Transcript
Speaker: Seeds are small, pervasive, and full of life.
Speaker: A Welsh proverb states, a seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible.
Speaker: But how many times in a day do you think about seeds?
Speaker: I mean, unless you're a gardener or involved in agriculture, you probably don't.
Speaker: But how many times a day do you think about clothing, the price of gas, what to eat, or about sneaking a piece of chocolate on your break or maybe grabbing a beer after work with friends?
Speaker: You know, my first thought of the day is usually make coffee.
Speaker: The thing is that all of these things are seeds, from the cotton that makes the clothes we wear to the beans that make up our morning coffee.
Speaker: And it would be hard to imagine life without them, at least a life that we would want to live.
Speaker: The truth is, whether we think about them or not, seeds are essential to life.
Speaker: They represent life.
Speaker: And maybe most interesting of all, every seed has a story.
Speaker: In this episode of Stories Worth Telling Forever, I take a closer look at the fascinating world of seeds alongside Adam Alexander, otherwise known as the Seed Detective, as he helps me to uncover some of the many mysteries hidden in seeds.
Speaker: All stored on the permaweb, powered by Arweave and Accord.com.
Speaker: There were a lot of things that really struck me when researching the topic of seeds.
Speaker: Their beauty, design, the stories they seem to contain.
Speaker: From the waxy, bright blue seed-like jewels of the blue Hesper palm to the sandbox tree.
Speaker: that holds its seeds in a kind of pumpkin-shaped capsule that explodes when it ripens, shooting seeds as far as 30 meters from the tree at 240 kilometers an hour.
Speaker: Seeds are alive.
Speaker: Carol Baskin, professor at the University of Kentucky, referred to seeds as baby plants in a box with their lunch.
Speaker: So inside each protective box or seed is essentially this living plant baby with all the food and energy it needs to grow up.
Speaker: The mystery is when and how it starts to do that.
Speaker: So the seed it needs to land in the right place at the right time in order to grow.
Speaker: But that perfect combination doesn't always happen easily or quickly.
Speaker: In fact, sometimes it takes thousands of years.
Speaker: The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Masada is located in Israel atop of this large isolated rock plateau.
Speaker: It looks down on the western shore of the Dead Sea.
Speaker: The top of this plateau is home to a natural fortress surrounding this magnificent palace that 2000 years ago became the stronghold of a group of Jewish rebels or assassins known as the Sakkari.
Speaker: One of the things that makes this fortress at Masada so unique are the steep cliffs that surround the plateau, making the only way to access it using a few narrow desert paths leading up this 400-meter incline to Masada.
Speaker: So this natural land formation gives Masada a huge defensive advantage and it makes it easy for them to keep an eye on the surrounding areas.
Speaker: But limited access also meant limited exit.
Speaker: So in 73 CE, the Sakkari found themselves as one of the last holdouts of the then Jewish Empire
Speaker: and they were trapped.
Speaker: They watched their natural defenses dissolve as the Romans slowly built this ramp of earth that stretched 197 meters in length and rose to the top where they built a tower and positioned a battering ram to breach Masada's walls.
Speaker: And so when the Romans finally entered Masada, they fully expected to be greeted by these dagger-carrying Sicarii assassins.
Speaker: But instead, there was nothing but silence.
Speaker: You see, rather than surrender or suffer defeat, the Sakkari had committed mass suicide.
Speaker: And some call this a story of courage, sacrifice and resilience.
Speaker: But it should be said that there are debates as to how this story could be interpreted.
Speaker: But however you interpret the story, there is no denying the impact that it had on the local culture.
Speaker: And there is absolutely an undeniable story of resilience in a somewhat overlooked aspect of this story.
Speaker: And it has to do with a very special seed.
Speaker: You see, before they died, the Sicari did two things.
Speaker: They burned their possessions, denying the Romans any spoils of war, and they chose to preserve their food stores, apparently to let the Romans know that the suicide of their people
Speaker: was not an act of desperation, but an act of defiance.
Speaker: So in the 60s, when they finally did the excavations at Masada, archaeologists uncovered food provisions that had somehow survived Masada's collapse.
Speaker: they found these carefully preserved foodstuffs, dates, with bits of fruit still adhering to the seeds.
Speaker: So then all these findings at Masada, they were labeled, cleaned, documented, and they stored them at a museum.
