.

And we know that in the recent past, some forms of agriculture have done such damage. Since Vavilov’s time, we have lost three-quarters of the former genetic base of our crops and livestock, squandering the diversity of flavors and fragrances by assuming that fossil fuel and fossil groundwater could be consumed without end to produce more food. Today, agriculture is responsible for generating half of the human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases to grow our food and fiber. We can do better. We can wean ourselves from our addictions to fossil fuel and groundwater, but only if we renew our commitment to wisely steward the natural resources and the cultural wisdom that has accumulated in our agricultural landscapes over the last ten millennia.

With rapid global climate change upon us, we need a greater diversity of seeds, breeds, fruits and roots out in our fields, adapting to the dynamic conditions there, more than ever before. Food diversity is no longer a luxury; its careful use and stewardship are once again a necessity if we are to feed future generations so that they can not survive but thrive. Vavilov pointed the way; we must not dwell so much on him as a signpost, but to where he was pointing.

When I arrived at the National Agricultural Library just outside Washington D.C. one noon this October, a white-haired man with a commanding presence stood at the security check, impeccably dressed in an elegant suit, while his translator explained to the guard that he would be the guest of honor for an event that afternoon. When he turned around to speak with his translator, I noticed that he had the same high brow and combed-back hair that the world’s greatest plant explorer had exhibited more than three quarters of a century ago, when that scientist made his last visit to the United States. The man in the security line in front of me was none other than Dr. Yuri Vavilov, the only surviving son of Dr. Nikolay Vavilov, whose legacy was being honored that day at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “intellectual seed bank,” as many call the great library in which we stood.

Although a half dozen of us spoke that afternoon about seed banks and the conservation of biodiversity in the field, Yuri Vavilov clearly stole the show. He astounded us by opting to give his speech in English, rather than relying on the talents of the very capable young translator who accompanied him. He spoke with pride of his fathers’ accomplishments as both a scientist and a visionary in the realms of agricultural science and geographic exploration. But he also spoke with pain in his voice while recalling his childhood during World War II in Saratov, Russia, where unbeknownst to him and his mother, his father lay dying of starvation in one of Stalin’s gulags just a few miles away. In carefully-chosen words, he went so far as to criticize the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Alexandr Solsenitzen (spelling) for implying that his uncle Sergey-another great scientist who contributed to Nobel Prize-winning physics research—was an unwitting accomplice to Stalin by letting his brother be jailed, and not earlier seeking to clear his name.

Near the end of the program, as I presented my photos of Nikolay Vavilov’s oldest surviving student, Dr. Amaik Dzangaliev—champion of the wild apple forests of Central Asia—Yuri Vavilov rose to his feet and sweetly told us his story of meeting this protégé of his father in Kazakhstan many years before. And then, he pulled from his briefcase a copy of a book of his own research books translated into Kazakh, as a gift! He later told me that if I should ever visit Almaty, Kazakhstan again, I should stroll down Vavilov Boulevard where apples have been planted to commemorate his father’s recognition of the coevolution of apples and Kazakh cultures along the Silk Road. And he ended his remarks by noting that the story of his father’s rise and tragic fall could only be compared to the stuff of Greek Tragedies.

What the rest of the presenters did that day was to try to assure Yuri that his father’s legacy was in no way forgotten; in fact, it was alive as it had been in decades. Two major books about his father had appeared in English in the last year, and a website from Bioversity International cleverly features a “travel blog” as if Nikolay Vavilov were still on the road, making field reports, and collecting seeds to this day. Major conservation organizations such as World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International now use as their primary tools for global conservation planning a series of maps of hotspots of wild biodiversity which build on Vavilov’s own map of centers of crop diversity first sketched out more than eight decades ago. While the staff of nearly every major seed bank in the world exhibits a photo of Vavilov’s historic visits to their country, farmers and activists shaping in situ conservation reserves for still-diverse farmlands are also paying attention to Vavilov’s notes and photos as means to gauge environmental and agricultural change in their foodsheds.

That evening, as Yuri Vavilov shared dinners with several of his admirers and friends, I could see the pleasure in his face as the party remembered not merely his father, but his father’s friends as well: Theodosius Dobzansky, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist; Jack Hawkes, the recently-deceased potato expert; Harry Harlan, the barley breeder and confidante; and Jack Harlan, Harry’s son, who once canoed with Vavilov out to see wild rice in a stream not all that far from the restaurant where we ate.

