The Real Meaning of Heirloom

I was going to quote heavily from this article about biodiversity, but I think I'll just link it instead. I couldn't phrase it so nicely anyway.

Here's the part that really encapsulates the whole deal:

It might be argued that, the issue of unnecessary transport aside, an increase in trade invariably leads to increased choice for consumers. After all, are not consumers now exposed to all kinds of new and exotic foods in their supermarket, foods that cannot be produced locally? While in a sense this is true, the reality is that the purported diversity offered by the global economy and its supermarkets is based on modes of production that are condemning producers to monoculture. The perceived expansion of choice obscures a startling loss in real diversity. Whereas a few decades ago, one could find more than a dozen varieties of apple or tomato in the local market, today there are typically just three or four. These are the same three or four varieties that you would find in a supermarket on the other side of the country, or on another continent - the few select varieties that have the characteristics that are most conducive to the demands of long-distance transport. As part of this process the diverse cheeses from France, the apple varieties of Devon and the olive groves of Andalusia are progressively being replaced by standardised hybrids, to suit the long distance, large scale marketplace. Examples of the once-famed range of more than 200 regional English apples are now a rarity in English shopping baskets - an example of what ‘choice’ actually means in the global economy.

This lack of real diversity at the market is mirrored in an increasing number of the world’s agricultural fields. The consequence of more and more farmers orienting their production towards far-away markets has been a startling loss in agricultural biodiversity. In China, of the 10,000 wheat varieties in use in 1949, only 1,000 remained in the 1970s. In the US, 95 per cent of the cabbage, 91 per cent of the field maize, 94 per cent of the pea, and 81 per cent of the tomato varieties have been lost. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), approximately 75 per cent of the world’s agricultural diversity has been lost in the last century. The implications of this trend for food security are ominous. Not only are there fewer kinds of foods being raised and eaten around the world, but diversity within the few remaining staples is being lost as well. Since a field planted in monoculture is more susceptible to devastation by pests and blight, the risks rise exponentially when much of the entire planet’s arable land is planted in virtually identical strains. In 1970, for example, 80 per cent of the corn planted in the US shared a common genetic heritage. When a maize blight struck, it quickly destroyed more than 10 million acres of corn. — From the Ground Up. Rethinking Industrial Agriculture, p. xvii - xviii, by Helena Norberg-Hodge/Peter Goering/John Page

Great. Now I feel like Lenny Bruce on one of his later-in-life tirades. Next time I'll say something more amusing.