Speaker: And then in 2005, Dr. Elaine Salawi, a horticulturist and director of the Arava Institute, decided to plant one of these date seeds.
Speaker: Was the seed still alive?
Speaker: Could it have survived the destruction of Masada 2000 years ago and then sat for another four decades at a museum?
Speaker: Well, to the shock of nearly everyone, the seed not only sprouted but grew into a healthy date palm, which was named Methuselah, the name of the longest living person recorded in the Bible.
Speaker: So the story of this seed, it's really now become this kind of living time capsule.
Speaker: Today, you can enjoy a date from the tree named Methuselah, grown 2000 years after its seed somehow survived the destruction of a fortress by a world-class army.
Speaker: If that's not resilient, I don't know what is.
Speaker: Well actually, most seeds have the ability to act as time capsules.
Speaker: in the sense that they are a reflection of their ancestor seeds.
Speaker: With the new plants and their seeds being shaped by the environment, the climate, the choices the people made that planted and grew them, what kind of soil they used.
Speaker: This results in something that is truly unique, while other plants maintain their genetic identities, remaining unchanged for generations and enabling us to enjoy the same garlic they ate 2,000 years ago.
Speaker: And it becomes this kind of living connection to the past.
Speaker: But how is it possible for a seed to remain viable or alive for thousands of years?
Speaker: Well, it's possible because of something called seed dormancy.
Speaker: When you buy a packet of seed to grow at home, those seeds are dormant.
Speaker: They're not fresh, but they are still living.
Speaker: They just need a specific set of circumstances to germinate.
Speaker: Now some seeds, they need a cold winter followed by a warming period to sprout in the spring.
Speaker: In his book, The Triumph of Seeds, Tor Hansen mentions how some wild mustard seeds
Speaker: respond to changes in the angle and length of daylight through six feet of snowpack.
Speaker: He also mentions how there are some that recognize the difference between full sunlight and the far red wavelengths that filter through leaves.
Speaker: So whatever the seed needs, dormant seeds,
Speaker: cannot and will not germinate until certain conditions are met.
Speaker: Some seeds from fire prone areas remain completely waterproof and they will not sprout until flames crack their coats and unplug these tiny holes to let moisture in.
Speaker: There are seeds that respond to ash, gases, and some are even described as having rain gauges built into their shells or seed coats.
Speaker: How is it that these seemingly inanimate objects are living and able to gauge temperature, smoke, gas, daylight?
Speaker: How they do this is still not fully understood.
Speaker: And the stories and mysteries don't end here.
Speaker: What better way to talk about the mystery surrounding seeds than to chat with the man they call the seed detective, Adam Alexander.
Speaker: Now one of the things you mentioned in your book was that like 30 years ago, you never thought about vegetables being in danger.
Speaker: And then you realize that embedded in them is culture, social traditions, and that each one actually had its own story.
Speaker: And now you've written this book, The Seed Detective, and it tells us these stories and these kinds of secret histories that are locked away in seeds.
Speaker: But before we get into talking about that, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about who you are and how you became the seed detective.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, first of all, you should know I'm a country boy.
Speaker: So I was born and raised in Devon.
Speaker: And my mother was a farmer until she was 94 and we took her out of the house in a box.
Speaker: But until that time, she really got me gardening when I was a very little kid.
Speaker: So, you know, by when I was five, six years old, I was already...
Speaker: growing stuff, radishes and things like that.
Speaker: And she liked me to go into the gooseberry bushes to collect the gooseberries because she was a bit of a sadist, I always liked to think, but there you go.
Speaker: And I have been involved in growing really all of my life.
Speaker: It was only really when I found myself in Donetsk in the Ukraine making a TV series
Speaker: that my sort of life as a seed detective really started thanks to a remarkable encounter in a market in Donetsk where I came across this woman who kind of she's been an archetype for me um who's an elderly woman who's been growing all her own vegetables and
Speaker: her own traditions and her own cuisine.
Speaker: Her type is somebody that I've been looking for and seeking out ever since because what I just realized when I was in Donetsk was that first of all she was selling in the market these peppers which at the time I didn't really think anything about until I actually got them back to the hotel where we were trying to feed ourselves and it was absolutely delicious and it was
Speaker: sweet and crisp, but it had a beautiful fruity heat, gentle heat to it.
