Episode 1: Seeds as Living History with Michael Twitty

Michael Twitty: 00:00

These plants have a journey, and that journey assumes different identities, and we should always respect the fact that it has led different lives in different cultures.

Melody Reese: 00:21

Every seed has a journey. As seeds move across landscapes and generations, they become part of new communities, new traditions, and new stories while still carrying traces of where they’ve been before. Seeds connect us to the people who grew them before us and the generations that will inherit them after us. Welcome to Sowing Connections, a podcast from Seed Savers Exchange. I’m your host, Melody, and I’m so happy you’re here. In this first episode, Michael Twitty, food historian and author, explores what those journeys can teach us about food, culture, and history. He discusses culinary justice, movement of crops across continents, and why understanding the stories of the seeds that we grow help us to understand ourselves and each other. After the interview, we’ll share a story of ‘Hoyt’s’ okra, an heirloom variety found in the Seed Savers Exchange collection, whose journey stayed a little bit closer to home. So, here’s the conversation between Seed Savers Exchange executive director Mike Bollinger and Michael Twitty.

Mike Bollinger: 01:32

At Seed Savers Exchange, we spend a lot of time thinking about seeds as carriers of history. You know, thinking about things like migration and adaptation, memory, labor, culture. Your work has explored those same themes through food ways and crops and ancestry. So this feels like a really natural conversation for us to have. I wanted to start, if I could, with a phrase that you often use, “culinary justice”. For listeners that care about heirloom seeds and gardening, food traditions, can you talk about what culinary justice means and maybe a little bit about what that looks like in practice?

Michael Twitty: 02:12

So I learned about food justice after social justice, and that came as a result of meeting Bryant Terry. I was very intrigued by the idea of food justice, you know, food as a human right. Culinary justice is a little bit different, and I remember I had a conversation as I started to conceive what that meant for me. And the person I was speaking to at a conference at a college said, “Well, it’s kind of elitist, isn’t it?” And I said, “No, not if someone jacks your you know, beans and rice.” The most basic of the food of agrarian people called in the Western world, unfortunately, peasants. And I said, Any, you know, that food can be stolen at any moment. Not just stolen, but but exploited, extracted, whatever you want to call it. And of course, if it gets in the right hands of the person who has the right platform, the right privilege and the right power, it becomes a commodity and therefore out of the reach of people who, you know, practice that cuisine or its dishes most naturally. We’re not just talking about appropriation, we’re talking about um discon-, you know, lack of connection with one’s root, one’s heritage, or with one’s national story. Because, you know, in the case of Southern food, Southern food is part of the national story. So for me, culinary injustice are those examples where we see the negative use of people’s food and traditions. And I mean, this doesn’t have to be cross across lines of phenotype. What people usually say the word “race.” It’s not just what color you are, what background or ethnicity or identity. It can also be within a country there’s, you know, appropriation of certain things saying, “oh, hey, this is us”, but at the same time, you know, beating back that us. So feijoada is the national dish of Brazil. And yet anti-blackness, despite the fact that Brazil is much more in touch with its African roots than the United States is, that anti-blackness still persists in so many ways that are violent and exploitative and extractive. So culinary justice as a practice means that we that people have the full ability to utilize to their benefit their cuisine, their food culture, their food ways for their further and forward development and growth. And that could mean both the community taking possession and power back, but it could also mean someone saying, “Hey, I realize that my roots are with many… my roots have many taps. And so therefore, I’m gonna take this and this influence, this impulse, and use it in a better way.” It also exists in the fact that when we have heritage gardens, which I’ve you know, a big proponent of many years, it means communities putting the seeds in the ground that represent the plants that represent the community. You know? So I guess what for me, culinary justice takes many forms. It’s sometimes easier to say what it isn’t, that it’s culinary injustice than what it is, but that’s because we have to have more people buy into the idea that there is a necessa- a need, a need to recognize that even food has been a tool to empower and disempower at will. And it’s the choices we make that can that can change it around. Food does not bring people together. Human beings with intention brings people, brings them together. Yes, and so it’s not the same thing, and I think people should just not think that just because you pop down some cheap ethnic eats on the table doesn’t make you a hero. But if you take the time to learn, learning is the most important weapon here. There’s a place in Pittsburgh called the Conflict Cafe, and it was the foods of axis of evil, quote-unquote, countries. Why do people eat that way in North Korea or Iran, which is very apropos at the moment? Other places, what’s going on? What are are the political cultural issues? People come and talk about their culture, their place, people would eat there and learn, ask questions, they’d learn things and read about the country. We have really abysmal geography that’s taught. We have all the resources, but not being taught. And so for me, in terms of my work, in terms of African-American foodways, and culture, if people have so many assumptions. You know, first of all, there’s that big blanket West Africa. Saying West Africa is worse than saying Western Europe because West Africa is twice the size of Western Europe, with 10 times more diversity. And so you have to re-educate your people, re-educate other people, reeducate yourself, go through the whole self-literacy process. And you have to think about why do people eat the way they eat? What are the continuums? What are the things we can understand as human beings? It’s a lot of work. And I think that there’s this, there’s this general malaise at the moment, and that malaise is designed around this principle of, well, you know, I don’t want to have to learn all that. I’ve already, I’m already, you know, I’m in the Western world with my business, with my sports, with my religion, or whatever, and I don’t have, I really don’t have the the patience or the time to get into one more thing, and especially not for them, the other. And that has slowed down our progress in this. You know, we can’t get people to say a proper pronoun, how can we get them to look at a map again? But we have to. Because food is a very ubiquitous, common form of introducing people to cultures they’re not aware of. And so we, especially in a country that’s multicultural, like America, I don’t care how monoculture they try to make it. And that’s why we have to keep on with culinary justice. Plus, it’s an issue of, you know, we can’t escape all of capitalism. We can’t escape all, you know, everybody has an economy whether you like it or not. And so the idea is to give people the opportunity, like in Sapelo Island, you know, they were growing the unique kind of ribbon [sugar]cane down there. They had purple ribbon [sugar]cane, or other people growing certain types of fruits or other things, foraging. Well, you’re giving the community not only back a means of making a living, but a means of teaching about themselves, a means of appreciating and celebrating themselves, a means of having joy. And for me, that’s culinary justice.

