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Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply
Seeds of Resistance is a wake-up call. With vivid and memorable stories, Mark Schapiro tells us how seeds are at the frontlines of our epic battle for healthy food.” —Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard
Sun. Soil. Water. Seed. These are the primordial ingredients for the most essential activity of all on growing food. All of these elements are being changed dramatically under the pressures of corporate consolidation of the food chain, which has been accelerating just as climate change is profoundly altering the conditions for growing food. In the midst of this global crisis, the fate of our food has slipped into a handful of the world’s largest companies. Seeds of Resistance will bring home what this corporate stranglehold is doing to our daily diet, from the explosion of genetically modified foods to the rapid disappearance of plant varieties to the elimination of independent farmers who have long been the bedrock of our food supply.
Seeds of Resistance will touch many nerves for readers, including concerns about climate change, chronic drought in essential farm states like California, the proliferation of GMOs, government interference (or purposeful ignorance), and the alarming domination of the seed market and our very life cycle by global giants like Monsanto.
But not all is bleak when it comes to the future of our food supply. Seeds of Resistance will also present hopeful stories about farmers, consumer groups, and government agencies around the world that are resisting the tightening corporate squeeze on our food chain.
“The latest science suggests that plants, including those of our major food crops, are engaged in a continuous interplay of responses with the environment in which they’re planted. That environment is changing; climatic disruptions are accelerating. The number of seed companies is declining, and the spectrum of seeds shrinking. The group of people involved in fighting for their seeds, and a more just and healthy food system, is expanding. Old assumptions of how we grow food are falling. New paradigms are emerging. It’s a time of profound vitality and volatility in the seed realm, with high stakes for all of us who care about our health, the planet’s health, and the food we eat. As powerful forces circle round the ground-zero ingredient of our food, one thing is becoming a seed is never just a seed. Seeds are the canaries on our climate disrupted planet. They’re emitting strong signals. Let’s read them.”
Sun. Soil. Water. Seed. These are the primordial ingredients for the most essential activity of all on growing food. All of these elements are being changed dramatically under the pressures of corporate consolidation of the food chain, which has been accelerating just as climate change is profoundly altering the conditions for growing food. In the midst of this global crisis, the fate of our food has slipped into a handful of the world’s largest companies. Seeds of Resistance will bring home what this corporate stranglehold is doing to our daily diet, from the explosion of genetically modified foods to the rapid disappearance of plant varieties to the elimination of independent farmers who have long been the bedrock of our food supply.
Seeds of Resistance will touch many nerves for readers, including concerns about climate change, chronic drought in essential farm states like California, the proliferation of GMOs, government interference (or purposeful ignorance), and the alarming domination of the seed market and our very life cycle by global giants like Monsanto.
But not all is bleak when it comes to the future of our food supply. Seeds of Resistance will also present hopeful stories about farmers, consumer groups, and government agencies around the world that are resisting the tightening corporate squeeze on our food chain.
“The latest science suggests that plants, including those of our major food crops, are engaged in a continuous interplay of responses with the environment in which they’re planted. That environment is changing; climatic disruptions are accelerating. The number of seed companies is declining, and the spectrum of seeds shrinking. The group of people involved in fighting for their seeds, and a more just and healthy food system, is expanding. Old assumptions of how we grow food are falling. New paradigms are emerging. It’s a time of profound vitality and volatility in the seed realm, with high stakes for all of us who care about our health, the planet’s health, and the food we eat. As powerful forces circle round the ground-zero ingredient of our food, one thing is becoming a seed is never just a seed. Seeds are the canaries on our climate disrupted planet. They’re emitting strong signals. Let’s read them.”
- GenresNonfictionFood
192 pages, Hardcover
First published May 3, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 29, 2018
This book has gone through three titles at least: Food Chained, Seeds of Revolt and Seeds of Rebellion. I find the text well written, dense but not hard to follow provided you have a little knowledge of the issues. Some photos would have really helped. Other areas could be looked at in more detail, for instance Fairtrade and food with air miles.