Speaker: Really great.
Speaker: And of course, the pepper is a fundamental part of Ukrainian cuisine, but also at the time when I was there, which was in the dying days of the Soviet Union, you know, right across the Soviet Union in Russia, they were growing peppers and of course, famous in Hungary because of paprika and
Speaker: this long tradition of using peppers in their cuisine.
Speaker: And it kind of, as you say, there was a sort of the penny dropped, as they say.
Speaker: And I then thought, well,
Speaker: I wonder in my travels, what I'll do is I'll send the crew off to make the films and I'll go and find farmers and go to markets and nose around and kind of see what... I was interested in just being able to savour those flavours and grow them myself.
Speaker: That was the original sort of driver, which was a curiosity and just a love of things that are delicious.
Speaker: And of course, these heritage and heirloom varieties, which have in many cases have been grown
Speaker: not only for generations, but for hundreds of years and even in my book, as you know, for millennia.
Speaker: Our forebears didn't grow this stuff just to stay alive.
Speaker: They grew it because it was fundamentally a part of their identity.
Speaker: And it was also, in a sense, the story of civilization.
Speaker: This domestication of vegetables is a very human story.
Speaker: Suddenly I was able to look at vegetables in a, in a completely different way and fruit and just see them as part of our collective story and their place in individual cultures, own sense of identity.
Speaker: At what point did you start thinking, you know, I need to document this.
Speaker: I need to, when did you get the idea to sort of start preparing this for a book?
Speaker: Ah, well, that is a classic story of the dysfunctionality of the media.
Speaker: I mean, I've been documenting my travels for...
Speaker: I don't know, since the early 70s.
Speaker: So I keep quite detailed diaries of all of my travels and encounters, and I've been documenting everything that I grow for at least that long.
Speaker: So I know everything that I've grown, when, where it's come from, what the results are like.
Speaker: So I have a very good archive in that sense.
Speaker: But what happened was...
Speaker: In about six years ago or so, a little bit more than that maybe, I was at a reunion in England.
Speaker: And this guy who I'd been living in a sort of communal house in Chelsea in the 70s, back in the day when you could live in Chelsea for next to nothing.
Speaker: And it was a very cool place to be off the King's Road.
Speaker: This dude had gone back to Australia, his homeland, and become quite a successful publisher.
Speaker: And he knew about my interest in seeds particularly, and also because I had been building a collection which is now around about 500 varieties.
Speaker: And on this reunion, we were, I was telling him about what I was doing and he said, look, Adam, I think it's time that you stepped out from behind the camera and got in front of the camera.
Speaker: You know, you're the seat detective and you should be telling your story.
Speaker: he very generously invested in a TV pilot.
Speaker: Next, the difficult bit was then persuading broadcasters to invest in this project.
Speaker: And the really depressing thing about working in television is, first of all, when you've got a few miles on the clock like me, you're a less attractive proposition.
Speaker: And also they just didn't get it.
Speaker: this sort of metropolitan media decision makers just thought nobody's going to be interested in this subject.
Speaker: And I was, you know, I do not like to be told no.
Speaker: And in any event, I had always planned to write a book to go with the series.
Speaker: So I thought, you know what, I'm just going to write this book.
Speaker: And the reaction to the book is, has been absolutely amazing because of course,
Speaker: It's, it's relevant to all of us.
Speaker: It matters.
Speaker: Yeah, it absolutely does.
Speaker: My, my, my professional life has been as a storyteller, as a doc, some drama, but mostly documentary storytelling.
Speaker: And I just know that actually how you engage people in something to me that is as important as the conservation of the genetic diversity of our edible crops is through stories, through help people when people
Speaker: hear those stories and see themselves as within those stories, then actually they think completely differently about what it is they're eating.
Speaker: You know, that packet of peas that came out of the deep freeze in the supermarket, that nameless thing that is just food, you suddenly realize actually there's a whole lot more going on with that humble vegetable than you ever thought.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it tastes better once you know.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker: You know, if you were to describe what a seed is, you know, what is a seed to you?
Speaker: A seed to me is memory.
Speaker: And it also is, it completes a circle.
Speaker: It links me back to those distant ancestors.
Speaker: To me, the seed is the beginning, the middle and the end, but it goes round and round.
Speaker: It doesn't actually have an end at all.
Speaker: It's this continuum.
