 |
When you sit down to eat your evening meal, do you ever stop to consider where this food on your plate has come from? What was the journey the ingredients have endured to make it to your kitchen? Do you give much thought to the origin of the fruit and vegetables before you? Many of the vegetables we are familiar with today are the product of many generations of gardeners over hundreds of years, but we rarely stop to think of this at the dinner table. David Cavagnaro is one of these gardeners; he is a man who knows the ingredients on his plate as few others do. His twin passions for gardening and food are an inspiration to backyarders the world over, and his contribution to the preservation of heirloom vegetable varieties makes him one of the world’s most important and influential gardeners.
David lives in Decorah, Iowa, in the upper mid-west of the United States where he gardens a six acre property nestled in a picturesque forrested valley. He leads a mostly self-sufficient life closely in tune with the seasons and cycles of nature. A more wise and contented soul would be hard to find. His affiliation with the natural world has been a lifelong journey exploring the species diversity as well as the history of our cultivated food plants.
David’s early interest in gardening was nurtured by his Italian grandparents who lived the traditions of growing and eating good food. As a child he was fascinated with the many insects found in gardens, a fascination which led him to study entomology at university. It was during his time as an entomologist at university that he took the opportunity to travel with a team of scientists to the Galapagos Islands in 1964. This expedition was only the third scientific expedition to the islands ever to be undertaken (the first being Charles Darwin’s expedition which formed the basis for Darwin’s theory of evolution documented in his work “Origin of Species”). Studying the insect life of the Galapagos Islands gave David a practical understanding of species diversity.
This combination of interest in the diversity of life and gardening naturally led David to the cultivation of “Heirloom” varieties of vegetables. He is a gardener driven by his stomach and his eye. Growing heirloom vegetables not only gave him plenty of tasty ingredients for his kitchen, but also provided him with a vast array of colours and forms for another of his interests, photography. David has been photographing plants for most of his life and is famous throughout the world for his photographic work.
Growing heirloom vegetables represents a preservation of diversity similar to the conservation of species diversity in the wild. When David sits down to eat, he feels a real sense of connection with the small-scale farming and gardening cultures of previous generations. He talks in terms of “cultural cuisines”, where each mouthful we take represents thousands of years of cultural selection. Through the ages people living in isolated communities across the world have developed their own unique food plants from local wild forms. This diversity has given rise to the huge range of edible plants on offer today. It is this diversity that is being threatened by the commercialisation of our food crops by multinational corporations like Monsanto and Aventis. Gene manipulation technologies like hybridisation and Genetic Engineering are aimed at large agricultural operations which means that the crops grown through the ages will not survive unless gardeners take David’s lead and grow them in their own backyards.
Vegetables from the Past.
David’s first major garden project was his property in California where he grew most of the food he consumed, including 45 varieties of grapes, over 100 varieties of fruit trees (all hand grafted by himself), corn, amaranth and soy for bread making and all his own fresh seasonal vegetables. From California, David moved to Iowa where he took the job of Farm Manager for the Seed Savers Heritage Farm set up by Kent and Diane Whealy. Kent and Diane founded the Seed Savers Exchange in the US in the early seventies as a grassroots network of gardeners interested in growing and preserving the many hundreds of vegetable varieties handed down through the generations. Many of these varieties faced extinction as commercial agriculture looked to varieties suited to mass production and transport. As their network expanded they saw the need to grow out these varieties to maintain purity and viability, therefore they established the Heritage Farm and employed David as Manager. In the eight years that he worked and lived there he grew approximately 15, 000 different vegetable varieties including over 3000 tomato varieties alone.
It was during his time at Heritage Farm that The Digger’s Club came in contact with David. It is largely due to the efforts of Seed Savers and David himself, that we can now offer varieties such as 'Golden Bantam' sweet corn, 'Tuscan Black' kale, 'Bohemian' pumpkin, 'Australian Yellow Leaf' lettuce, 'Romano' beans, 'Amish Paste' and 'Tommy Toe' tomatoes, to name a few. All of these Heirloom vegetable varieties are non-hybrids and free from any genetic manipulation, so when you grow them in your garden you have the option to save your own seed and continue the long lineage of gardeners preserving the heritage of our food plants.
Our Food connects us to the Natural World.
The integrity of our food is a subject close to David’s heart. Whether it be the genetic diversity of heirlooms, the nutritional quality of our ingredients or the impact of our gardening techniques on the Earth, what we eat often defines us. In recent times the quality and integrity of food in the US has taken a dramatic slide, resulting in an alarming decline in public health. The incidence of obesity in the US has gone from a situation where, in 1990, no state had 15 per cent or more of its population in the obese category, to a point where, eleven years later in 2001, only one state didn’t. (See Jeffery Smith’s recently published book Seeds of Deception). If we are to reverse these trends and improve our collective health we must take a more active role in the production of our basic ingredients.
On his recent visit to Heronswood, David spoke at our Harvest Dinner about the value of growing our own food, or at least being as close to the source of our food as possible. By being in touch with the production of our food, we are better placed to understand the vitality and nutritional quality of what we eat. Over-processing, packaging, transport and fat saturation reduce the nutrition, taste and quality of ingredients. Much of the American (and consequently the Australian) diet has become this “Fast Food” style, and people are becoming more and more distant from the origin of their food. When our food has to travel long distances to reach our kitchens it has to be packaged, refrigerated and transported. Our impact on the earth is significantly escalated as a result of this packaging and transport and we produce mountains of unnecessary waste in the process. David fills only two rubbish bins a year because he buys almost no food from the supermarket.
David’s reverence for the ingredients used to prepare his daily meals puts him in direct contact with the natural processes that have produced that meal, by doing this he recognises that we are part of the ecological systems of life on this planet. Not only does this connection benefit his health, but by being in tune with the process of food gardening he can produce much of his own food without impacting dramatically on the natural resources surrounding him. If we are serious about pursuing a sustainable future, then growing our food is probably the single most important step we can take. David’s example shows how we can live more lightly upon the earth whilst enjoying all that nature provides. By taking David’s lead we can boost bio-diversity and encourage environmental health.
Don’t underestimate the power of the backyard gardener to change the world!
Tim Sansom of the Garden of St Erth interviewed David during his a lecture at Heronswood.
.
|