Artisanal baker Eli Rogosa. Photo by Amy Toensing

The December issue of Smithsonian magazine features a story about heirloom wheat and the people who grow and bake with it. Eli Rogosa, director of the Heritage Wheat Conservancy and an artisanal baker, talks about her work in the field and in the kitchen. At the end she shares her recipe for a heritage bread.

Q: Why did you decide to devote your time to heritage varieties of wheat?

A: The silent crisis of the loss of genetic diversity of one of the world’s staple food crops is very serious—and very exciting, because there are still a lot of varieties that are in gene banks.

Q: What is your most memorable experience baking?

A: I’m working with a species of grain called einkorn, which is getting a lot of publicity these days because it’s safe for those with gluten allergies. Einkorn was originally domesticated in the Tigris/Euphrates/ancient Mesopotamian region, which today is Iraq. So I went down to the local Iraqi bakery recently and I said, “Would you like to try this bread in your bakery?” They were really excited, so I brought them some einkorn flour and they baked traditional Iraqi flatbread. They just couldn’t believe it. They said, “This is real bread, this is what it’s supposed to taste like.” The traditional methods that they bake with were the ways that einkorn was baked with for millennia. Now I think there’s five halal stores in the city where I was, Portland Maine. They just want to buy einkorn, so it’s in all the stores.

Q: Are there differences between working with flour milled from heritage wheats and standard supermarket flour?

A: It’s a whole different ballgame to buy from a local wheat grower rather than to buy from the store. The modern wheats are completely uniform. If you buy something from the supermarket, you know exactly what to expect. But if you buy a local variety from a local grower, it’s going to reflect the fertility, the variety, the weather. That explains why breads from different countries are so different.

Q: Can you substitute flour made from heritage grains for supermarket flour?

A: You can substitute. You probably might need a little less water, a little more salt because it’s lower gluten. But I just bake bread normally. I bake bread in the morning for my husband. Instead of doing a lot of kneading, I make my dough the night before and just let it sit and it gets a little bit fermented, like a light sourdough. So I think time is a factor if you make your dough the night before and then bake it the next day. It’s really easy.

Q: How much experimentation does it take before you get a bread recipe just right?

A: I don’t use recipes. I’m a creative baker—it’s easy to bake. I’ve read all the books, but I didn’t learn baking from books; I learned it from illiterate grandmas in Third World countries. Baking is like a natural process. You feel when it works right and follow the dough, and it’s very liberating when you bake by feel and consistency of the dough and not measuring. You have to play around to feel comfortable and familiar with what works.

Q: What advice would you offer to someone interested in growing heritage wheats in his or her own back yard?

A: Find a local source for heritage wheat seeds, or contact me at growseed.org, and I’ll send you samples. It’s easy. Wheats are a grass. It’s the easiest crop I’ve grown on our farm. I grow only winter wheat, which means I plant it in September and harvest in July. I find that the winter wheats are better adapted, and in the spring they just shoot up and they compete with weeds, so your weeding pressure is really decreased.

Recipe for einkorn sprout bread, by Eli Gogosa

(Makes two loaves)

STEP 1: ADVANCE PREPARATION

Five days before baking, mix 1 tablespoon (T) non-chlorinated water (spring water, distilled water, well water or rain water, NOT tap water) with 1 T einkorn flour in a bowl. (Both einkorn flour and einkorn grain are available at natural foods stores or from growseed.org. Optional: Add 1 T cultured butter milk to encourage fermentation.) Cover but don’t refrigerate. Each following day, mix in another 1 T einkorn flour and 1 T non-chlorinated water.  Keep the bowl at room temperature until the mixture has started to bubble. This is sourdough starter. Two days before baking, soak 1 cup einkorn grain in the non-chlorinated water overnight in a covered bowl. The next day pour off the water. Rinse daily and keep covered. The grains might start sprouting rootlets.

STEP 2: MAKING THE BREAD DOUGH

In a food processor, blender or hand-crank food mill, blend the soaked grains briefly so they are the consistency of chunky oatmeal. Mix the starter, 1 cup blended grain and 4 cups einkorn flour, 1 teaspoon (t) sea salt and 1 3/4 cups warm water. (If you are concerned that you may not have sufficient starter, add 1 t yeast. Optional: For sweeter, festive bread, add some chopped dates and walnuts to taste and 1/2 cup maple syrup in place of 1/2 cup water.) Add more flour if the dough is too sticky or more water if too dry. Knead the dough until it forms a ball that springs back when you poke it. Shape the dough into two loaves—flatbreads, boules or standard bread-pan loaves. Refrigerate overnight in bread pans or on a baking sheet greased with olive oil and dusted with einkorn flour.

STEP 3: BAKING

The next day, let the two loaves warm to room temperature for 1/2 hour. Dust the surfaces of the loaves with einkorn flour. Slash if desired. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Turn down the oven to 350 degrees. Bake the loaves at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until the tops of the crusts are golden brown. Turn the oven off, but keep the loaves inside for another 1/2 hour before taking them out.

