By keeping the size, colors, and flavors of foods consistent, large-scale producers are elbowing out the fragile, juicy, and region-specific foods that used to make our fields and plates exciting. The U.S. Ark of Taste, a program of Slow Food USA, seeks to reverse this trend. The Ark is a growing list of foods that are flavorful, culturally rooted, and at risk of extinction. Slow Food members from around the country nominate foods to the Ark and mobilize volunteers to keep them in production.

Why is food diversity important? For one, interesting new flavors can entice even the pickiest of eaters to try more fruits and veggies. On an environmental scale, ecosystems thrive when they include a diversity of organisms. And while some genetic adaptations might not have immediately apparent benefits, preserving a deep gene pool is critical for long-term food security.

But what can everyday people do to preserve diversity in the food chain? Here are the stories of the two newest foods on the U.S. Ark of Taste, and the committed volunteers who wouldn’t stand idly by while biodiversity around them dwindled. The fact that they’re both from the South is pure coincidence, but not entirely surprising given that region’s continued interest in food culture.

Louisiana Mirliton

The natural and man-made disasters that wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast in recent years have also threatened the rich culture of growing and cooking traditional foods.

Take the traditional Louisiana mirliton for example. Introduced to the Gulf during the 1804 Slave Revolt in Haiti, the mirliton (a squash-like vegetable also called chayote) became a key ingredient in Creole and Cajun cuisine. Meanwhile, a range of heirloom varieties developed in backyards and abandoned lots.

Commercially hybridized chayotes pale in comparison to their locally-bred counterparts, both in terms of flavor and adaptation to the Gulf microclimate. Nonetheless  they were cheap and easy to find at stores like Wal-Mart, so they had begun dominating the local market even before the floods. After Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, however, many vines were drowned or went untended; the exodus of residents made propagation of heirloom varieties less common. Eventually, some mirliton fans tried to plant store-bought Costa Rican seeds, but many of the vegetables—adapted to mile-high altitude—didn’t take root in New Orleans.

Enter the Adopt-A-Mirliton project, a partner of the New Orleans Crescent City Farmers Market. Founded by Dr. Lance Hill, Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, in 2008, the project has identified dozens of threatened landraces, propagated them, and made them available at the Crescent City Farmers Market. Along with a fey key volunteers, Hill has essentially saved these distinct varieties from the brink of extinction. And he’s given them names, such as the “Papa Sylvest,” to ensure that their breeding lines will remain distinct.

Volunteers who agree to adopt a vine receive a 16-page growers guide and in turn must keep detailed records of the care their plant receives. According to Hill, the project has plans for expansion: “While our seed distribution is free, we do expect next fall that our growing network of heirloom growers will produce thousands of seeds and they will be available for sale at nurseries that we certify as only selling home-grown Louisiana mirlitons,” he told the The Times-Picayune recently.

The Hua Moa Banana

Hurricanes and disease all but wiped out production of the Hua Moa in the Miami area over the years, causing a heavy dependence on imported bananas.

Then, a few years back, a group  of active Slow Food Miami members started working to revive Hua Moa production, with the hope of  putting these important bananas back on the menu. Last year, local chef Michael Schwartz of Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink prepared a sold-out dinner featuring the fruit at the invitation of area chapter leaders. One of the Hua Moa’s winning qualities is that it can be prepared in both sweet and savory dishes. The versatile fruit appeared in dishes as far-ranging as ceviche, tostones, a spicy coconut milk soup, and pound cake.

The dinner was a collaboration with rare fruit grower Larry Siegel, one of the last remaining producers of the Hua Moa in the region. Seigel grows a range of tropical fruit on 35 acres in Davie, Florida. “I started with lychee, cherimoyas, longans, avocados,” he told the Genuine Kitchen recently.  “They took a big hit during hurricanes Irene and Wilma.  [But] coconut, papaya, and bananas always hang on!”

Introducing chefs and eaters to rare foods can spark a wildfire of interest. The resulting increase in demand can then help convince farmers to take on the risks and challenges associated with less common crops. Nominating the Hua Moa to the Ark was the starting point for more dinners, partnerships, and other events in support of this storied, unique fruit.

Are you interested in fighting for flavor? There are all kinds of other suggestions for encouraging food diversity on the Slow Food USA website.

Mirliton photos courtesy of Dr. Lance Hill.