After withstanding the pain of the forty year period during which mention of his father’s legacy was banished from history and science books in Russia, Yuri Vavilov appeared to accept the belated recognition by the world that his father was one of the most original minds ever to be concerned with plant conservation and agricultural geography. If justice was fully done, his father would be as well known to American gardeners and farmers-and to all other food producers, for that matter—as Charles Darwin, Gregory Mendel, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver, and Luther Burbank.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.

As mentioned in last week’s post, Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT), of which I am founder, learned that at least seventy of the heirloom apples unique to New England that remain are so infrequently featured in nurseries, farmers markets and roadside stands that they can be considered threatened or endangered.

One additional source of heirloom fruits is often overlooked—the abandoned orchards lost amongst the underbrush on old homesteads, in national parks and historic farms. Perhaps as many as half of all the trees surviving in remnants of historic orchards and hedgerows are what we call “forgotten fruits”—heirloom apples that have been orphaned, losing their original names, as well as the horticultural and culinary traditions which went with them. And yet they have genetic, historic and perhaps gastronomic significance, just as much as Johnny Appleseed’s original plantings in the Ohio River Valley, or as the ancient apple forests of Kazakhstan first explored by Nikolay Vavilov and Aimak Dzangaliev, and recently heralded by Frank Browning and Michael Pollan.

This autumn, folks from the RAFT partnership are teaming up with the staff at Old Sturbridge Village outside Worcester, Mass. to explore what can tangibly be done with the forgotten fruits of such abandoned orchards and hedgerows. The oldest trees out on the landscape may be well over a century old, and the last of their kinds that have not perished. We are also sponsoring a similar forum in the Grand Traverse foodshed of northern Michigan, where cherries as well as apples also abound. We are hoping to form local workgroups in each of these foodsheds to inventory, protect and share “scion”-wood cuttings from these neglected reservoirs of food diversity.

But such rescues of old-timey varieties form only the first of many steps needed to bring the diverse fruits unique to American landscapes back into our kitchens, public festivals and community feasts. We also need to taste them when fresh, to document their keeping qualities, to bake with them, to press their juices and to ferment them. We need to see which are best used in blends to make hard ciders, and which are best savored as alone distinctive flavors.

If you love apples like we love apples, we need your help. Millions of people in this country need our guidance and encouragement to experience the simple fact that apple encompasses more than what Jonathan or Granny Smith can offer. We need to bring back a wider range of fruit diversity into American landscapes, and return their forgotten flavors to our tables.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.

When the leaves of New England begin to glow with crimsons, purples and golds, many of us remember that it’s time for crimson, purple and gold apples to be picked, packed, sequestered in storage sheds, or processed into cider, butter, sauces or pies.

Apples exemplify that taste of the fall for many of us, but just what kind of apples we taste depends upon just where exactly we live, and how well we know our neighboring orchard-keepers.

Some eight hundred kinds of apples once enriched the kitchens, taverns and inns of New England, but most of these have already disappeared from the region’s cuisines. In fact, just nineteen varieties monopolize the bins in our grocery stores, the pies of our cafes and the ciders of our bars. That is but a paltry sample of what it means to be an apple.

When the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) held workshops in Vermont and Massachusetts last year, we learned that at least seventy of the heirloom apples unique to New England that remain are so infrequently featured in nurseries, farmers markets and roadside stands that they can be considered threatened or endangered.

If nothing is soon done about them, their colors, textures, flavors and fragrances might forever be lost from Yankee culinary traditions. But we might also forget the lovely poetry of their folk names: Baker Sweet, Bottle Greening, Coles Quince, Gloria Mundi, Graniwinkle, Hightop Sweet, Pumpkin Russet, and Sheepnose.

Fortunately, in some rural communities, grassroots efforts to keep these old-timey apples alive and thriving appear to be on the rise. From the coastal plains of the Clambake foodshed, to the inland mountains of the Maple Syrup foodshed, named nursery stock of heirloom apples have been newly planted and are flourishing.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.

As mentioned in last week’s blog post, in Peru’s Parque de la Papa-the Potato Park-, the Quechuan farmers maintain some 1200 varieties of potatoes named in their own language. Farmers are particularly attentive to the effects of climate change on the micro-habitats where each potato variety can be planted. Quechuan Ricardo Paco Chipa says his father constantly reminds him that the elevation distributions of potatoes today are far different than those that were common when he first farmed a half century ago. Certain varieties cannot grow as low as they once did, because of the heat they would suffer in those places today. At least four cold-tolerant varieties once planted at the highest levels have recently become rare, for lack of any habitats today that are free from the heat during their six month-long growing season. One black and white variety which Ricardo called luqui was once commonly used for making chuno, the freeze-dried potatoes that can be rehydrated for soups and purees:

“There is less snow each year, less water, and hotter seasons. Now we must plant each variety higher and higher from year to year. The varieties adapted to the very coldest country below the peaks now have hardly any place to grow.”