Speaker: As I say, I go and look into my fridges in the garage.
Speaker: I've got two fridges full of seeds.
Speaker: And I can open that door and I can look at those jars of seeds or packets of seeds and the label immediately takes me back to that place where I found them or the person who gave them to me.
Speaker: Their story, that to me is memory, but it's also memory.
Speaker: very importantly, the thing that links us way back to when this all began.
Speaker: Yeah, I recall you mentioning something in your book, how I think it was Harvest Time, you compared it to opening a family photo album.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I like that.
Speaker: And also when you walk, I mean, I think a lot of gardeners, a lot of growers feel this too, is that, you know, when I walk into my garden, I mean, just like today, a good example of it is I was putting up squash from Ukraine to grow, to eat, but also to then have seeds that I can give to displaced Ukrainians to grow next year.
Speaker: And amongst them also was I was potting up a cucumber that comes from Syria.
Speaker: And I remembered
Speaker: In the act of potting up that cucumber, I was back in that store, that seed shop in Aleppo, in the Souk in Aleppo, deep underground, surrounded by these amazing edible crops that were being grown in Syria then.
Speaker: And it just reminds me of my own journey, but it also, I know that those two vegetables
Speaker: really mean something to the people whose cultures they are a fundamental part of.
Speaker: So it's a journey in my garden, it's a continual journey all over the world and into my past, as well as into the future, because of course, one's growing them for next season and the season after.
Speaker: That is awesome.
Speaker: I absolutely love that.
Speaker: The idea of you going somewhere and taking something from one of these countries and then bringing it back with you, growing it, and then, you know, a displaced person, a refugee moves to your area and you're able to take that vegetable from their homeland and share it with them.
Speaker: You go, this rescued piece of their home.
Speaker: That is special.
Speaker: So I got a call from a friend of mine who said there's this Ukrainian family who are living in a village near me and the husband is a very keen gardener and he'd been back to Ukraine just a few, I don't know, a couple of months ago.
Speaker: He'd gone back briefly to collect some seeds from his garden.
Speaker: And he but he didn't doesn't have a garden where he's living anyway.
Speaker: She said to me, he's given me a couple of little seedlings of a tomato that he actually found in Azerbaijan, of all places.
Speaker: And this guy, Valeri, so she gave me one of his tomato plants and I said, I'd really like to meet Valeri.
Speaker: And he was really pleased.
Speaker: He and his wife came to see me yesterday and I wanted to show them what I was growing.
Speaker: And of course, one of the things that I'm growing is one of the great characters that's in my book, which is this pepper from Donetsk.
Speaker: And Valery comes from Donetsk.
Speaker: And he said, I've got nowhere to grow anything.
Speaker: And he gave me another couple of tomato plants.
Speaker: Goodness knows where I'm going to grow these.
Speaker: But then I said, are you sure you can't find room on a windowsill or something in your house to grow this pepper from Donetsk?
Speaker: And he looked at me and he said, I will try.
Speaker: So I was able to give him a pepper plant.
Speaker: And that is, that to me is, apart from the fact that it's very moving,
Speaker: and very emotional.
Speaker: It's amazing that you can have something as prosaic as that that really binds and holds people together.
Speaker: Valeria and I will be the best of friends forever as a result of that meeting yesterday.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: That's the connection between, you know, the both of you through a seed through this shared experience.
Speaker: It's, it just makes me want to grow these vegetables so that I can one day just have that experience.
Speaker: I think that's just, it's awesome.
Speaker: It's funny.
Speaker: And I actually started reading your book just after I'd completed a trip to Oman.
Speaker: And I loved your story about finding the Omani garlic.
Speaker: So how did that happen?
Speaker: Like, how did you end up, or when were you there?
Speaker: Actually, I've been working in the UAE and I needed some, I needed a bit of R&R because I love the Arab world and the Middle East and I've worked extensively there over the years, but
Speaker: I thought I want to go to Amman and everybody said it's really great.
Speaker: And also Amman grows the greatest dates anywhere on this planet.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I am led by my stomach.
Speaker: And so off we went.
Speaker: I did the thing that I always do when I go to a place I haven't been to before.
Speaker: First stop is the market.
Speaker: Because markets in the Arab world, there are no women selling you vegetables.
Speaker: It's all guys.