These artifacts are thought to have been offerings from the earliest farming communities that lived in this area. Chemical analysis of charred food residues preserved inside a number of vessels shows they were used for processing freshwater fish, which supplemented their fledgling agricultural economy. Image courtesy of Anders Fischer.

When humans made the switch from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, it was a revolutionary transition. Archaeologists have linked the change to population growth and a wider variety in diet. Traditionally, archaeologists saw this as a relatively instantaneous changeover, with societies adopting livestock and cereal cultivation as well as the use of ceramic containers to process and store foodstuffs. But using pots as an indicator of when this shift took place is problematic, especially given evidence that even foraging societies used vessels. Now a new study of pots paints a different picture of this pivotal point in human history and suggests that the shift to farming was not as rapid as previously thought.

Researchers from the University of York and the University of Bradford focused their attentions on potsherds from inland and coastal settlements around the Baltic. Farming has been practiced there since about 4,000 B.C. Human remains from before this point in time show a diet heavy in marine life, while later remains indicate a diet heavy in land-based foods. So if anything, it’s also a region that could support the rapid change view. In an analysis of lipids (fats and other molecules) on 133 potsherds, the researchers found that even after the practice of domesticating plants and animals was well in place, people still continued to forage for food in nearby waterways. So even though the know-how was there, the cultural shift to relying on farmed foodstuffs was much more gradual.

A male Atlantic salmon. Image courtesy of Flickr user U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region

Salmon farming has received its share of criticism for being detrimental to the environment. Many salmon are raised in net pens, which allow fish waste, chemicals and farming byproducts to spread into the wild. There’s also the threat of pathogens that could thrive in crowded pens and escape to harm natural fish populations. One disease, infectious salmon anemia, was once thought to be a problem exclusive to farmed Atlantic salmon. A new study by a group of researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia has found that this influenza-like virus is infecting naturally ocurring salmon populations.

Infectious salmon anemia was first observed 1984 and occurs most often in overcrowded, filthy salmon pens. As the name suggests, the virus causes anemia, the condition in which a body doesn’t have enough healthy red blood cells to deliver oxygen to its tissues. Infected fish may exhibit symptoms—such as pale gills and loss of appetite—or they may outwardly seem perfectly fine. While the disease doesn’t pose any risks to humans, it can wipe out upwards of 70 percent of a farmed salmon population.

This is the first time the disease has been found in wild fish off the coast of North America. After observing a decline in the salmon population off the British Columbia coast, researchers collected 48 specimens for study and discovering two juvenile fish infected with the disease. While there is currently no evidence to definitively link fish farming to the presence of salmon anemia in wild populations, there could be devastating ramifications, not just for the fishing industry, but for the wildlife that depends on salmon for food. “It’s a disease emergency,” James Winton, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s fish health section, told the Associated Press. “We’re concerned. Should it be introduced, it might be able to adapt to Pacific salmon.”

Brown rice. Image courtesy of Flickr user ayayan.s

This year’s Nobel Prize winners were honored for, among other things, discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace; their work on women’s rights and peace-building in Liberia; and advances in the understanding of immunity. But in years past, a number of winners have been recognized for food-related achievements—making food safer, more available or just increasing our knowledge of it. Here are five notable cases:

1904: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Better known for his research with canines to explain conditioned responses—training dogs to salivate when they heard a sound they had come to associate with food—Pavlov won the Nobel for his earlier work on the digestive systems of mammals. Before he devised a way of observing the digestive organs of animals, there was only a limited understanding of how the stomach digests food.

1929: Christiaan Eijkman, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Eijkman and his co-awardee, Sir Frederick Hopkins, were honored for discovering of the importance of vitamins in health and disease prevention. In the 1890s, Eijkman, of the Netherlands, studied the disease beriberi in the then–Dutch colony of Java, where he made the connection between a diet lacking rice bran (the bran had been removed to make the rice last longer) and high rates of beriberi. This was an important milestone in the eventual formation of the concept of vitamins, though the word itself wasn’t coined until 1911.

1945: Lord John Boyd Orr, Nobel Peace Prize
Orr, of Scotland, devoted much of his life to improving world nutrition and to the equitable distribution of food. After helping shape Britain’s wartime food policy, Orr became director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a World Food Board in 1947. Two years later, by which time he had retired to a lucrative business career, his efforts were recognized by the Nobel committee.

1970: Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize
Possibly no one on this list had as great an effect on so many people as Borlaug, the American considered the father of the “Green Revolution” for his development of methods that vastly improved yields and disease-resistance in crops. Although some of his methods were later criticized for having a negative environmental impact, they greatly increased food security in poor countries such as India and Pakistan. The debate over how to balance environmental concerns with the food needs of a growing world population continues today.

