GREEN & SUSTAINABLE

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Renewing America's Food Traditions

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Vermont farmers like Pete Johnson of Pete's Greens are preserving heirloom varieties of tomatoes and bringing them and other organic produce to area restaurants and farmers' markets.

Gone are flavors, aromas, textures and colors we can hardly imagine: historic delicacies from the sea such as White abalone and Shortnose sturgeon; the Cui-ui sucker and the Colorado pike-minnow from our rivers; Gaspé flint corn, Chapalote popcorn, Jack beans and Sumpweed sunflowers from our fields. We once grew some 14,000 named varieties of apples in North America, but our nursery trade today comprises only about 1,400, some of which are new varieties. Each apple had a different taste, use, season of maturity and keeping time in cold cellars; some were for hard cider, others for baking or for eating right off the tree. Many of them may still be out there, a few last trees surviving in abandoned orchards and hedgerows.

While we are dimly aware of what we may have lost, we are starting to learn the consequences of their disappearance. In the 1700s, it is estimated that one in every four birds in North America was a passenger pigeon. By 1914, this popular source of food had been hunted to extinction. With the pigeons gone, their primary food source—acorns—began to flourish. Shortly after, the population of deer and mice, which also subsist on acorns, began to explode as did the ticks these animals carry. Scientists now directly link the disappearance of the passenger pigeon to the spread of Lyme disease.

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