Speaker: It's a very different vibe, if you like, in these markets.
Speaker: But I saw in the market there was a lot of Omani produce that was being grown there.
Speaker: And so I thought, blimey, I...
Speaker: I'm learning something about this place that I hadn't really thought of.
Speaker: I was just going to disappear off to an empty beach and do nothing for a week.
Speaker: But no, so I got up a four by four and drove up onto the Saïd Plateau.
Speaker: Having been told that this was the place which was famous for its damask roses, and I was keen to see, that was really what I was interested to see there.
Speaker: And also I'd heard a lot about the irrigation.
Speaker: And I'm always fascinated by how
Speaker: societies, how they live and thrive in these incredibly, on the face of it, inhospitable places.
Speaker: You know, because it's got very low rainfall, it's incredibly steep.
Speaker: Anyway, I arrived there and of course, I'm too early for the Damask Roses.
Speaker: But like you, wandering around amongst those incredible terraces and seeing what was being grown and feasting on dates like you wouldn't believe,
Speaker: which was then when I just by chance just stumbled on these terraces of garlic.
Speaker: And it was, I kind of,
Speaker: Over the years, I know where things have come, I know where things, they originated.
Speaker: And so when I see something that is incongruous, like garlic growing on the site plateau, you think kind of, why is it there?
Speaker: It was, and then talking to the hotelier who happened to own, was a farmer who was growing all this garlic.
Speaker: It got me thinking about, you know, what was the importance of Amman in terms of the movement of people, not modern geopolitics, but the geopolitics of four and a half thousand years ago.
Speaker: And if you think about Damascus, which is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, which is in this same corner of the world as Amman, and you would be traveling up from the south,
Speaker: You'd arrive at the peninsula.
Speaker: You'd no doubt be getting on a camel to head north up through to Damascus and Aleppo and then on to Constantinople.
Speaker: But your starting point would have been this incredible little corner of the Arabian Gulf.
Speaker: And one of the things that we did, our ancestors did when they traveled, and which we still do today, I do it, and I know lots of people who do it.
Speaker: Valery, my new friend from born in Donetsk, what was he doing?
Speaker: He was going back to bring seeds back to England from his home, although these ones came from Azerbaijan.
Speaker: I digress.
Speaker: The point is that we carry the seeds of our identity with us
Speaker: As we travel from south to north or wherever it is, whether it's traders, whether being displaced, having to find somewhere else to, to make our lives and with them, the thing we bring is our memories of home.
Speaker: And in this case, it was garlic that had come originally from South Asia.
Speaker: So that's a long way away.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's amazing how, you know, you know, that garlic that's growing in your garden now it's so it's
Speaker: this connection or this link back to this, the story that you have and the people that you met, just to think you can go somewhere and take that with you and have a garden growing full of those
Speaker: experiences and memories like, you know, people like me who are relatively new to gardening and growing seeds.
Speaker: What would be a vegetable or something that you would encourage them to start with that would be kind of like this high impact vegetable to get them hooked on the whole process?
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: What's your favorite vegetable?
Speaker: and grow that because all of these vegetables have their own stories.
Speaker: And obviously some are easier to grow than others.
Speaker: And I would always say you want to grow things that are well adapted.
Speaker: So you want to select, you think, actually, I really love tomatoes.
Speaker: That's my favorite vegetable.
Speaker: Actually it's a fruit, but that's another matter.
Speaker: And I love them.
Speaker: So then grow the tomato that
Speaker: you think is the most delicious, or that somebody gives you a plant of who is a neighbor, who may have been growing it for some time.
Speaker: Or when you go to the farmer's market, there's somebody there who's got a variety that really
Speaker: gives you the wow factor and then grow that yourself.
Speaker: And the reason you grow it is because actually you like eating it because there's no point in growing something just because somebody says you should grow this, it's really, really good.
Speaker: Actually, you should grow it because you think it's really, really good.
Speaker: I have favorites for different times of the year.
Speaker: So I think the other thing is grow something that is a trigger.
Speaker: So for me, I mean, it may sound crazy,
Speaker: But there is, to me, there is nothing lovelier than in the spring going into my polytunnel and pulling a carrot in
Speaker: late February out of the ground in the polytunnel in early March, wiping it on the pants of my seat of my trousers and biting into it because that is to me is the first taste, if you like, of spring from something that I sowed in the autumn.