Mike Bollinger: 09:30

Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. And you know, and kind of from there, you know, I feel like it naturally raises the question, for me, of seeds. You know, where do you think seeds enter that picture? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michael Twitty: 09:47

I don’t really remember when I started learning about… no, actually I do, sorry. I do remember when I started learning about heirloom seeds and heirloom plants and you know, heritage breeding animals and heritage fruits, etc., is when I started getting into living history. And living history in and of itself is a way of approaching and mitigating traumas from the past, but also honoring our ancestors and honoring what people went through as a whole, learning about the ways of the past. But the the trick is that when you see, you know, a guinea hog, or you see a bronze turkey, or you encounter, a ‘Newton Pippin’ and apple, or you have a ‘Georgia Rattlesnake’ watermelon, a pawpaw, an American persimmon, and especially in a Cherokee, ‘Trail of Tears’ bean, or a fish pepper, you are necessarily, or Devil’s Claw, you know, which is really, really old. What you’re talking about is encountering a history and keys to an alternative history in life and experience. We don’t depend on, we can choose not to depend on plants and things the way our ancestors did. But once you understand how much those seeds, those plants, and those animals and those fruit made a difference in their lives and how much they depend upon every aspect of it as part of a whole system, then you go, oh man, okay. This is, this is a lot more intricate than I thought. No wonder I’ve heard certain stories or certain things have been passed down to me. Those seeds carry the stories of forced migration, willing migration, choices made at the last minute. And so this idea, “oh, the past is dead”, it’s not. Just like we are an example of the human species persisting into the future, so are these plants. And these plants tell a story that, if we didn’t have those stories, would be quite bland, you know, to play on the pun. You know, you wouldn’t have access to parts of your ancestors’ lives or other people’s ancestors’ lives, and be able to really truly reconstruct who they were. I mean, right now a lot of people make claims about the meaning of our past, the meaning of our peoples, peoplehoods, and the meaning of who we are without really having any sort of granularity that seeds give you.