And yet, these Quechuan farmers are not passive victims of climate change; they are dynamically responding to such changes by employing their crop diversity and their traditional knowledge to meet such challenges. Ricardo was clear that this was among their primary motivations for engaging in the collective mission of the Potato Park:

“We are not only bringing back a diversity of potato varieties to our fields, but the traditional knowledge about how and where to grow them-and prepare them-as well.”

This was not always the case. In the 1960s, the Peruvian government and international agricultural agencies lured Ricardo’s forefathers into adopting new agricultural practices and concentrating on a few “improved” potato varieties. But these imported techniques, technologies and hybrids did not necessarily suit the conditions found in highlands surrounding Cusco. One Quechuan farmer-Justicio Ucra-smirked as he explained what happened:

“We found that the improved varieties not only did poorly in the marketplace, but they were bad for the soil and bad for your health.”

Gradually, the farmers returned to the time-tried varieties that they had not already abandoned; with the repatriation of other varieties collected by CIP’s plant explorers in the 1970s, and others gifted to them by farmers in other parts of Peru, they now collectively cultivate over a thousand varieties each year. This not only offers them a modicum of food security from year to year; it is also allowing the farmers to move toward the goal of true food sovereignty:

“We have to go beyond mere food security to food sovereignty and sustainability because that is the only way we can have a good relationship with Pachamama, a good relationship with the land…”

In the meantime, the farmers wives—who also sow, harvest and ceremonially bless the potatoes—are busy experimenting with how to better use their great diversity of potatoes. They’ve formed “the Gastronomic Work Group” (Maruja) with other women from the six communities to document traditional recipes and innovate around them:

“What we do is not unlike the kind of innovation with food that our grandmothers did. We combine particular potato varieties with various medicinal plants and other herbs from the wild used in making sauces. We evaluate them on whether they are both tasty and healthy.”

In the park’s co-op restaurant called Papamanka, the food they offered us met both of those criteria. It also had a rich sense of cultural heritage to it that may still not be apparent in many Novo-Andino restaurants in the city. Alejandro Argumedo explained just why that might be:

“Our intent has been to integrate all aspects of managing or sustaining a landscape and its food diversity through cultural means. This has been our basis not only for conserving potato diversity, but also for sustaining traditional livelihoods…We had the faith that if we stayed true to the notion of cultural integrity—with the symbol of the potato to unite us under one sombrero—we would achieve not just one objective, but many at the same time.”

The people of the Potato Park—including the potatoes themselves—have done just that. This success would have intrigued and delighted Nikolay Vavilov, his colleague Sergey Bukasov, and many of the other crop historians who visited Peru over the last century.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.

Repatriation literally means to bring something back to the fatherland, taking into custody something which once belonged to your cultural community.

There have been other instances of crop repatriation-notably the dozens of Hopi crop varieties relocated, documented and returned to the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in 2002. This was facilitated by members of what is now called the Renewing America’s Food Traditions collaborative, including the Seed Savers Exchange, Native Seeds/SEARCH and the Center for Sustainable Environments.

Picking up where I left in my last blog post, the repatriation of Peruvian potatoes for in situ conservation has been unprecedented both in scale and in its acceptance by one of internationally-funded crop conservation and improvement centers (collectively known as CGIAR). Key scientists at the International Potato Center (CIP) had become convinced that such a community-based conservation strategy was indeed worth supporting. Some two decades before, however, CGIAR administrators such as Trevor Williams formally dismissed in situ conservation strategies as impractical, costly and unproductive. Today, CIP’s more forward-thinking scientists provide technical assistance upon request to farmers in the Potato Park who wish to gain advice on the best ways to cultivate, fertilize and manage their many varieties of native tubers. At the same time, the leaders of the Parque de la Papa has requested that the UN Food and Agriculture’s International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources formally recognize their cultural landscape as a “gene bank” of equal importance and status of that of the International Potato Center.

Today, the Quechuan farmers in the Potato Park maintain some 1200 varieties of potatoes named in their own language, in addition to razas criollas (land races) of maize, oca, quinoa, fava beans and wheat. When you visit them, you are at first dazzled by the sheer splendor of colors woven into their caps, ponchos, pants or dresses; these are folks that understand beauty. But color is not merely ornamental; the many varieties of potatoes range from black and purple to brown and yellow; they are knobby, curvilinear, oblong, round, or shaped like a hen’s egg. Each has its own identity, its own flavor, its own texture; some even have their own “voice.”

