Hi'iaka's Healing Herb Garden

The Differences Between Biodiversity and Bioengineering

Tomatoes are red, corn is yellow, and string beans are green - right? Not necessarily so! Common commercial varieties of string beans are green, true, and that's what we mostly see and eat. "But they can also be purple, maroon, or yellow. Tomatoes can be orange, yellow or purple. Many familiar fruits and vegetables grow in a rainbow of colors," says Rosalind Creasy in her book Blue Potatoes, Orange Tomatoes. Just look through a seed catalog, like Richter's Herbs (www.richters.com), to discover 40 naturally-occurring varieties of basil, or the Thyme Garden's (www.thymegarden.com) to discover 70 varieties of thyme alone. The 2004 Seeds of Change catalog (www.seedsofchange.com) lists 50 varieties of tomatoes! How does an ambitious gardener make a decision about which seeds to buy? Well, that's where the fun begins!

Lots of familiar foods grow in a rainbow of surprising colors. In addition to orange tomatoes, imagine red corn, yellow watermelons, and multicolored radishes, all produced by Mother Nature and not scientists in a lab. This is biodiversity, which is what I'll be talking about this month.

Much Diversity Has Been Lost

Our grandparents and their parents knew about biodiversity. They had much more diversity of crops than we have ever dreamed of in our cookie-cutter, non-diversified food crop culture of today. In fact, the Rural Advancement Foundation reports that "75 types of vegetables, or approximately 97% of the varieties that were available in the year 1900, are now extinct. Many have survived only by the graces of backyard seed savers." Biodiversity is a term that is finding its way into more and more publications and common usage today as people learn about the wonders of nature and the diversity that she provides us. All we have to do is open our eyes and look for these unusual varieties, sometimes called "heirlooms," because many are still out there.

The Birds and the Bees

How do different kinds of veggies and other plants come to exist? They certainly do NOT begin their lives in a laboratory! They come about because the birds and the bees, in their work of pollinating the flowers of different crops, often cause cross-pollination to happen. This is called "open pollination" because it happens "openly," naturally, and the results are often wonderful new cultivars that cross-pollinate right in your own back yard. I have seen this in my garden: my Genova sweet basil has crossed with the Thai basil, creating volunteer keikis of a delightful new type of basil that has some of the characteristics of both its parents. With so much natural diversity, why does science feel the need to artificially create new types of plants?

The Irish Potato Famine Points Up the Importance of Diversity

"Natural biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it," said Edward Wilson, a biologist at Harvard University. "This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve... and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady." When things get out of balance, when humans take control, this balance is lost. It happened in 1845 when the only variety of potato being grown commercially in Europe was attacked by a fungal disease. Poor people depended on this important crop so much that in 1846 one million people died, while another 1-1/2 million left Ireland. My ancestors, and many of yours, came to the United States during this era. In the book Seeds of Change, author Kenny Ausubel relates that "plant breeders later identified another strain from the potato's biological center of origin in Peru and bred it [that is, they created a hybrid, which is not the same as bioengineering] to make a new plant resistant to the rot."

If Nature Provides Biodiversity, Why Do We Need Genetic Engineering?

I think it's unnecessary for scientists to develop new strains of crops in laboratories because so much diversity already exists. Do you want a tomato with a thicker skin that will discourage fruitflies? It already exists: just read the heirloom seed catalogs' descriptions. Maybe bioengineering reflects the old attitude of "because we can." Maybe it's the superior, paternalistic, arrogant and controlling nature of [some] human beings to want to be the force in charge of the universe. Well, folks, we are not. And of course, it is fed by economics. Former Vice President Al Gore observed that "the single most serious threat to the global food system is the threat of genetic erosion," and that is one of the most serious things the bioengineering movement is doing. More natural species and varieties will become extinct as more genetically engineered crops replace the old-fashioned varieties of such foods as corn, wheat, and soybeans.

Buy Heirloom Varieties of Seeds

So what can we all do to help solve this problem? Buy heirloom varieties of vegetable and other seeds through companies like Seeds of Change and Horizon Herbs (www.horizonherbs.com). Save those seeds, share them with friends and family, and keep looking for new varieties to grow. Don't buy hybrid varieties or those that have been genetically engineered because "the biggest single trigger of extinctions today is the introduction of new hybrid varieties by multinational seed companies," according to Kent and Diana Whealy, founders of Seed Savers Exchange. "The major seed companies drop more of the old kinds as they introduce new hybrids, and the reliable heirloom and traditional varieties are then almost certain to disappear." In monitoring the loss of our "irreplaceable garden heritage," they found that "44.6% of all the non-hybrid vegetable varieties available in 1984 had been dropped from mail-order catalogs by 1991, and those losses appear to be escalating." And, I might add, our traditional, centuries-old food crops appear to be in even more serious danger due to the introduction of genetically engineered versions of plants, which I don't consider to be real food at all.

You can make a difference, I can make a difference, we all can contribute to helping make sure that these wonderful, TRUE varieties of our favorite foods do not totally vanish from the world, by simply saying NO to phony, scary, manufactured food.