Farming and new media are not mutually exclusive. Image courtesy of Flickr user IRRI Images

Conscientious eaters want to know all about where their food came from, how it was grown and who grew it. Part of the appeal of farmers’ markets is getting face time with those who spend their days with their hands in the dirt. Suddenly, consumers want to have a “relationship” with their small-scale farmers, ranchers and cheese makers — people who once toiled in obscurity. (This is still usually the case in the larger agricultural industry, where the vast majority of our food comes from.)

One unintended consequence is that, now, personality counts. A grower with a winning smile or the gift of the gab may get the sale even when the wares at the next table are just as fresh and succulent-looking. There’s a pair of young, attractive male farmers in my area whose tent always seems to be crowded with female customers.

Now, technology that wasn’t around a decade ago—blogs, smartphones, Facebook and Twitter—is taking the farmer-consumer relationship to another level. It’s how CSA members can find out what’s likely to be in their share soon, get recipes for what to do with bok choy or celeriac, and read cute little stories about how the farm animals are doing. The farmer gets to communicate with current and potential customers, and office-bound readers get to live vicariously through their computer or phone screens.

Ree Drummond, who has parlayed her rural life as the wife of a cattle rancher into a wildly successful site called The Pioneer Woman, gives a glimpse of the possibilities for savvy online self-marketing. She doesn’t quite qualify as a rancher herself—although she often rides along and helps out with the chores, she seems to usually have a camera in hand—but her gorgeous photographs and folksy anecdotes about life on the range are about as good an advertisement as any for making a living off the land.

Most farmer blogs are far simpler (and, some might argue, more authentic). The Dairyman’s Blog, written by a young Alabama dairy farmer, offers “MooTube” videos of life on the farm. Self-described farm wife Jill Heemstra focuses on the funny side of farming at Fence Post Diaries, with blog titles like “You Might Be a Farmer’s Wife If…” (example: “…you use the phrase ‘semen tank’ in casual conversation”).

Blogs and tweets are also providing a new platform for farmers of all stripes to express their views on agriculture and politics. Missouri hog farmer Chris Chinn advocates on her blog for fewer government regulations and conventional farm practices that she feels have gotten a bad rap, while small-scale farmer Gavin Venn tweets as @morethanorganic with his thoughts on animal welfare and genetically modified foods.

Social media has become a stand-in for the kind of conversations farmers have always had in person, about the weather, what’s growing, advice and opinions. The Twitter hashtag #agchat encompasses discussions of parenting on the farm, venting about too much or too little rain, links to agriculture news and just about everything else of interest to the ag-minded.

But tweeting from the tractor has its perils. As Stewart Skinner, a Canadian pig farmer with the Twitter handle @ModernFarmer tweeted recently about his gadget, “The blackberry can’t stand up to the rigors of the barn. RIM needs to come up with a smartphone for farmers.”

Dried chili pepper wreath, courtesy of Flickr user min_photos

In a society that could conceive of deep-fried sticks of butter and donut burgers, it’s sometimes hard to remember that food’s main purpose is to keep us alive. In other societies, such as among the Yanesha people of the Peruvian Andes, food’s centrality to life is celebrated in myths that describe the origins of their most important food plants.

Ethnobiologist Fernando Santos-Granero, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, recently published a fascinating study of the Yanesha myths, titled “The Virtuous Manioc and the Horny Barbasco: Sublime and Grotesque Modes of Transformation in the Origin of Yanesha Plant Life.”

He explains in The Journal of Ethnobiology that the Yanesha, like other Amazonian peoples, conceive of a primordial time when all plants and animals took human form. Around the time that the present-day sun rose to the heavens, the Yanesha believe, the beings went through one of two kinds of transformation, classified as either “sublime” or “grotesque,” into their current states. The sublime transformations were associated with the upper half of the body and expressions of love and self-sacrifice, while the grotesque were “related to the baser activities of the lower body,” Santos-Granero writes. “Because of their immoral way of life—expressed in extreme forms of genital, oral, and anal incontinence—these primordial humans were separated from humanity and transformed into the plants they are nowadays.”

Santos-Granero concluded, by process of elimination (no pun intended), that the determining factor in which type of transformation a plant went through was the antiquity of its domestication. The oldest domesticated plants, and therefore those most central to the Yanesha diet—including manioc, maize, beans and peanuts—were ascribed to sublime transformations, while more recently domesticated plants—chili peppers and yams, for instance—fell into the grotesque category.

The maize narrative is an example of the sublime transformation (and has some interesting parallels to a more familiar religious story): During a time of famine, the creator god felt pity for humans, so he impregnated a virgin girl. The girl’s father demanded to know who the father was, but the girl refused to tell him—this is an example of the creator god testing the humans to see if they are worthy of his sympathy. The father accepted this child of unknown parentage, proving his worthiness, and the fair-haired grandson grew up to be Maize-Person. Maize-Person sowed pieces of himself in the grandfather’s garden and taught the people how to harvest and prepare the ensuing crop. When there was nothing more of his maize, he ascended to the sky and became a bright star.