Mike Bollinger: 12:35

In The Cooking Gene, you trace ancestry through foodways as much as through documents. Can you talk a little bit about how you read a crop? I mean, you could, you know, whether rice or okra, you know, cow peas, you know, kind of as a historical document and maybe even what a plant can reveal that sometimes archives can’t?

Michael Twitty: 13:04

Sure. I mean, the assumption is that ,in particular which comes to slavery and enslavement, that crops were given to the enslaved, like the way you give fodder to an animal. People don’t,  now people don’t have to say that literally. That’s what the hell they mean. Or given to enslaved people like they were given, like rations were given to a prisoner. So automatically we lack narratives of, you know, agency and ownership. Okay, that’s problematic because how do you move 12 to 15 million human beings across an ocean in the same way that you move millions of Europeans? Here’s, the here’s fact number one. There were more Africans crossing the Atlantic Ocean before 1820 than Europeans, and they were being counted upon not only to produce cash crops, but to build a life of their own and to support the life of the people who enslaved them and the people who they associated with, from indentured servants to other types of immigrants to indigenous people to new groups of people that developed in the new world.  And so, yes, they’re gonna have to have certain foods and things. Peter Kalm, K-A-L-M, was a Finnish-Swedish writer. And he, I think he was a naturalist as well, and he talked about how in Philadelphia he says, oh, in Philadelphia, nobody, white or black, can live without, you know, peppers and vinegar, and everybody loves the soup made of this thing called okra. Well, that’s the northern, maybe, maybe not the northern limit, it might be New York, of okra. That’s just a whole story and of itself. So already you can know that Abelmoschus esculentus (Sorry, Latin folks, I pronounced it the way I pronounce it) starts off in northeastern Africa through the migration that happened with Sahara and the Sahel started drying up. A lot of West African peoples, ethnicities, have as part of their lore the idea of following the rivers, right? We also have to recognize people were living in a green Sahara 6,000 years ago, and then it started drying up probably between the time like a 2,000 years. So we’re talking about maybe the time we associate with ourselves versus the Romans, right? 2,000 years. Well, that sounds like a long time. It is a long time, but it’s not a long time, if you know what I mean, in terms of human life, and so people started to leave this nursery, this human nursery, and push south and west. And the Niger River, the Niger Benue, the Volta, the Senegal River, all these rivers were basically highways of humanity. They followed the water until they saw the other water, the ocean. And they brought with them cowpeas and millet and sorghum and okra and melons and other and rice, African rice, and other key fonio, etc., etc., and other key things that were part of the agricultural complex that developed in West Africa. So for me, it’s like going from having a history that begins in enslavement with a question mark before it to a history that starts with, no, no, no, baby, we’re talking about 8,000 years ago. That’s what I had to realize with The Cooking Gene. I was like, no, no, You just, you know, you knew these people existed. You knew they had a history, and you knew that there were all these developments in technology and architecture and agriculture and religion and life in Africa. But now that you have the DNA component and also you know the history of the connection between the communities, right? Now you know the other part, which is oh now that you know you’re part of these people, that means that this is your deeper connection to people who you will never know. That goes back, you know, a long time. That’s amazing for a people that’s supposed to have a history that only begins with 1619 to now. I don’t buy in, and it’s enabled me to not buy into the idea that our ancestors are completely anonymous and ancient and unapproachable, and also that these plants helped other people thrive and succeed. They made people the equivalent of 18th century millionaires within two, three good crops. And that built Charleston and Savannah, and that built the Southern aristocracy, and it built the fact… the reason why we have had so much trouble with our own politics is because these people were too rich to be defeated. Okay, their wealth made them untouchable, and the knowledge that built their wealth came from people’s interaction with cotton and rice and even tobacco, going back a very long time. Now, some people are like, wait a minute, tobacco didn’t show up to… yeah, I got that, Boo. But you have to understand that before tobacco becomes an understood commodity in Virginia and Maryland and then North Carolina, by the time that John Rolfe was like, hmm, let me blend this and blend this and use this and use that to make tobacco a passable product, Africans were already growing [Nicotiana] rustica and other forms of tobacco in Senegal, Gambia, other places, to the point where they came here with knowledge of how to grow the thing. Okay? And rice, not just, my friend, not just like growing the rice, but processing it, understanding there’s a certain way. You and I both know that rice takes a certain flood pattern. It takes, it takes sometimes it’s dry rice. You have to you have to, you know, use the mortar and pestle and the baskets. So those forms of African, you know, technologies to process rice cross the ocean as well. And so once we get that, then we have to incorporate also the knowledge about how New World crops are going to be included as well. They come to Africa, then they go back to the Americas in different forms.