Speaker: The other wonderful things are things like radishes.
Speaker: I just, early radish,
Speaker: you know, it's March and the weather is not great.
Speaker: And yet there is this wonderful thing that's coming through the ground and it's peppery and delicious.
Speaker: And then in the summertime, it's eating, you know, if you grow melons and you harvest a melon on a hot summer's day,
Speaker: and the flesh is warm from the sun and sweet, you think you've died and gone to heaven.
Speaker: Which is why you should be growing as much stuff as you can, I say, regardless of where you are.
Speaker: Well, that carrot sounds pretty good.
Speaker: It's been a pleasure talking with you, Adam.
Speaker: And just out of curiosity, if we want to follow along where you're going next, is there somewhere we can sort of catch up with what you're doing?
Speaker: I will be over the next few months just sharing some of my experiences as I'm researching this new book through my website.
Speaker: Just get in touch with me and tell me, hey, Adam, what the hell are you up to?
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Well, I'll be doing that and I'll definitely make sure the link to the website is in the notes for the show here.
Speaker: Once again, appreciate.
Speaker: Well, for me too, I'm very glad we finally got to speak.
Speaker: While it would be great if we could entrust Adam to preserve the many thousands of seed varieties we've discovered,
Speaker: Really everyone can have a share.
Speaker: And if you're interested in sharing, swapping or learning more about preserving seeds, it's definitely worth searching out seed related resources, organizations and communities in your local area.
Speaker: And I'll leave some links for those in the description.
Speaker: Beyond the saving of seeds as individuals, there are also those with much bigger plans.
Speaker: Plans to preserve and protect seeds that may prove to be essential for the feeding of humanity in the future.
Speaker: So this kind of seed-based insurance policy is based around the idea of something called seed banks.
Speaker: Now there are seed banks run by governments, institutions, private organizations all over the world.
Speaker: And they do what you might think.
Speaker: They collect and preserve seeds in case we need them in the future.
Speaker: But to give you a sense of the scale of what's going on, one international organization, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, they contribute to some of the most important seed banks in the world.
Speaker: They have an annual endowment of $850 million.
Speaker: And that's just one organization.
Speaker: There are many other seed banks that are not funded.
Speaker: by this organization.
Speaker: So you might wonder, why is this such an important thing when we've existed for thousands of years without seed banks?
Speaker: Well, the threats we face now are unlike anything that has come before.
Speaker: And while there isn't enough time in this episode to do a deep dive into all of the reasons, I think it's important for people to understand that seed banks are more than just about preserving seeds from disease, climate change or disasters.
Speaker: In the 1960s, governments and big corporations promoted these high-yielding miracle crops as a new kind of solution to world hunger.
Speaker: The seeds were more expensive, but the farmers were promised significantly higher yields from the crops.
Speaker: All they had to do was plant these special seeds and use the chemicals and fertilizers that accompanied them.
Speaker: So this change towards these miracle crop varieties, it was subsidized by governments.
Speaker: So they helped farmers switch their crops and started what was called a green revolution.
Speaker: Now the crops did provide short-term gains, but because it was so widely adopted, it meant that crops became more and more uniform across continents.
Speaker: Diversity was lost.
Speaker: And then they realized the pesticides that they used.
Speaker: they killed more than just pests, but insects, fish, crabs, frogs, edible herbs, wild plants, and actually the chemicals were so toxic that they even poisoned some of the farmers and their families.
Speaker: And those temporary gains that they had enjoyed,
Speaker: now became susceptible to disease, a disease that could easily wipe out these genetically uniform crops and devastate entire food systems.
Speaker: So that was the green revolution.
Speaker: After that came the gene revolution.
Speaker: This meant fundamentally changing and altering food in ways that we had never done before, never experienced before.
Speaker: It meant that you could literally take genes from bacteria, viruses, insects, animals, humans.
Speaker: In theory, you could combine corn with genes taken from COVID-19.
Speaker: Just to give you an idea of what could happen.
Speaker: Of course, these genetic modifications, they were done with the goal to improving food sources and feeding more people.
Speaker: So good intentions.
Speaker: But the problem is we don't always know how these modifications will affect people or the environment in the long term.
Speaker: When we adopt these changes without knowing it could be at some point too late to go back.
Speaker: We have entire continents growing uniform crops, potentially susceptible to new disease, new viruses.