The author is a journalist with decades of experience of reporting on agriculture and food science around the world. He invites us to consider seeds. Crop seeds particularly; and gene editing and patenting. Reminding us that the firms which genetically modify (GM) crop seeds are pesticide producers first and foremost, the author explains that the small handful of these firms like Monsanto and DuPont have bought up the small seed sellers and come to an oligarchy.
The two main ways seeds have been altered, we're told, is to make them resistant to pests - anything chewing the leaves has its stomach exploded - and to make them immune to herbicide Roundup, so that farmers can spray herbicide on competition weeds. (When Roundup came out of patent, the maker Monsanto secretly paid stores to keep it on the shelves and push it over generic brands.) The seeds are also made sterile before sale, in some cases, so farmers can't save and reseed. This sterility and patenting of specific genetic inheritance, which may be partly pig or fish as well as plant, means that a plant cannot evolve to suit a changing climate. Farmers are not allowed to sell these crops as organic, so contamination with windblown GM pollen on a crop can cause a detectable amount of GM in the resultant grain. As the GM farmers have got their crops bulk-sold the only market left for the tainted crop is animal feed. The author shows how it is that laws have not been made to hold the seed patenters liable for damages.
Of course, Europe decided after a few field trials which tended to get mysteriously destroyed, that GM seeds would be banned. The farmers who worry that no untainted soy or corn is left in America may be close on right, but Europe has a genetic reservoir. And the author is more concerned with an even older genetic reservoir, a Middle Eastern store of saved, regrown and resaved seeds. These thousands of years old ancestral grains have adapted to dry conditions and we are going to need their merits. We learn of a seed bank in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib, which stored more than 150 varieties of crop seeds. As war tore the area in 2003, some scientists managed to get out with bags of seeds, escaping... to a town near Aleppo in Syria. Oops. Amazingly seeds survived another war and they recur in a few places through the book.
One place some of these seeds were sent was Italy, where two sacks of mixed wheat grains were given to two farmers, one on dry Sicily and one in fertile Tuscany. The seeds cross-pollinated, with those best suited to local conditions thriving. This matters because in 1970 a fungal blight spread through America's corn crop. All the grain was the same variety and had no resistance. An Agriculture minister tried to get assurance of American crop genetic diversity recently but the seed patenters would not co-operate. By asking farmers to send in seeds they were sowing instead, a safe food organisation managed to test them and found that many of the supposedly different seeds were genetically identical in different packets.
The author compares this to the potato blight that infected Ireland's potatoes in the 1840s but does not get it right. He says all the plants were from the same strain brought by Raleigh and this one strain had no resistance. Not so. The Irish and Scots had several varieties of potato to choose to grow, but the poorer people had small patches of rented marginal land for their crops, specifically in the West and Islands of Ireland and Scotland, and this small patch had to feed a large family with next to no income. The preferred plant was called the Lumper as it had a large lumpy tuber and was the most prolific cropper. Wealthy landowners did not depend on potatoes and more prosperous farmers could choose tastier varieties or early and late croppers. The Lumper turned out to have no resistance to blight. Other varieties did. The Lumper is still grown in test patches in our agri-stations today, still showing blight on the leaves when other plants are clean.
(See Woodbrook by David Thomson.)
We also look at Native American farmers who grew and preserved heritage varieties of many plants along with knowledge of how to grow food in a desert. One of the first botanists to look at indigenous heritage plants in many countries was Nikoly Vavilov, a Russian who was sent in 1916 to trace the source of soldiers' illness - fungus on wheat - and went on to try to invest grains with traits to help them survive Russian cold. Today we need all the knowledge and many seeds which are otherwise extinct. The Seed Vault in Svalbard famously got a leak in recent months. This shows that the warming climate is unpredictable. The seed patenters are working "to uncouple the plant from the environment" while organic farmers are working to restore a degraded environment.