Mike Bollinger: 20:12

Yeah, it just makes me think about, then again, if we’re thinking about seeds and food traditions, and how with that movement you’ve got changing names, you know, and meanings, and owners as they move. So, how do you think about preservation or attribution or even credit when a tradition has passed through so many hands?

Michael Twitty: 20:39

The first and foremost thing is that you have to recognize that people have different relationships. It’s like a kid. And at home, that kid is the baby. In the world, that kid is a student or a member of a team, or a stranger that needs help, or needs discipline, a consumer, you know, that child has different relationships to the people who meet them, and different assumptions and different requirements based on a society’s approach to gender, class, ethnicity, race, etc. In the same way, foods do the same thing. Someone was like, wait a minute, that plant belongs to I said, No, no, no, no. The minute it goes across the ocean and there’s no trail, it becomes a very different thing. It no longer has the same meanings, and I mean we can always especially give credit where credit is due. So for example, you know, we think of tomatoes, tomatl That’s Nahuatl, Aztec, right, Mexica. and that plant has a very distinct history among them, although we can probably guess. It probably precedes them. But the word and the whole the culinary idea of it coming into the food comes from a very specific moment in time, the early middle 1500s. Right? When Cortez meets Moctezuma and his people who are growing these, and then it kind of spreads like wildfire from there, relatively speaking. And so within a century and some change, it’s starting to change the way Italians eat forever. And people think sweet potatoes they only think of one type of sweet potato in their mind, the archetype of this orange flesh thing. Well, we both know that there were purple ones, orange, yellow, but white ones, white one was actually much more popular because it’s much more versatile. You know? And then later on, people were like, hey, I kind of want a vegetable I can make a pie out of. Well, pies and puddings are British. But you put them in the hands of Black people, and they all of a sudden these pies and puddings are not the same animal that they were. So I guess what I’m trying to get at is that these plants have a journey, and that journey assumes different identities, and we should always be careful about how we do our attributions, but at the same time, respect the fact that it has led different lives in different cultures.

Mike Bollinger: 23:24

Yeah, I think you talk about that in Kosher Soul, right? Where you explore the meeting point of African American and Jewish traditions, you know, and I guess I’m just… to elaborate maybe even a little bit more, like what did that work teach you about, you know, about that across diasporas and where different histories and trauma and migration where those things meet?

Michael Twitty: 23:49

Well, first and foremost, it taught me that marginalized people, the history is not from the top down, it’s the bottom up. And a lot of people assume that, oh, you know, when you talk about Southern food, the British, the German and the… it’s like, okay, but. You know, but… because there’s a lot of, you know, elitist history there. Nobody wants to talk about the poor people who never had a portrait made or never, you know, had to do all kinds of crazy things to survive. And so my point with Kosher Soul, because I am Black and I am Jewish, is this idea that you know the Jewish people and the African American people and people in the African diaspora, these are two diasporas that have only so much real power, but their cultural power is amazing and imminent and has a life of its own. And it shows itself in music and in language, in entertainment, in moral suasion, other spiritual forms of activism, and it shows itself in food. You know? It’s the deep, it’s the deep frying of Sephardic Jews that comes to England that makes fish and chips, and it’s a deep frying of West Africans that come to the South and makes all sorts of things, from fried chicken to beignet to fried okra. And to understand why those cooking types came from these marginalized others into the mainstream is really important, but also understand that these two communities have been interacting for a very long time. I mean, if you want to put it this way, the book of Exodus talks, does not talk about just one type of people, it actually talks about the phrase an Erev Rav. And I explain in Kosher Soul that Rav, like Rabbah in Hebrew, means “many, a multitude, a great number of.” And Erev is the same word for evening, for mixture, for you know, a shade of this and a shade of that coming together, twilight, a dawn. So the concept is that there was a mixed multitude of people. Um, Egypt, Mitzrayim, the narrow place, because it was an empire, a significant power, you know, had multiple types of people mixing and living. And, you know, if you watch the the great Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, not a historical document, but it’s very powerful when they’re leaving Egypt and you don’t just see one type of people in that mix following Moses You know, so I’m trying to get across people that from presumably 3,500 years ago to the present day, you have the interaction off and on of Jewish and African in Venn diagram, not in oppositional antipodes.