Speaker: And then we have genetically modified food that might be safe, but might not be.
Speaker: Well, what's our fallback?
Speaker: We have seed banks that exist as a kind of insurance policy.
Speaker: They contain many wild and local varieties of seeds that can be planted, studied, and maybe one day come to the rescue.
Speaker: One example that stands out that illustrates how seed banks can be instrumental in restoring food sources was the Irish potato famine.
Speaker: This happened in the late 1800s and approximately 1 million people died because they relied on one variety of potato and it was susceptible to disease.
Speaker: So seed banks were able to restore potato growing in Ireland and prevent this from happening again by helping people to plant a variety of potatoes.
Speaker: So while seed banks are essential for safeguarding global biodiversity and food security,
Speaker: It's also important to realize that they themselves are not immune to disasters.
Speaker: One example is the National Seed Bank of Iraq.
Speaker: You know, just before the outbreak of the war in 2003, Iraq had sent some of its most precious seeds.
Speaker: including wheat, barley, date palms to the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, which was located in Syria.
Speaker: So sent them to Syria.
Speaker: And the seed bank in Syria was really special because it had this vast collection of seeds from many countries in a sensitive region.
Speaker: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran.
Speaker: And so they were able to save some of these seeds from Iraq in Syria.
Speaker: Around 2012, war started in Syria and the seed bank was targeted and destroyed.
Speaker: However, from the time that the war started in 2012 to 2015, they were able to move a portion of
Speaker: of these seeds from Syria to Lebanon.
Speaker: Maybe one of the safest, most advanced seed banks in the world, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, sometimes referred to as the Doomsday Vault, has also faced dangers.
Speaker: Now this seed vault, it was chosen
Speaker: for its remote cold climate.
Speaker: It's on this Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
Speaker: But recent years have seen unseasonably warm temperatures and that has meant that flooding has actually come to the entrance of the seed bank.
Speaker: So this seed fortress that was built assuming that it would remain the safe haven for seeds, it's now under attack, the attack of global warming.
Speaker: then there's money all seed banks take significant funds to run and it's not always the most interesting proposition to fund a seed bank but seed banks can only preserve seeds as long as the seeds are alive and not all of them last for hundreds or thousands of years you know they need to be grown and replaced and all of that requires funding
Speaker: The Svalbard Doomsday Vault was actually intended to be a backup for other seed banks.
Speaker: You know, it's not unlike how we perceive internet-based cloud storage.
Speaker: We assume our data, our memories, our photos, they're stored safely in the cloud, backed up, right?
Speaker: But if it's stored in one place or a couple of places and something happens, war, disaster, a company going out of business or equipment failure, you know, our data could be gone.
Speaker: So just like with seeds, the more locations we have our data stored and preserved,
Speaker: The greater the confidence that we have that our data or our seeds will be there when we need them.
Speaker: And that's why each episode we make of stories worth telling forever is permanently stored on our weave.
Speaker: You know, we're able to pay once, have our episodes and their accompanying story vaults stored across thousands of nodes around the world.
Speaker: If one goes down, it doesn't affect our data.
Speaker: And we can also access and manage our data safely and easily from anywhere using accord.com.
Speaker: If you're listening to this and you have something that you want to make sure you have preserved, you can try out the Arweave storage layer using Accord on our website at foreverstories.xyz.
Speaker: While we're grateful that permanent storage exists for data, we need to keep working on a solution for seeds.
Speaker: The good news is that more and more we're realizing the value and power of seeds.
Speaker: And we have over 400,000 known seed producing plants in the world, each with its own distinct seed dispersal strategy.
Speaker: They rely on elements like wind,
Speaker: water or animals to ensure their survival.
Speaker: From the devil's claw hitching a ride on animals to the acorns reliance on squirrels.
Speaker: You know, the world of seeds, it is absolutely captivating.
Speaker: And best of all, we get to enjoy the things they become.
Speaker: But we need to remember,
Speaker: That the choices we make caring for them and the plants that they become will shape both their future and ours.
Speaker: So the next time you're out enjoying nature or making something to eat, take a moment to appreciate a seed.
Speaker: As a famous Chinese proverb said, to see things in the seed, that is genius.
Speaker: I'm Tai.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of Stories Worth Telling Forever.
Speaker: you