Money talks a lot in this book; laws are made or not made, investigations carried out or not, lobbying is fierce from the different sides of the issue. We also look briefly at impoverished countries exporting cash crops to wealthy nations. New Zealand looked at results from tests of American crops against EU crops and decided that as the yield was no better in America, even lower, it would ban GM. EU crops require more hands-on work, but natural pest-eaters will keep pest numbers low if they are not poisoned. And in an era when more jobs are being lost to automation every day, even in China (a massive food importer facing the reality of drought hitting its supplier America) I think we could well give people work on farms. The countryside community needs people and nature rather than the sterility of miles of monocrops.
Bibliography and notes P128 - 147. I counted 27 names which I could be sure were female.
I downloaded an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
You may also be interested in:
The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson
The Price of Thirst by Karen Piper.
The author is a journalist with decades of experience of reporting on agriculture and food science around the world. He invites us to consider seeds. Crop seeds particularly; and gene editing and patenting. Reminding us that the firms which genetically modify (GM) crop seeds are pesticide producers first and foremost, the author explains that the small handful of these firms like Monsanto and DuPont have bought up the small seed sellers and come to an oligarchy.
The two main ways seeds have been altered, we're told, is to make them resistant to pests - anything chewing the leaves has its stomach exploded - and to make them immune to herbicide Roundup, so that farmers can spray herbicide on competition weeds. (When Roundup came out of patent, the maker Monsanto secretly paid stores to keep it on the shelves and push it over generic brands.) The seeds are also made sterile before sale, in some cases, so farmers can't save and reseed. This sterility and patenting of specific genetic inheritance, which may be partly pig or fish as well as plant, means that a plant cannot evolve to suit a changing climate. Farmers are not allowed to sell these crops as organic, so contamination with windblown GM pollen on a crop can cause a detectable amount of GM in the resultant grain. As the GM farmers have got their crops bulk-sold the only market left for the tainted crop is animal feed. The author shows how it is that laws have not been made to hold the seed patenters liable for damages.
Of course, Europe decided after a few field trials which tended to get mysteriously destroyed, that GM seeds would be banned. The farmers who worry that no untainted soy or corn is left in America may be close on right, but Europe has a genetic reservoir. And the author is more concerned with an even older genetic reservoir, a Middle Eastern store of saved, regrown and resaved seeds. These thousands of years old ancestral grains have adapted to dry conditions and we are going to need their merits. We learn of a seed bank in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib, which stored more than 150 varieties of crop seeds. As war tore the area in 2003, some scientists managed to get out with bags of seeds, escaping... to a town near Aleppo in Syria. Oops. Amazingly seeds survived another war and they recur in a few places through the book.
One place some of these seeds were sent was Italy, where two sacks of mixed wheat grains were given to two farmers, one on dry Sicily and one in fertile Tuscany. The seeds cross-pollinated, with those best suited to local conditions thriving. This matters because in 1970 a fungal blight spread through America's corn crop. All the grain was the same variety and had no resistance. An Agriculture minister tried to get assurance of American crop genetic diversity recently but the seed patenters would not co-operate. By asking farmers to send in seeds they were sowing instead, a safe food organisation managed to test them and found that many of the supposedly different seeds were genetically identical in different packets.
The author compares this to the potato blight that infected Ireland's potatoes in the 1840s but does not get it right. He says all the plants were from the same strain brought by Raleigh and this one strain had no resistance. Not so. The Irish and Scots had several varieties of potato to choose to grow, but the poorer people had small patches of rented marginal land for their crops, specifically in the West and Islands of Ireland and Scotland, and this small patch had to feed a large family with next to no income. The preferred plant was called the Lumper as it had a large lumpy tuber and was the most prolific cropper. Wealthy landowners did not depend on potatoes and more prosperous farmers could choose tastier varieties or early and late croppers. The Lumper turned out to have no resistance to blight. Other varieties did. The Lumper is still grown in test patches in our agri-stations today, still showing blight on the leaves when other plants are clean.
(See Woodbrook by David Thomson.)