Mike Bollinger: 27:08

Yeah. I’m gonna pivot here a little bit, if I may, because I could talk to you all day, but I know that we gotta you know keep this to a time and be respectful of your time. But I’m thinking about you know, the many of our gard… many of our listeners, excuse me, are you know gardeners, seed savers, a lot of them interested in growing crops connected to food traditions that you’ve written about. If someone is gonna grow these crops in home gardens, is there… how do they do that respectfully? Are there things that people should be learning or a thought that should go into this before they plant? Does that come after?

Michael Twitty: 27:47

It’s the whole process.  You’re learning and you’re listening and you’re telling. I mean, anyone who says, you know what, this is where this comes from, and I learned more about the people and I taught my children. That’s fantastic. I mean, it really doesn’t, it’s not greater than that. I don’t believe in, you know, you shouldn’t do this because you’re the unless it’s a specific spiritual tradition in which you have to have some form of cultural initiation. But growing is different., And also extends to how you the how you treat that people. Don’t eat my food as an African descendant and then harbor anti-Blackness, work on your anti-Blackness.  That’s built into our culture. Don’t eat my food as someone who is Chicano, Mexican, Latino, and then disrespect the community and its humanity. We’ve said that, you know, we’ve said that. Don’t eat my food and then turn around and throw me in a concentration camp. That is the simplest answer to that question. Educate yourself, educate others, and have respect.

Mike Bollinger: 28:56

Yeah. I’m just thinking about the diversity of things that have come into Seed Savers Exchange over time, and we often talk so much about, you know, the history of where these seeds have come from and our ability to be able to trace them back as as far as we can. But I’m gonna tie that to the genetic diversity, you know, that is within our food system as well. Do you think that we lose culture when we lose that genetic diversity in our food system too?

Michael Twitty: 29:26

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I’ve had kids say things to me like, “that isn’t corn, corn comes from a can.” You know, that hurts. But also if people lose the idea that, oh, you realize that all these indigenous folks had hundreds of varieties of corn, you know, squash, beans, sunflowers, specific root crops, and those enable them to have, you know, a complete diet. Which created the food that that, you know, feeds two-thirds of the planet Earth. You have almost nothing from Northern Europe that feeds the planet. And with those crops comes mathematics and economics and religion and architecture, and so and so and so and so and so…

Mike Bollinger: 30:18

So many things, yeah.

Michael Twitty: 30:19

So many things. But knowing, you know, agricultural or agrarian is the next level. Because then you have to respect climate and ecosystems, right? And habitats. It’s no longer just about you. It it’s only sad if you think it’s just about you. We have to do more… like I say, I didn’t know a lot of this until I started working living history. And then also it’s kind of for me the attachment, the idea of oh, my people would have had this because they were from this part of the South and they had this going on. Those who have knowledge of how seeds and plants change and grow and morph and develop have a really precious knowledge because apples need cold. And so as your climate changes, it becomes less cold. Where are those apples that have the genes that can survive greater heat? And that’s just one tiny example. We have a million and one seeds and varieties still, even though we’ve lost quite a bit. And this is not just here, it’s in the developing world where for millennia there was a diversity of of varieties of rice or barley or whatever. And now it’s been, you know, kind of decimated. And so that work to sort of bring all that back is so much more monumentally heroic than ever was before.