At a Slow Food dinner seven years ago, native foods chef John Farais and California native landscaper Alrie Middlebrook began an ongoing conversation about the importance of integrating native plants into our daily lives and diets.

One fruit of that conversation is the Eating California class sponsored by the California Native Garden Foundation. The goal of the class is to inspire a movement of passionate native food lovers, and in the process start an ecological revolution.

Native foods are, by definition, adapted to the places in which they grow and as a result have a far smaller environmental load on the land. One of Alrie’s dreams would be to transfer food production to urban areas – on rooftops, in city gardens – freeing up farmlands to be reclaimed as native habitat. The ultimate result, she reasons, would be greater biodiversity with less energy use and pollution.

And greater culinary diversity, as well.

There are thousands of native edibles, many of which have superior nutrition and even taste than their cultivated counterparts. The problem at this point is that they can be hard to come by in our modern world. Some of them are being protected and supported by Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste. The Ark’s goal is to catalog and protect forgotten foods before they disappear. Foods such as Desert Oregano, Pinyon Pine Nuts, Emory Acorns, and Mesquite Pod Flour are all represented.

Beyond the foods themselves are the lessons that they teach us. When ethnobotanist Kat Anderson, from U.C. Davis, talks about the Native Californian way of harvesting food, it sounds like poetry:

Do not take everything

Leave something behind

Ask permission

Give Thanks

What Kat is describing is simply a culture code of respect for the land that feeds them. And that belief isn’t necessarily gone, just perhaps forgotten.

She tells this story of the elders speaking about the decline of the native plants: “No one is talking to the plants,” they say, “and as a result they go away.” The elders say the plants miss us but are in hiding. They will return, but “only when we start paying attention.”

Slow Food Nation’s Native Foods Pavilion at Taste, curated by Bernadette Zambrano will be open Saturday, August 30 and Sunday, August 31. Foods available for tasting will include wild rice from the White Earth Land Recovery Project, posole with native corn hominy and buffalo.

Photos by Aaron French and Yosemite Native American

Before the dawn of industrial agriculture, we had thousands of varieties of vegetables and fruits. Today, we see only a small fraction of that variety: red delicious apples, iceberg lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes. According to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, 75 percent of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900 and during that same period, 93 percent of American food product diversity has been lost. In the last century, 30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct and one more is lost every six hours.

Part of Slow Food International’s mission is to protect our world’s agricultural diversity through its Ark of Taste, a catalog of endangered foods that have fallen into disuse. The program’s mission is to celebrate these varietals and reintroduce them to the public, in hopes of preserving the unique diversity of our agricultural landscape.

We are lucky in the Bay Area to have the Gravenstein Apple, one of our local symbols of ongoing biodiversity in an apple supply dominated by the often-mealy Red Delicious and sometimes-sour Granny Smith. According to Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, the United States has lost nearly 86 percent of apple varieties—over 6,000 different kinds—since 1903, but the Gravenstein has managed to survive. An historical agricultural tradition in Sonoma County since 1811, the Gravenstein was originally planted by Russian trappers and was one of the first apples to be ready for market. The Gravenstein is known for its versatility as an ingredient in pies and sauces and a great-tasting snack on its own.

The month of August is Gravenstein Apple month and Slow Food is kicking it off with a celebration. In a continued the effort to protect this local culinary heritage through the pleasure of taste, The Culinary Underground presents the Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Slow Dinner 2008 under the apple trees at Nana Mae’s Organic Bollinger Lane orchard. Join us on Sunday, August 23 at 4:00pm for a grand feast, which highlights the sweet and tart flavors of this local favorite.

You will be greeted with an autumn apple, the artisanal cocktail from bar chef, Scott Beattie, from Cyrus Restaurant in Healdsburg and author of Artisanal Cocktails – Drinks Inspired By The Seasons. Chef and farmer Doug Nicosia of Sensuous Farms will begin his grand feast with hors d’oeuvres: cold apple soup shot, spicy scallop crudo on apple slices, apple conserve, walnuts and Point Reyes blu cream on a pastry puff, rosemary apple confit over applewood smoked pork belly on a mini corncake and tomato carpaccio with apple cider vinegar. The main course will include apple-cured duck leg confit and cured, apple smoked and seared duck breast over torn pasta in an apple cream sauce with carrot puree, flashed shitakes and an apple gastrique. The grand finale will be an apple polenta cake with caramel ice cream and an apple bourbon sauce.