Quechuan farmer Ricardo Paco Chipa of the village of Paru Paru explained to me how one potato variety was found to have its own voice. It is now known as a “guardian potato” who collaborates with human guardians or stewards of potato diversity to protect this diversity from outside threats.

“The guardian potato is known as Santo Ruma. It began to speak one time when a thief came to rob all the potatoes from a field; it scared away the thief, and woke up the people to defend the field. Of course, it is rare for a potato to speak, “Ricardo added soberly, “but by doing so, it saved the others. Those of us who are appointed as human guardians of the potatoes must recognize this.”

I was intrigued by the notion that at least some of the potato varieties were perceived by the Quechuans as embodying qualities that the rest of us might attribute only to humans. Ricardo was straight forward in his

defense of this notion:

“Potatoes are part of our family. We keep them in our homes with us.”

An elder several decades older than Ricardo added that one should never cut a potato with a knife, because it is alive. Such empathy with the sentience of potatoes is complemented by detailed technical knowledge about the plants themselves, and the environments in which they grow. One of the Quechuan farmers of the

Potato Park wanted to affirm to academically-trained biologists of the veracity of his community’s knowledge:

“We want the world to know that we ourselves are scientists of the potato. We have detailed knowledge about the life of these plants. We read their flowers, their leaves, their vines. We read the soil, the weather; we see how the plants respond to the winds. They are our books.”

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.

For a quarter century, the breed of ethnobotanists I’ve hung with have proposed through countless lectures and publications that crop diversity can best conserved in situ, in the cultural landscapes managed by the traditional farmers who have long been its stewards. Now, in the highlands of Peru, a dream has come true, one that would have made the late Russian crop conservationist Nikolay Vavilov giddy with delight. Vavilov himself visited the Andes some seventy years ago, during an era when there was no “formal” in situ conservation for potatoes anywhere in the world. But today, there is such a place, simply known as the Parque de la Papa-the Potato Park. I had the pleasure to visit the park and to listen to the Quechuan farmers within it just after their “winter” solstice of 2008.

To arrive at the Parque de la Papa, you leave Cusco’s high elevation urbanity at 11,000 foot, and you climb, climb, climb. It seems as though you might leave the altiplano (highlands) behind altogether, for you wind up dirt roads toward the Andes’ snow-capped peaks until you can see above you only azure skies as deeply blue as a mountain lake. You must leave behind your earlier elevation sickness known as seroche by drinking the tea and chewing the leaves of a trickster of a plant known as coca, and by going slow. Indeed it is important to set your pace through the highlands slow enough for your mind to reconnect with farming traditions that have remained resilient for millennia; there are families here growing potatoes on stone-lined terraces with much of the skills and insights that their ancestors accumulated over dozens of generations.

When you are done meandering up switchbacks on a wheezing, teetering bus, you come to where Quechuans are harvesting their potatoes. There, you find yourself in front of a large billboard that proclaims that you have entered the Parque de la Papa. What it does not mention is that this is the only “park” in the world fully dedicated to the in situ conservation of native crops. The six Quechuan communities there have dedicated their future to the “repatriation, restoration and sustainable management of the native agro-biodiversity of the potato, and to the traditional knowledge shared within the communities associated with it.”

The six agrarian communities which have rallied around their shared interest in potato diversity are known as Chawaytiré, Sacaca, Kuyo Grande, Pampallaqta, Paru Paru, and Amaru. They did not always feel united with one another; in fact, in the years prior to the Potato Park, there had been some bloodshed between two of the communities over a contested boundary between their farming and grazing lands. Instead of staying entrenched in such territorial disputes, they agreed to be part of a grassroots initiative facilitated by ethnobotanist Alejandro Argumedo, one of the founders and leader of Asociación Andes based in Cusco. These agrarian communities agreed that they had more to gain by banding together in defense of their sustenance-potato culture—than they could ever realize by struggling against one another or working in isolation.

And so, they began to form institutional linkages not only with NGO’s such as Asociación Andes, but with networks including other indigenous communities struggling to define and maintain their own food sovereignty as well. In 2002, the six communities were confident enough to declare some 10,000 hectares of their lands the Parque de la Papa, which was soon followed by an agreement with the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru that allowed the repatriation of some 420 varieties of potatoes previously collected by CIP for the purposes of plant breeding.

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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.