Saving the Future One Seed at a Time with Jere Gettle

Future of Food - Let's Eat Better for Ourselves and the Planet

Planting heirloom seeds — the kind of seeds you order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds — seems like a quaint pastime. You picture baby food jars lined on a sunny kitchen windowsill, each one filled with a different kind of seed, or neighbors trading seeds over the backyard fence. The world of heirloom seeds is all that, and a lot more. Seeds carry culture and history. Civilizations live or starve depending on whether they have access to seeds. If the world were to end, rebooting it would begin with planting seeds.

Heirloom seeds do something really weird. Plant them and they grow. Harvest the seeds and plant them again. They grow all over again. If you are an urbanist who gets most of their food out of plastic packages, the idea of self-replicating food is something out of science fiction.

Here’s something else out of science fiction. Just before the year 2000, there was something called the Y2K Scare. People believed that their personal computers would freeze up and go black. The banking system would collapse as well as the power grid. Planes would crash. Balanced unsteadily upon a binary code of ones and zeroes, the world would stop when all the computers failed. It looked like the end for people, so people started saving seeds in case they needed to grow their own food.

Y2K didn’t happen. But the seed habit caught on for some. A new generation of backyard gardeners realized that growing your own food was good. Y2K was when Jere Gette’s business really took off. You can get to know his business from the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Catalogue. The same one that I ordered my seeds from to plant in my tiny garden. He printed his first catalog when he was seventeen. When I discovered the catalog in LA he had already been at it a while. Now, more than two decades later, he offers about 2000 varieties of vegetables and herbs, the largest selection in the U.S.

Jere joins the podcast to tell us why seeds matter, why GMO seeds are damaging the integrity of our food supply, and why beet seeds are his favorite.

The problem is as we lose more and more of these traditional varieties, it reduces the gene pool for breeders to work with. And that's why it's so important for home gardeners and farmers, everybody, to conserve these old varieties because even if you're developing modern hybrids, you still have to start with some base stock. You still have to have the genes of these old insect-resistant varieties or these old heat-tolerant varieties to develop the modern varieties. - Jere Gettle

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