The fruits and vegetables we will have tomorrow may be more nutritious than the ones we have today, because the development of more highly nutritious cultivars is ongoing at universities and research centers around the country. One of the leading centers of this research is the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center of the Department of Horticultural Sciences at Texas A&M University. The goal of the center is to develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables that taste better, look better, and contain higher levels of natural disease-preventing compounds, especially cancer preventives. In one of the most promising projects, scientists are searching for those fruit and vegetable varieties that have extra-high levels of flavor components, nutritive compounds, antioxidants, and substances that research has shown to have a preventive effect on chronic diseases. The scientists hope to move varieties to market that will taste so good, people will eat more of them; and as people increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables, their diet will become more healthful. Even if people don’t eat more sheer weight of the new fruits and vegetables, they’ll get greater health benefits because of elevated levels of nutrients and disease-preventing compounds. Education about the new and more nutritious varieties will be needed.
It may be possible to breed more nutrition into kale, for instance, but how much kale can you eat? I once asked Joan Gussow, a nutritionist at Columbia University, a rather simplistic question: Which vegetable is best for you? “Kale is probably the most nutrition-packed vegetable, but hardly anyone eats enough kale to get real benefits,” she said. “So, I’d say, broccoli is best for you, because it’s almost as nutritious as kale, and people eat enough of it to make a difference.”
GROWING WHAT PEOPLE WANT
Research at state Agricultural Experiment Stations is revealing some important trends for people looking for fresh, organic food. In Connecticut, for example, the Connecticut AES for more than twenty years has been operating a New Crops Program. Connecticut sits astride one of the largest consumer markets for globe artichokes in the country. Forty percent of California’s artichokes are sold in markets between New York and Boston. According to David Hill of the New Crops Program, writing in the Spring 2002, Frontiers of Plant Science, “We learned how to grow artichokes in Connecticut by modifying their growth habit to shorten their normal biennial life cycle of two years down to just four months so we could produce an annual crop. Growers in Easton and Branford can attest to the popularity of locally grown artichokes whose flavor is superior to that of 10-day-old artichokes shipped from California.”
The New Crops Program surveyed consumers and growers who attend farmers’ markets to determine the kind of unusual fruits, vegetables, and herbs they would buy if they were locally grown. Leading the list of forty-five items were crops you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with Connecticut: okra, leeks, sweet potatoes, jilo (a South American eggplant), and calabaza winter squash. The reason for these choices is the growth of new ethnic communities, such as the 15,000 emigrés from Brazil to the Danbury-Waterbury region who prize jilo, or the 350,000 Hispanics across the state who use calabaza in vegetable dishes, soups, and baked goods. So the New Crops Program began to study these crops and found that okra, leeks, sweet potatoes, and jilo actually grew well in Connecticut if cultivars developed for northerly climates and cultural (growing) techniques to shorten the growing season were used. Now organic farmers in the state can grow these specialty crops and sell them at the open-air farmers’ markets that are so culturally familiar to the Hispanic and Brazilian communities, and, increasingly, to the savvy mainstream markets.
GROWING MORE GENETICALLY DIVERSE CROPS
Another benefit of small-scale agriculture compared to corporate agribusiness is the greater genetic diversity of open-pollinated crops typically grown by organic family farmers. You may remember the outbreak of disease that ravaged the American field corn crop throughout the Midwest in 1977. The problem was that almost all of the corn being grown was the same genetic hybrid. It grew well and produced good crops, but the hybrid was susceptible to a certain fungal disease, and the crop that year failed because of it. Farmers then saw the importance of planting a diverse set of cultivars with lots of genetic variation. If one hybrid gets a disease, another may not.
Genetic diversity is recognized as crucial now among field crops but perhaps less so among fruit and nut trees. Some U.S. fruit and nut industries are based primarily on one or two major cultivars: Bing and Royal Ann sweet cherries, Tilton and Blenheim apricots, Bartlett pears, Barcelona hazelnuts, Kerman pistachios, and Hayward kiwifruit, for some good examples.
....read more |
|
Share This Article