Origin myths in the grotesque category, by contrast, center around selfish or immoral beings. For instance, chili peppers are said to be created from the farts of Hua’t~ena’, a gigantic forest ogre with an enormous, toothed penis who raped women and then ate them. And if being a “horny, cannibalistic rapist” wasn’t bad enough, his semen was poisonous to fish. He was somewhat redeemed, however, because when his selfish destruction of fish was discovered, he was ashamed—he cut off his penis and planted it, thus creating the barbasco (a plant used by the Yanesha to temporarily stun and catch fish) and, through his farts, the chili pepper.

Wild stories, indeed, but are they really any more outlandish than deep-fried sticks of butter?

What to do with the corn from your local market? Image courtesy of Flickr user Like_The_Grand_Canyon

Between high fructose corn syrup, corn starch and corn-fed meat, most Americans eat far more corn—at least indirectly—than they realize. But the best way to eat the stuff, of course, is fresh off the cob. We’re talking real fresh, as in within hours of being picked, if possible, before the sugars have a chance to turn to starch. (Unprocessed grain corn, the kind that ends up in packaged food or fed to animals, is a different variety from sweet corn and is inedible, or at least highly unpalatable, to humans.)

I could eat an ear or two of corn, simply slathered in butter and lightly sprinkled with salt, every day of summer. But that would be like telling Shaun White he had to choose either snowboarding or skateboarding, despite excelling at both, or limiting Ben Franklin to a single pursuit of inquiry. Why squelch such potential greatness?

Here are five other ways to let corn shine:

1. In salads. Good corn doesn’t even need to be cooked to add sweet, crunchy flavor to salads. Blogger Heather Christo simply tosses the kernels with cut up mango, cherry tomatoes, scallions and a Mexican-inspired dressing. HoneySage’s recipe for Fresh Corn Salad with Spicy Shrimp and Tomatoes calls for only the briefest of cooking. Summer Corn Salad from 101 Cookbooks includes pepitas (pumpkin seeds) and sunflower seeds and what Heidi Swanson describes as lemonade vinaigrette. And She Simmers explains a simple Thai snack of fresh corn and raw shredded coconut meat; the recipe is accompanied by a poignant recollection of the author’s late mother.

2. In soup. Most Americans give hot liquids a rest in summer, but fresh corn soup is worth making an exception for, or saving for a cool late-season evening. Especially when it includes grilled poblano chiles, as suggested by the Cooking Photographer. For a heartier bowlful, go for creamy corn chowder packed with potatoes—the Reluctant Gourmet offers a vegetarian version, or add bacon, as demonstrated at Kitchen Catharsis.

3. With sage. Corn and sage, like tomatoes and basil, are a combination that always works well together. Gluten Free Cooking School pairs them in Savory Sage Corn Cakes. Food 52 shares a recipe for Corn Risotto with Anchovy Sage Leaf Bite. And KitchenDaily keeps it simple with Sautéed Corn with Brown Sage Butter.

4. With its sisters. The classic example of companion planting is the Iroquois tradition of the three sisters—corn, beans and squash. These three crops complement each other both in the garden and at the table. The blog Tigers & Strawberries sticks with a dish that also originated with Native Americans (and made famous by Sylvester the cat)—succotash, a simple mélange of corn, lima beans, zucchini and seasonings. A contributor at RecipesTap included international influences in Three Sisters Fritters, combining corn, fava beans and zucchini blossoms with tarragon butter and cayenne yogurt dipping sauce.

5. Don’t forget dessert. Considering its natural sweetness, it’s surprising that corn doesn’t feature in more desserts. Brazilians have the right idea, simmering it in coconut milk and cinnamon to make corn pudding. A recipe at Taste of Home transforms fresh corn into dessert crepes topped with lemon cream and apricot jam. But the perfect summer dessert might be sweet corn ice cream—the Kitchn gives a simple recipe.

Fried frog legs. Image courtesy of Flickr user rockdoggydog.

In the story of Kermit the Frog’s rise to fame recounted in The Muppet Movie, the road to stardom is paved with danger—namely in the form of Doc Hopper, the owner of a fast-food chain specializing in frog legs who wants Kermit for a singing, dancing spokesman. Our amphibian friend is horrified by the prospect. “All I can see are millions of frogs with tiny crutches,” he says in response to Hopper’s initial business proposal. And while things turned out well for Kermit and his talented troupe of friends, in real life, it’s not that easy being green. A worldwide penchant for frogs’ legs results in billions of frogs being snapped up and eaten every year, and according to a new study, it’s a dining habit that is putting considerable strain on frog populations.

In Europe, the mild-flavored meat has been a part of the cuisine for centuries, but demand for frogs’ legs skyrocketed after World War II to the point that local frog populations in Romania went extinct. France had to place a ban on the collection of indigenous frogs in 1992. To meet consumer demands, the European Union has been importing frogs from Asia. The United States is another major frog consumer, importing an average of 2,280 tons of legs per year, most of which come from, ironically, American bullfrogs.