Mike Bollinger: 31:53

So I’m really curious. I mean, you’ve written incredible books, you’re on podcasts all over the place, you’ve, you know, you’ve got your own blogs, you’ve got all of the cooking that you’re doing. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re working on now? What’s at your front door now?

Michael Twitty: 32:13

I just finished and put out Recipes from the American South. That hasn’t been a year yet that it’s been out. It’s been a couple like four or five months. And that was a lot. It was a big project for me. I’m hopefully I’m applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin to catalogue these historic foods and plants and sort of like provide a blueprint for the future. I’m starting my legacy work right now. I want people in the near future and distant future to not retrace. Technology has made us very lazy in a sense of we think we got it all. Oh, it’s on Google, it’s great, we’re good. History’s been recorded. We’ll never forget it. It don’t work that way. Ask the people who were at the Library of Alexandria or Timbuktu or, you know, in Athens or Baghdad about the flow of knowledge. You know, we’ve already had cures for certain things that we just lost and had to get back in a different form. When you think of it that way, it’s very depressing. And so we all have to do our part. So you know, legacy work for me looks like that. I’m working on an anthology of Black food writing and you know, well orature and writing. And I’m working on a project about the African American engagement with Great Britain from linguistic, food, culture, and you know, racial identity perspective.

Mike Bollinger: 33:57

Yeah.

Michael Twitty: 33:58

Yeah.

Mike Bollinger: 33:59

I’m gonna just… one last question here. In what is a really wild time globally, where are you finding hope for the future?

Michael Twitty: 34:14

If you plant a seed, you have to have hope. And if you have a garden, you have to have hope. If you teach children, you have to have hope. And you have to do it the right way. You have to do it with with ethical and a human understanding, you can’t do it in exploitive or extractive understanding. Because otherwise the karma will come back to you and you will get bit. And so for me, you know, you have to encounter the sun and the sky and the water and grow things. You also have to think about creating helping life sustain itself. And learning, learning is absolutely the way to stay alive longer, and learning is the way to have fellowship and friendship and genealogy and other things. The Cooking Gene for everybody is a book about food, but it’s a book about food through a family, my family and the way in which those things intersect. And it’s not perfected, but it’s getting, you know, it’s giving people a way to look at their own stories in that way. And, you know, I just find that all of those things are interconnected, and they all have… there’s a holistic way to look at this. You know, you can look just look at food as just that thing that makes me not hungry anymore, or you can look at food as this amazing miracle that gets passed down L’dor vador, from generation to generation, and reconstitutes itself in new forms that no generation previous could conceive of. And for me, if you don’t get that out of, you know, history isn’t dead, history is living. Be tolerant, be empathetic, be aware, have boundaries, but also open your arms. That’s what food has done for me as a historian, as a storyteller, as a griot, as someone who puts food into practice, is a tool for me for making my version of humanity better.

Mike Bollinger: 36:18

I thank you for that. And I’m thinking about, you know, your books that I’ve read, and I mean it has changed the way that I look at food, and the way that I look at my family history and has driven me and inspired me to explore, and I know that your work is is changing people’s lives in real ways. So I appreciate hearing that you are continuing to do those things and write about so many other things that you haven’t had the opportunity to do yet. So thank you, Michael. Thank you so much for your time here. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to all of the places that this goes and the learning that it inspires as a result of our time here. So thanks again.

Michael Twitty: 37:02

Thank you so much. I really appreciate y’all and thank you for the work that y’all do because it’s definitely been a part of my education and my direction going forward. Thank you.

Melody Reese: 37:15

Michael Twitty reminds us that seeds don’t just carry genetics, they carry memory, relationships, and the lives of the people who kept them. And the stories we tell about those seeds aren’t only found in books and archives. They’re preserved in family memories, passed from neighbor to neighbor, and carried forward in every garden you plant. Throughout this season, we’ll be sharing stories from the Seed Savers Exchange collection. Stories that trace journeys of individual varieties and the people who kept them alive. This story begins with a gardener in Arkansas, a neighbor offering some freshly picked okra, and an unexpected connection that reaches back generations. Here is seed historian, Eduardo, with the story of Hoyt’s okra.

