Heritage seed varieties are available at April festivals
Vegetable seedlings from heritage seed varieties will be available to the public at a festival on the island of Aegina on Sunday, April 1, as part of a program by the Association of Active Citizens of Aegina to promote healthier food. The association was prompted by the work done by the Peliti alternative community in northern Greece that collects heritage seed varieties from around the country and has published a catalog of sources. «A group of us got together and acquired seeds from producers listed in the catalog. We started growing them along with other seeds we collected ourselves,» said Aris Pavlos. The festival is being held in Aegina’s port at the Pyrgos tou Markellou beginning at 11 a.m. Apart from plants, information on planting with an emphasis on drought-tolerant plants adapted to conditions in Greece will also be available. «The idea is to develop a better relationship with the food we eat,» said Pavlos. «Even if we grow just a few things ourselves, we appreciate the farmers more.» The festival includes a film screening, games for children and a talk by Panayiotis Sainatoudis, the coordinator of Peliti. «Local varieties are a living part of our culture. Just as we have a duty to preserve the Acropolis, we have a duty to preserve our local food varieties,» said Sainatoudis at a presentation in Athens last week. «Food sold in most stores these days is uniform, created in laboratories mainly for economic reasons. In nature, there is no uniformity, but variety,» he continued. «The seeds that have come down to us through the ages have been through thousands of tests – strong winds, diseases, wars, all kinds of wear and tear – which have made them resistant to disease and weather conditions. But today in farming there is a growing genetic uniformity. Only six varieties of corn are cultivated in the world today. That means that if one of them is affected by disease, a country’s entire crop could be destroyed. Using local varieties prevents the spread of epidemics.» Some of the heritage varieties still grown in parts of Greece have been cultivated for some 8,000 years. Heritage wheat includes Triticum monococcum (commonly known as Einkorn wheat, in Greece as kaploutzas), one of the first cultivated by humans and probably the ancestor of all other wheat varieties cultivated today, and Triticum aestivum, seeds of which were found by archaeologists in the ruined palace of Knossos. «There are varieties of vegetables such as beans, corn and potatoes that have adapted to conditions in Greece and can now be called local varieties, even if they were originally from somewhere else,» said Sainatoudis. Peliti’s catalog also includes a list of livestock breeders who raise traditional breeds of animals, such as the short-horned cattle (Bos brachyceros) that have been bred in Greece for 10,000 years. According to Dimitris Dimou, a livestock breeder in Trikala, only two breeds of the original five that were raised in Greece until about 1960 are still being bred – the short-horned cattle, of which he estimates there are about 2,000, and the Katerini breed of Greek steppe cattle (Bos primigenius) of which he has 118 of the total 180 still in Greece. «One million cattle have disappeared from the Greek countryside in the last 40 years,» Dimou said. «Cattle breeds have been introduced that cannot adapt to the Greek environment but need to be fed. The traditional breeds were able to exploit the Greece’s poor pastureland; they adapted. These new breeds might be bigger but they are not as productive.» Over the past 10 years Dimou, who also breeds pigs, has taken part in research by universities to find and study native breeds of farm animals. He has been awarded by the Slow Food organization for his work in preserving the agricultural biodiversity of farm animals. Unfortunately, his meat is not available in the stores – he sells straight to customers. Part of the solution Sainatoudis believes that all would not be lost if people began supporting local initiatives, of which the Aegina association is just one example. «We are living in a time in which there is what could be called a world ‘dictatorship’ in which a few companies are in a way trying to control the world population,» he said. «Whoever controls food supplies wields great political and economic power… We may feel helpless, but if we realize that we bear some responsibility for what is happening, then we also can be part of the solution.» The first thing, he says, is to have a positive attitude. «When we focus on things that are positive these will increase in number,» he said. «Even by starting one’s own herb garden on a balcony or windowsill, one discovers other like-minded people and realizes that one is not alone. Another thing that we should all try to do is buy food that has been grown as close as possible to where we live.» Heritage seed varieties of fruit and vegetables collected by volunteers from the Peliti alternative community on missions throughout the country will also be available to the public at Peliti’s annual festival, to be held on Saturday, April 14, at the Monastery of Timios Prodromos at Anatoli, Kissavos, in the prefecture of Larissa. This is Peliti’s seventh annual event that has become a fixture for everyone interested in preserving quality food in the face of the growing onslaught of globalized food varieties.