India was a major frog exporter starting in the 1950s; however, the wild populations of those animals eventually collapsed, and with fewer predators to feed on insects and other pests, local agriculture started to suffer. It was a problem that prompted India to ban trade in frogs in 1987, and populations have since recovered. But now history may be repeating itself in Indonesia. Using farmed frogs may be a means of taking some pressure off the animals hopping around in the wild, but even that route poses problems: non-native frogs raised on farms can escape and introduce diseases or turn into an invasive species, which is the case with Indian bullfrogs raised in Madagascar. And then there are animal welfare issues (as dramatized on “The Muppet Show“); frogs are sometimes dismembered while still alive.

The study offers a number of ways to make frog leg trade sustainable and to minimize ecological impacts, such as setting export quotas, carefully monitoring wild populations, restricting commercial farming to native species and setting humane standards for the capture and slaughter of the animals. All that said, with so many issues surrounding this food source, would you spring for a plate of frogs’ legs?

School lunch program poster. Courtesy of the National Archives

When Thomas Jefferson visited Lombardy, Italy in 1787, exporting rice in the husk was illegal on pain of death. Such trivialities didn’t keep this founding father from secreting illicit grains in his pockets and taking them back to America. “The greatest service which can be rendered to any country,” he later wrote, “is to add a useful plant to its culture.” (Indeed, he considered his introduction of European rice and olive trees to the Americas as one of his greatest life accomplishments alongside writing the Declaration of Independence.) That attitude was adopted and maintained by the United States government, and a show on view at the National Archives explores how Uncle Sam affects how we eat. Through paper ephemera, sound recordings, posters, the show illustrates how the government influenced food on the farm, in the factories, in our homes and in the overall American diet.

I think most of us are at least somewhat aware of the ways in which the government guides how we eat. If you went to public school, you were probably exposed to the federally subsidized lunch program (for better or for worse). You may have noticed the recent unveiling of the plate-shaped infographic designed to help Americans plan balanced meals. And then there are FDA food recalls. Those facets are certainly represented here. But this show is a revelation (at least for me) for exhibiting the breadth of Uncle Sam’s involvement in our food. Beginning in the 1830s, the USDA started a seed distribution program in which they gave free seeds to farmers in an attempt to figure out which plants would fare well in a variety of soils and climates. And when food production became industrialized—with factories and canneries cranking out prefab products—the USDA had to step in to set quality guidelines when Americans were getting sick from ill-prepared foodstuffs. It got to the point where a “poison squad” was appointed to test suspect additives and preservatives to determine which ones were actually safe for human consumption.

Steady readers know of my love of food-related crime, so it was fascinating—if not slightly bizarre—to see mug shots of men who did time for violating the oleomargarine act by selling margarine that was colored to look like butter. Another display—attractively housed in a doughnut-shaped frame—talks about how World War II-era studies showed that B1 promoted energy. Since the nation was mobilizing for war, one food manufacturer responded with vitamin doughnuts. The poster on display hawking the product promises plenty of “pep and vigor” as evidenced by the pair of grinning, rosy-cheeked children who are noshing on vitamin B1-fortified pastry. The government stepped in saying that this and similar products could be marketed only as enriched flour doughnuts. I also loved seeing sample recipes for federally subsidized school lunches from circa 1946. Liver loaf, ham shortcake and creamed vegetables seem a far cry from the sentimental favorites from when I was buying school lunch. Any other fans of the chicken fillet on bun out there?

In the show, stereoscopic viewers let you take a look at vintage 3-D photographs, mocked-up radios allow viewers to “tune in” to food-related radio programming, and there’s a hearty helping of snippets of government-produced movies—everything from short silent movies promoting the nutritive merits of milk to informational films featuring flustered housewives who need some words of wisdom to put a healthful meal on the table. My favorite was the clip from the Mulligan Stew informational films from the 1970s, a trippy series in which the kid stars not only dispense dietary advice but also have a rock band. (I was also quite taken by the themed wainscoting, with carvings of corn stalks in the farming gallery, canned goods in the factory gallery and so on. Even the paint on the walls made the show a vibrant and fun experience. Were photography allowed, I’d go back with the Sherwin Williams app on my iPod to get some digital paint swatches. But I digress.)

The show covers a wonderfully wide swath of territory, and I heartily recommend that you make a point of visiting the National Archives, where “What’s Cooking Uncle Sam” will be on display  until January 3, 2012.

Bananas have been cultivated for thousands of years. But are the days of the familiar Cavendish numbered? Image courtesy of Flickr user Jason Gulledge

When I pack my lunch box in the morning, my thermos of tea and whatever I’ve decided to have for a midday meal is always accompanied by a banana. Force of habit—it has been my default snack-on-the-go of choice since my mom was packing lunches for me to take to school. And it’s a pretty popular fruit. The United States (as of 2005) consumes approximately 15 percent of the 80 million tons of bananas produced globally per year. But the sunshine yellow Cavendish bananas we see in the grocery store are the result of thousands of years of domestication—and a new study takes a multidisciplinary approach to figure out when and where wild bananas were tamed.