Tracy Bull: 38:09

I went by one day and he said, “Do you want some okra?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Didn’t you plant okra?” I said, “Yes, I did, but I can’t get okra to do nothing down there at the house.” He said, “Well, here.” He said, “Hoyt gave me these when we moved here.” And he said, “And this is the only okra seed I’ve ever used.”

Eduardo Fernandez: 38:25

That is Tracy Bull, remembering how this story came to be. A neighbor offering some okra he had just harvested, and then a realization the seed had come through Tracy’s own family line and had found its way back to him. Although Tracy’s a seasoned garden, he had struggled for years to grow okra from catalogs because the seeds either germinated poorly or produced disappointing results. Then, one summer evening, Tracy’s neighbor Jim Newton offered him some okra he had just picked, and Tracy accepted, while mentioning almost casually that okra had never worked well in his garden. Jim’s reply changed the story. Jim told Tracy that the okra seed had come to him when he moved into that community in the early 1970s, and that it had originally come from Tracy’s own cousin. The simple version is that while Tracy had been looking outside for something that would work, the seed that did work had been nearby and connected to his own family line the whole time. This okra belongs to a very small community in Arkansas called Pleasant Grove, about 60 miles west of Little Rock. And that place matters, because this seed has remained in the same local orbit, within the same extended family and community for a long time.

Tracy Bull: 40:03

So I feel very confident my grandpa grew this exact same okra.  And I feel very confident that my great-grandpa grew this same kind of okra. Everybody had okra in their garden, and I feel pretty confident that it was all the same okra.

Eduardo Fernandez: 40:08

So it’s been going in the family, since your family settled there, probably.

Tracy Bull: 40:12

Yeah, I mean it could have been literally from the 1850s.

Eduardo Fernandez: 40:17

It moved within one family: grandfather, uncle, cousin, then to a neighbor, and finally made it to Tracy. And now to Seed Savers Exchange. Tracy’s uncle, Gerald Moore, had grown this okra forever, according to family memory, and Tracy could confidently date that stewardship to at least the mid-1960s. Tracy’s cousin was Hoyt Miller, and after receiving the seed from Gerald, he grew it for years before handing it to Tracy’s neighbor, Jim Newton, when Jim moved to Pleasant Grove. Jim planted it, saved seed every year, and for roughly 50 years used no other okra seed. Then, that summer evening, Jim handed it to Tracy, and that is how ‘Hoyt’s’ okra stayed alive. That’s how this Arkansas seed became a part of the Seed Savers Exchange collection in Decorah, Iowa, and is now available for gardeners throughout the country. Tracy describes this okra seed as an old spiny type rather than a spineless variety, and he sees it as well adapted to heat, humidity, drought, pests, and disease. Typical Southern growing conditions. The reason it stayed in use is simple. It works, it germinates and it produces. And of course, Tracy’s family kept it because they ate it. Battered fried okra, okra with purple hull peas, and okra with gumbo. Tracy saves seed every year by leaving pods to mature late into the season, sometimes reaching even 12 to 16 inches long, until they dry down and the seeds can be used for the next year’s planting. In Tracy’s estimate, a single mature pot can yield 50 to 100 seeds, so a few pods can carry a season and still leave enough to share. And that is the quiet heart of this story: a seed that keeps going because the seed saving practice keeps going. Tracy donated ‘Hoyt’s’ okra to Seed Savers Exchange because he wants it to have a stable home beyond one garden. And in his donation he set quite a large seed sample, hundreds of them. So the variety could be tested, increased, preserved, and distributed. This is a story about a seed that stayed alive because people kept planting it, saving it, and passing it along. It’s earned its place in more than one garden. It’s not a grand story, it’s a local one. A good seed stayed alive because somebody kept it going. Somebody cared.

Melody Reese: 43:07

If you’d like to plant ‘Hoyt’s’ okra in your own garden, you can find it listed on The Exchange. Seed Savers Exchange’s gardener-to-gardener seed swap via our website and also linked in the show notes. Thank you for joining us for our first episode of Sowing Connections. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. It will be a “From the Archives” special and will be coming to you in two weeks. We’ll see you soon.