As we head into autumn and the height of apple season, remember to look for heritage varieties—not only will you be preserving biodiversity, you’ll discover an incredible range of flavor and texture beyond what the industrial standards can offer.

Tickets: $160 ($140 for Slow Food Members) can be purchased at The Cheese Shop Healdsburg or by calling, 707.433.4998. The ticket price includes dinner, cocktail, wines, service and parking. All proceeds benefit the Slow Food Gravenstein Apple Presidia Project.

During a recent visit to the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, a bag of tepary beans at the Rancho Gordo stand called out to me as I struggled to make a few choices from their incredible variety of offerings. I knew that they were an ancient bean associated with Native Americans and so I bought a pound. The variety I purchased are small and pale green in color. The photo shows them along with a kidney bean and black bean for scale.

Tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius) have a fascinating history and an intriguing future. Ken Albala’s “Beans: A History,” devotes a chapter to the bean, and is the source of most of the information in this post. (An interview with Albala from Salon can be found at Tracie McMillan’s web site.)

The name tepary apparently comes from the language of the Tohono O’odham tribe, one of the tribes that has inhabited the deserts of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico for centuries. One story goes that the Spanish asked about the plant and received the answer “T pawi” — “it’s a bean.”

An Ancient Plant
The beans go back so far in human history that their precise origins are unclear. The general theory is that they were first domesticated in Central American several thousand years ago; five-thousand year old remains have been found in archelogical digs in Puebla, Mexico. They eventually made their way to modern-day Arizona and New Mexico, providing much of the protein and other critical nutrients for the great civilizations that flourished in the deserts (Albala writes that the beans provided 49% of the protein in the diet of the Tohono O’odham tribe during the days of Spanish domination, as well as calcium and niacin).

Tepary beans are desert plants — they have evolved and been bred to withstand the parched earth and blistering sun of the desert. After they are given a bit of water to become established, they can thrive in conditions that would decimate most other crops. At one time, scores of varieties were grown — Albala writes that 46 colors were grown in the early 20th century (California has a long history of growing the beans). But for one reason or another, the bean fell out of favor and today the bean is so rarely cultivated that it has a place in the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste (a collection of foods that are in danger of disappearing).

Ancient Foods as a Solution to Modern Problems
There’s a theory among scientists that the Native Americans of the desert have something called a “thrifty gene” that enabled people to efficiently convert food to body mass during the rare times of plenty. When people with this gene met 20th century foods like government surplus lard, white flour, and cheap sugar, a public health disaster unfolded: shockingly high rates of diabetes and obesity on the reservations of southern Arizona. Scientists are studying the current population of Native Americans, looking at their genetics to try to understand why they are so susceptible to diabetes and obesity. Others are looking backward at the foods that tribes ate in the centuries before Europeans arrived. These foods, which include tepary beans, various parts of the mesquite tree, cholla cactus buds, and other desert plants contain high levels of soluble fiber that cause there sugars to be released slowly during digestion in addition to providing a feeling of fullness. The subjects of diabetes, obesity and desert foods were examined on an episode of Alan Alda’s long running, but now departed, Scientific American Frontiers (which features Gary Nabhan, co-editor of “Renewing America’s Food Traditions”) and a recent episode of 60 Minutes II. More information about the Tohono O’odham tribe can be found at the Tohono O’odham Community Action (TOCA) website.

My Experience with Tepary Beans
I cooked some of the beans last Sunday, adding few extra ingredients so I could fully appreciate their flavor. My approach was simple: saute some diced onion in vegetable oil until it is soft, add water and the beans (which were presoaked in water overnight). I brought the mixture to a boil, and then simmered it gently for a few hours, partly covered. Near the end of cooking (which took a few hours even though the beans are small), I added some salt and a few teaspoons of ground New Mexico chilies. To serve, I topped the beans with diced raw tomato and skillet-seared sweet corn (slice sweet corn from the cob, then saute it over high heat in a little bit of vegetable oil until it is tender and some of the kernels had browned slightly). My simple bean stew was tasty, if a bit austere. The flavor of tepary beans is distinctive: nutty, sweet and not very “beany” at all. Bringing these ancient beans into my kitchen added some new flavors to my cooking repertoire, while helping me appreciate the importance of preserving culinary diversity.

*** A taste workshop on foods of the Southwest will include tepary beans. Buy tickets here.***

Image by Marc Rumminger