First off, a quick genealogical history: One of the fruit’s wild ancestors is the Musa acuminata, a spindly plant with small, okra-like pods that were bred to produce seedless fruit. At one point, this was crossed with the heartier-looking Musa balbisiana to create plantains, and it is from plantains that our modern varieties of bananas are derived. (And yes, there’s more than just the supermarket variety.) Banana pollen and stem imprints and other sorts of fossils do show up in the archaeological record, and it looks like Musa acuminata has been cultivated since at least 6,500 years ago; the oldest evidence comes from New Guinea. The study traced the spread of bananas around the world by looking at linguistic history, working on the premise that a cultivated plant carries its name wherever it goes, and if that plant is successful in a new culture, the plant’s name is retained. Trumping the cliché of Eskimos having 100 words for snow (or however that urban legend goes), Melanesia has more than 1,000 terms for different varieties of bananas. Combining archaeological, genealogical and linguistic studies, they trace various hybridizations and conclude that bananas were introduced to Africa at least 2,500 years ago.

But as it turns out, the Cavendish we hold so near and dear needs to do a little more evolving if it is going to hold on. On a genetic level, our supermarket bananas lack diversity, meaning they are especially susceptible to disease, such as black sigatoka, a fungal disease that is proving to be impervious to fungicides. Such pests are putting this variety of banana at risk—with some scientists saying it is careening toward extinction. Some creative cultivation may be required. A candidate for a new supermarket variety of banana is the Yangambi Km5, which is native to the Democratic Republic of Congo. A fertile plant and highly resistant to disease, the only trait keeping it from being suitable for shipping is its thin peel.

The author's vegetable garden. Photo courtesy of Lisa Bramen.

I’m about halfway through my first season of vegetable gardening, and frankly I’m amazed at how well it’s going. Considering how little I knew and how nervous I was going into this project, it’s been gratifying to see my little boxes of dirt turn into a well-stocked produce aisle. Few other endeavors would allow the novice such immediate success.

Much of it, of course, has been luck—I happen to have a south-facing backyard that gets sun all day, and Mother Nature has been doing a lot of the watering for me. The rest is just showing up: pulling weeds, pinching off tomato plant suckers (new growth in the joints of stems that could siphon away nutrients from the fruits) and harvesting veggies when they’re ready.

The latter, surprisingly, has been the most challenging. Some things, like lettuce mix and arugula, have grown so quickly and abundantly that I feel like Lucy Ricardo on the chocolate factory assembly line trying to keep up with it. I’ve been handing bags of the stuff to everyone I know, and I still have plenty left for two salads a day. Next year I’ll plant half as much.

And what was I thinking planting a whole row of dill? One plant would have been sufficient for the occasional sprig I need. I hadn’t realized they would grow to three feet tall. I couldn’t handle the pressure of a dozen plants daring me to find a use for them—and casting shadows over the rest of the bed—so I finally cracked and pulled up all but two (a couple of them found a new life transplanted in a friend’s garden).

Meal planning has become like triage; we eat whatever is most urgently ripe. One day, after weeks of eyeing my shelling peas, I realized they had reached peak plumpness and needed to be picked—stat! Any longer and they would become tough and starchy. Because peas take up so much space relative to their edible yield, we ate the entire harvest in one sitting. Next year, I’ll plant more peas.

I almost didn’t plant peas at all, because I have never been a fan. I was one of those kids who used to push my wan, shriveled frozen peas around my plate rather than eat them. But, along with tomatoes, peas might be the food with the most radical taste difference between fresh homegrown and store-bought. Fresh off the vine they are sweet and succulent—delicious.

Now on to the next project: learning how to pickle and can my surplus veggies so I can bring a little taste of summer into next winter—a season that always comes too soon around here.

Visitors and artists interact under the guadua (bamboo) tents in the Colombia program area. Photo by Francisco Guerra/Smithsonian Institution

A woman named Yolanda, who lives in Retiro, Colombia, a small town outside of Medellín, runs a roadside restaurant called “Mi Jardín,” or “My Garden,” that caters to local workers, tourists and anybody else who happens to be passing by. She learned what she knows from her mother and has been cooking for more than 30 years.

Yesterday, Yolanda was standing on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., teaching Americans how to make frijoles.

Colombia is one of three featured themes at this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival (the others are the Peace Corps and rhythm and blues music), and volunteers are offering cooking demonstrations every day from 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (See our Around the Mall blog for full coverage of the festival and daily schedules.) I headed out in the blazing hot July sun yesterday to learn a little bit about traditional Colombian cuisine.

Frijoles, or red beans, are one of the most common foods in Colombia, and especially Antioquia, the department (the Colombian equivalent of a U.S. state) where Yolanda lives, in the coffee-growing region in the northwest of the country. People from this area eat frijoles nearly every day, she said, either blended into a soup, as a side dish, or as part of a larger main dish.

Antioquia used to be populated mainly by laborers who spent their days in the fields. They needed something cheap, filling and full of energy and protein to keep them going throughout the day. Hence, frijoles.

Today, there are endless variations on the dish, and each family has its own distinctive frijoles recipe. Yolanda’s mother made them with carrots and potatoes, so that’s what she does, too. Other ingredients include yucca and plantains, and most variations contain an adobo-like mixture composed of tomato, onion, garlic, pepper and oil. On a holiday, Yolanda said, she goes through about nine pounds of beans at her restaurant.

Speaking in Spanish, Yolanda also told me a little about other traditional dishes, including bandeja paisa, a large plate filled with a variety of foods, often including frijoles. At her restaurant, Yolanda adds rice, avocado, egg, sausage, salad, plantain and fried pork skin to the plate. Empanadas and arepas, a kind of cornmeal cake, are also popular.

Another traditional option is sancocho, a soup made with varying ingredients, but that Yolanda makes with broth, chicken, yucca and potatoes. It’s typical for Colombian families to make sancocho during a “paseo de olla”—literally, a walk with a pot. A paseo de olla is kind of a like an extended picnic, where a group of family and friends takes everything they need to make sancocho, from a hen to the pot itself, to a river. There, they spend the day swimming, cooking and enjoying one another’s company.

“You go with all your family and all your friends, you’re drinking all day, and at the end of the day you have the sancocho,” Yolanda said. “It’s beautiful.”

I’ll say so.

– written by Julie Mianecki

A photographic update on Lisa's fledgling garden. Image courtesy of Lisa Bramen.

Six weeks ago I stuck some seeds in the ground. Now, in their place, are neat rows of lettuce, radishes, Swiss chard and pea vines. No one is more surprised than me. All the anxieties I had as a new gardener have subsided, and I’m enjoying what I had worried would seem a chore. Tending the raised beds is relatively mindless work that allows me to feel productive—and avoid actual chores, like house-cleaning—while leaving room to daydream.

It also allows the headspace to have little epiphanies. My first was that gardening has a lot more to do with encouraging death than life.

About a week after I planted my first seeds, I crouched over the raised bed admiring the rows of half-inch seedlings that had appeared. My self-satisfaction quickly faded when I looked over at the next bed, where I hadn’t yet planted anything, and saw that it, too, was teeming with incipient life—weeds!

Other than sticking the seeds in the ground and providing them with a decent place to grow and sufficient water (which hasn’t been a problem because I live in a rainy place that’s having an especially wet spring), the only thing I’ve done to foster veggie life is kill the competition. The garden is a dog-eat-dog world.

I’ve spent untold hours plucking weeds from the dirt. This has taught me something else: gardening is either the best or the worst thing an obsessive person can take up. I find it exceptionally, almost maniacally satisfying when I find just the right tension to pull a weed out along with its long, trailing root without it breaking off at the soil level. “Die, weed, die!” I think to myself, without the twinge of the guilt I always feel when I kill a spider, whose only crime was having creepy legs.

Then again, weeding could drive a perfectionist mad, because it’s a never-ending task. That first day, after hours of pulling out tiny weeds, I discovered that if I swept the top of the soil aside, I could see hundreds of little white roots that hadn’t yet reached the surface. As he has done many times before, my husband nipped my crazy in the bud and convinced me to wait until they had grown big enough to easily pull out.

Weeds—there are thousands of species, and I have not learned the names of the ones that have colonized my garden—are evolutionary winners. They have adapted through natural selection to muscle out other species. Left to their own devices, my namby-pamby vegetables wouldn’t stand a chance against these brutes.

Which leads me to my final epiphany (for now, anyway): gardening, and by extension farming, is an unnatural act. All the debate about “natural” food versus processed and genetically modified organisms ignores the fact that most of the plants that humans eat today are the result of our intentional tinkering with nature, starting somewhere around 11,000 years ago. They represent a step in the evolution of humans, not plants (which is not to say that GMOs are good for people or the planet). As Tom Standage explains in An Edible History of Humanity (I wrote about the book last year), the earliest farmers unwittingly aided—or defied—natural selection when they chose to gather, and then sow seeds from, grasses with a mutation that made them easier to eat. Left alone, these mutations would probably have been selected out, but instead, over many generations of human intervention, became what we know today as corn, or maize.

It may be a mutant, but it’s delicious slathered in butter.

Apple, pumpkin and elderberry wine from Will o' Wisp Wines. Photograph by Lisa Bramen

The first thing that comes to mind at the mention of wine is “yes, please.” The second is “grapes.” And the last thing might have been pumpkins—until this week, when I tasted pumpkin wine.

Shelle Bailey, who lives near me in the Adirondacks, makes wine out of carrots, elderberries, apples and, yes, pumpkins—pretty much everything other than grapes. She recently got her federal permit to start a community-supported winery. Like a CSA (community-supported agriculture), a membership in the Will o’ Wisp Wines CSW gives Bailey the money up front to buy produce and supplies, which she will use to make unusual grapeless wines that will be distributed to members when they’re ready. Aside from the above, the varieties she plans to make include tomato, lemon-ginger, gooseberry, dandelion, beet, rose hips and maple.

The CSW model is novel, but it turns out that the kinds of wines she’s making have a history. Long before grapes cornered the fermented juice market, wine was made from all manner of fruits, vegetables and especially honey; mead, or honey wine, is “one of mankind’s most ancient alcoholic drinks,” according to The Glutton’s Glossary, by John Ayto.

Mead was also Bailey’s entrée into non-grape wines, both for drinking and for home fermenting. She stopped drinking most regular wine because of a bad reaction to sulfites, which are frequently added as a preservative so a wine can age without turning to vinegar. (All wines, including Bailey’s, also contain a certain amount of naturally occurring sulfites.) The wines she makes are meant to be drunk within a year.

Bailey learned to make wine through a combination of family history (she uses her father’s dandelion wine recipe) research (both online and by asking other hobbyists), and “a lot of trial and error,” she says. She is a proponent of “natural” wines—in contrast with commercial wineries, she doesn’t filter them, chemically “kill off” the yeast, blend batches or otherwise tinker with the flavor, for example by adding tannins. “I don’t want it to taste like a grape wine,” she says. “It’s kind of an ‘unwine.’ ”

My co-workers and I had a little tasting at my office this week. We tried Bailey’s apple, elderberry and pumpkin wines. They definitely would not be confused with a grape wine, although they didn’t taste how I expected. Bailey had told me she prefers dry wines, but I had been prepared for them to be a little sweet. They really weren’t; they tasted strongly of alcohol (this may have been partly because they had just been bottled; I suppose they may mellow with a few month’s age). Bailey says her wines average from 10 to 14 percent alcohol, which is comparable with grape wines. The apple, which I expected to taste like cider, was more like apple brandy—but, then again, not really like anything else. The pumpkin, the biggest surprise, was my favorite—slightly vegetal and almost imperceptibly sweet. The best description of her wine is probably Bailey’s own: she calls it “a light, dry, country-style/table wine with a fresh and uncomplicated taste.”

“Great news, Mom and Dad—Matt and I are having a cucumber plant! And some peas, and tomatoes, and beets, too. I know we should wait to tell people until we’re certain they’ve germinated, and there’s a long way to go before they actually fruit, but we just planted the seeds yesterday and we couldn’t be more excited. Matt already built the (raised) beds.”

Somehow, I don’t think this imaginary conversation with my parents would cause quite as much commotion as a similar announcement my brother and his wife made nine years ago. Theirs was accompanied by a picture of their first daughter’s ultrasound. Even though most embryos look pretty similar at that stage, it’s always awe-inspiring to see a brand-new person forming in the womb (and I can only imagine the awe is increased a hundredfold if the womb is your own). There is the head with beginnings of eyes, the tiny appendages that will someday turn into limbs with fingers and toes.

What I never realized was that a similar process happens in the plant kingdom. Inside every seed are the basic parts of a fully formed plant: immature roots and tiny leaves curled up like a vegetal embryo. As it turns out, they’re even called embryos. Within the seed’s protective wall is also a food called endosperm that nourishes the embryonic plant as it starts growing into a seedling.

Friends who have had children in recent years signed up for daily emails telling them what was happening to their fetus at that point in its development. As a novice gardener starting my first vegetable garden, I have a similar curiosity (obviously, on a far less emotional scale) about what’s going on just under the surface of my newly planted raised beds. If things are going well, three days after sowing, my little ones should be in the early stages of germination.

First tomato seedlings, courtesy of Flickr user amandabhslater

I got a preview of how this happens when I tried sprouting radish seeds a couple of months ago. The seeds were soaked in water, then rinsed twice daily to keep them moist. This, plus sufficient warmth, was enough to make the seed coating break down, which released enzymes that caused the embryo to grow into a sprout, or the beginning of a plant—though they wouldn’t ever reach full “planthood” without soil and sun.

The same thing is (I hope) happening under the soil with my vegetable seeds, although the required conditions vary slightly for different seeds. Some need warm soil, some need cooler temperatures, and a few require some light to properly germinate (all of which are helpfully spelled out on the seed packets). Larger seeds contain more endosperm, meaning they can be planted deeper into the soil and be nourished as they grow roots and shoots. I enjoyed seeing all the different shapes and sizes of the seeds—beets were knobby and irregular; lettuce, tiny, smooth and lozenge shaped; peas were, well, peas.

This Discovery Channel video explains the germination process in simple terms: After the seed coating breaks apart, the first root, called the radicle, starts to grow downward in search of nutrients. Then another shoot, called a plumule, grows up in search of light. With the help of nutrients from the soil, plus water and light, it will continue to grow to maturity.

The best part of all? No need to save for their college tuition. Although, between seeds and materials and tools, I could see how gardening could become an expensive hobby.