variety or simply planting, harvesting, and preserving seeds to ensure that a longtime favorite makes it into succeeding generations. Seed sharing follows the contours of traditional community life, as gardeners distribute a variety to family members, friends, and neighbors. Some growers freely share a prized bean with anyone likely to cultivate it, in order to ensure its preservation. Others more proprietary by nature might hoard their stock, prompting a neighbor to raid a garden late at night in an act of seed liberation. Even today some rural communities continue the barter system of acquiring goods and services, and seeds play a role in such exchanges: they may be traded for supplies, slipped across the table at a church picnic, or offered to entice support for a political candidate. Exchanging seeds clearly produces more than food; it is an act of profound social meaning, nurturing community and family bonds.
At the hardware store, the church supper, or the family reunion, telling stories about seeds and the giving of seeds constitute a distinct type of knowledge exchange. This system of knowledge creation and transmission challenges the dominant narrative about who is an authority and whose knowledge prevails in society. Unlike academic and corporate professionals, who tend to speak mainly to their peers in journal articles and who see seeds as commodities for patent protection, the experts in the world of seed saving are imbedded in their communities, and they have built their knowledge base—and, frankly, their passion—through a lifetime of in-the-field experience and careful observation. The displacement of just this sort of local knowledge is what marked the transition to modern agriculture, with the advent of university-trained agriculture experts selling their version of a brighter future at rural farmers’ institutes and extension offices. The speakers in this volume return us to the once-prevalent, surprisingly persistent world of neighbors with brains worth picking.
Author Bill Best brings alive a range of keepers, many with specialized knowledge. We meet, for example, an expert in tree grafting, a critical skill for preserving heirloom fruits. Many varieties of beans are named after the women who developed and preserved them, affirming the primary role of women as knowledge bearers. At the same time, the author demonstrates how the modern seed-saver network actively incorporates the Internet, providing an interesting case study of the interplay of orally transmitted traditional knowledge and modern technology.
The author’s stories about gardening convey a deep sense of regional history and folklore. We learn about Daniel Boone’s pioneer exploits, the Trail of Tears that removed Cherokees from their homeland, methods of tobacco cultivation, local politics, and the recent migrations that have shaped the transmission of seeds across space and time.
Beyond the obvious functional impact of seed saving, seeds and plants feature significantly in Appalachian expressive culture. As Best notes, one need look no further to appreciate the cultural significance of beans than “Jack and the Bean Stalk” and the other Jack tales, stories famous in western North Carolina and eastern Kentucky, where the author has spent his life. Among the seed savers mentioned is Letha Hicks, drawing us to note the connection of saving seeds and saving stories. Jack tales, of European and Celtic origin, were preserved in America principally by the Hicks family of the Beech Mountain region of western North Carolina. Ray Hicks, who in 1983 received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as a teller of these tales, learned them as a boy from his elders, who told the stories while canning or drying apples. In a region where beans are a staple of necessity and hardship presents many obstacles, it is easy to understand the appeal of stories in which magical beans and individual pluck enable success.
One of the most popular fiddle tunes of the Southern Appalachians is “Leather Britches,” a title that refers to a way of preserving long beans. Before the widespread use of freezing or canning, people would string mature beans together and air-dry them for several weeks, preserving these “leather breeches” (britches) for later rehydration and cooking.
In the broadest sense, seed saving is an act of connection to place. Heirloom varieties bear the names of the people, animals, materials, and motivations that define local life. When we read of Ora’s Speckled Bean, Brown Goose, White Case Knife, and Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, we have a sense of a story behind each one. The community that sustains these heirloom fruits and vegetables stands as a telling counterpoint to the contemporary notion that rapid mobility and separation from friends and family are what life is and should be—the uncritically accepted norm. A poignant reminder of seeds as a connection to place is the effort of those who have left Appalachia to secure and cultivate the varieties they knew back home.
Again in contrast to the big and the uniform in agriculture, Best refocuses our attention to an intimate scale. He invites us to notice the distinctive texture of a greasy bean, the compactness of beans in a pod, or how a tomato seems to taste better when accompanied by the smell of field tobacco.
Today, local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national movement. Seed swaps among neighbors at the local store have given way to a network of enthusiasts, regional educators, and nonprofit groups exchanging on the Internet. “Local” is harder to define these days, surely. Yet it is fair to say that these savers constitute an alternative agricultural world, one that operates on assumptions and values that sharply contrast with those of global agribusiness.
There is undeniably an element of the romantic in tending to seeds as if life depends on them. But it is only modern rationality, with its devotion to finding a technical solution to any problem, that prompts us to reject the romantic as superfluous. Perhaps there is inherent value in the dirty fingernails and slightly aching spine, and the curiosity and dedication that people bring to toiling in a small garden and helping plants grow. These stories offer a critical perspective on our own lives, beginning with what we sit down to eat at the dinner table. All this, from the planting of a seed.
Howard L. Sacks teaches sociology at Kenyon College, where he directs the Rural Life Center. For the past fifteen years, he has led an initiative to build a sustainable local food system in Knox County, Ohio. He and his wife, Judy, raise sheep on their farm near Gambier.
Dedication
My mother, Margaret Sanford Best, was an old-time seed saver who took her seed saving very seriously. Born over a hundred years ago in 1911, at the time of her death in 1994, just four weeks before her eighty-third birthday, she was still busy trading seeds with extended family members and other people in the Upper Crabtree community in Haywood County, North Carolina. Having said frequently that she would wear out rather than rust out, Mother had kept gardening as long as possible, always saving seeds for the next season and making sure she had plenty to share.
One of my earliest memories is picking colorful cornfield beans with her and learning how to avoid the equally colorful saddleback caterpillars and other stinging “worms” that could leave painful welts on bare skin. Mother picked the beans higher up the cornstalks, and I picked those close to the bottom. That I had helped pick the beans I ate for supper that night made me feel very much a part of the family life and farm life in which I was a participant. I was about three years old at the time.
I had my first garden of my own in 1963, after my wife and I had started working at Berea College. As soon as we had arrived in Kentucky, we had bought a farm in Jackson County, and I ordered seeds from catalogs, mistakenly assuming that they would be like the beans and tomatoes I had grown up with. I was quite disappointed, to put it mildly. While visiting family in North Carolina that fall, I mentioned my disappointment with commercial beans, and Mother quickly went to her can house and handed me bags of several of her varieties of beans, which were beginning to be called heirlooms. I have never looked back.
Mother realized early that the commercial seed companies had stopped selling the beans that had flavor and texture worthy of the name bean. She intensified her seed-saving activities as she got older, seemingly aware that her efforts would be a legacy worth leaving to her descendants and any others who might like to grow and eat these beans.
Ten years