We also look at Native American farmers who grew and preserved heritage varieties of many plants along with knowledge of how to grow food in a desert. One of the first botanists to look at indigenous heritage plants in many countries was Nikoly Vavilov, a Russian who was sent in 1916 to trace the source of soldiers' illness - fungus on wheat - and went on to try to invest grains with traits to help them survive Russian cold. Today we need all the knowledge and many seeds which are otherwise extinct. The Seed Vault in Svalbard famously got a leak in recent months. This shows that the warming climate is unpredictable. The seed patenters are working "to uncouple the plant from the environment" while organic farmers are working to restore a degraded environment.
Money talks a lot in this book; laws are made or not made, investigations carried out or not, lobbying is fierce from the different sides of the issue. We also look briefly at impoverished countries exporting cash crops to wealthy nations. New Zealand looked at results from tests of American crops against EU crops and decided that as the yield was no better in America, even lower, it would ban GM. EU crops require more hands-on work, but natural pest-eaters will keep pest numbers low if they are not poisoned. And in an era when more jobs are being lost to automation every day, even in China (a massive food importer facing the reality of drought hitting its supplier America) I think we could well give people work on farms. The countryside community needs people and nature rather than the sterility of miles of monocrops.
Bibliography and notes P128 - 147. I counted 27 names which I could be sure were female.
I downloaded an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
You may also be interested in:
The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson
The Price of Thirst by Karen Piper.
September 20, 2018
I loved this book!
I not only read it...I consumed it! I learned so much that more often than not I found myself making notes on a pad of paper, muttering, "Hmm, I didn't know that"
This is a fascinating, disturbing, inspiring book about the seed industry (obviously), the food industry, the release of power and the struggle to reclaim our control of our food.
If you are interested in the farm-to-table movement, or the 100-mile-meal movement, or even just interested in knowing what you put in your body...this book is for you.
I would give this book ten stars if I could.
AWESOME BOOK!!!
I not only read it...I consumed it! I learned so much that more often than not I found myself making notes on a pad of paper, muttering, "Hmm, I didn't know that"
This is a fascinating, disturbing, inspiring book about the seed industry (obviously), the food industry, the release of power and the struggle to reclaim our control of our food.
If you are interested in the farm-to-table movement, or the 100-mile-meal movement, or even just interested in knowing what you put in your body...this book is for you.
I would give this book ten stars if I could.
AWESOME BOOK!!!
July 2, 2018
TITLE: Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply
AUTHOR: Mark Schapiro
EXPECTED PUBLICATION DATE: 18 September 2018
FORMAT: ARC ebook
ISBN-13: 9781510705760
______________________________
NOTE: I received an Advanced Readers Copy of this book from NetGalley. This review is my honest opinion of the book.
_____________________________
Rating: 4.5 stars
This book is primarily about seeds, specifically the seeds that we grow commercially and then turn into various food products. This is an extremly interesting and well written book that explores how corporations and governments have taken over (i.e. messed with) the millenia old traditions of seed saving, seed cultivation, seed planting and ultimately food production and how this is ultimately detrimental to our food security. Genetically modified crop plants and are briefly covered, as well as seed libraries (the rebels). I found the section on seed vaults to be particularly intersting. This book manages to squash a whole lot of important information into a mere 160 pages, covering the important aspects of this topic and still managing to be accessible, easy to read/understand and personable.
AUTHOR: Mark Schapiro
EXPECTED PUBLICATION DATE: 18 September 2018
FORMAT: ARC ebook
ISBN-13: 9781510705760
______________________________
NOTE: I received an Advanced Readers Copy of this book from NetGalley. This review is my honest opinion of the book.
_____________________________
Rating: 4.5 stars
This book is primarily about seeds, specifically the seeds that we grow commercially and then turn into various food products. This is an extremly interesting and well written book that explores how corporations and governments have taken over (i.e. messed with) the millenia old traditions of seed saving, seed cultivation, seed planting and ultimately food production and how this is ultimately detrimental to our food security. Genetically modified crop plants and are briefly covered, as well as seed libraries (the rebels). I found the section on seed vaults to be particularly intersting. This book manages to squash a whole lot of important information into a mere 160 pages, covering the important aspects of this topic and still managing to be accessible, easy to read/understand and personable.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews