Taste,

m em o ry

forgotten foods, lost flavors, and why they matter

Restoring Diversity to Our Fields, Markets, and Tables

d av i d b u c h a n a n
foreword by gary paul nabhan

Foreword
When I close my eyes and reimagine my periodic pilgrimages to David Buchanans plantings, I see him walking with me through a lush, and luscious-tasting, garden in a sunny opening of the Northern Forest, as moist breezes and latent humidity from the sea suffuse all the colors around us with a rich brilliance. David is leading me between the rows to show me a Waldoboro Greenneck rutabaga, whose ancestors, they say, washed up on the Maine coast after a shipwreck way back in 1886; today, he tells me, this colorful turniplike oddity is making a comeback on the local-food scene. Next, he shows me the diminutive ground-hugging foliage of a Marshall strawberry, still struggling to get off the endangered list, but once prized as the best-tasting cultivated berry in all of America. Finally, he leads me over to his fledging nurserynow spread among three properties and thrivingwhich harbors some of Maines rarest but most delicious apples. Their names are as memorable as the sauces, pies, and hard ciders that are made from them. For David, working to save, celebrate, and savor the remaining living riches of the agrarian world is something thats visceral as well as intellectual, ethical, and, perhaps, spiritual. His sweat mingles with their floral fragrances and herbal high notes. We have inherited rather ugly terms from the sciences to describe these unusual-tasting, sometimes oddly shaped and garishly colored heritage crops: agrobiodiversity; endemic floral cultigens; economic botanical heirlooms; plant germplasm; phytogenetic resources; and landraces. Such labels only serve to obfuscate what the agrarian poet Wallace McCrae calls things of intrinsic worthshrouding them with a kind of tyranny that comes from an overreliance on esoteric jargon. Walking through Davids garden, though, helps put faces back on these plants, tastes back in our mouths, and synesthetic memories back into our dreams.
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Taste, memory
Suddenly, through Davids well-paced storytelling, these plants have once again become living neighbors of ours, part and parcel of our communities, our feasts, and folklore. And yet, David is cautious not to keep them suspended in some romanticized past, as if tending heirloom vegetables and heritage fruits were merely an effort to freeze the genetic and cultural landscape by a mutant cohort of agricultural Luddites. He, like many of us, wants to see these genetic, cultural, and culinary legacies continue to evolve, adapt to new conditions, and gain resistance to previously unforeseen diseases. David wants them to diversify and proliferate and reach beyond his own garden beds, to stun and inspire others wherever their journey takes them. Over the years David Buchanan has scoured archives and abandoned orchards in search of the rarest of the rare. He is both a seasoned sleuth of botanical lore and a nationally recognized conservationist of historically cultivated plants, but his book is about the future, not about the past. It sows seeds of hope, not despair. It is about how Davids own life has been changed by his daily practice of meditating over plants, of tending the garden, cherishing the seedlings, and harvesting the fruits to share with people who have never known them before. He is not alone in these pursuits, but shares the skills, sentiments, and sensibilities of some of Americas most remarkable (agri)cultural treasure keepers: Will Bonsall, John Bunker, Tom Burford, Betty Fussell, Rob Johnston, C. R. Lawn, Russell Libby, Glenn Roberts, Robin Schempp, Poppy Tooker, and Ben Watson. He also is intimate with the local gardeners, home cooks, honey spinners, fruit canners, cheesemakers, and brewers on his own home turf. These folks may not be as widely touted as the Iron Chefs and Extreme Eaters on Tv and YouTube, but they are surely the ones who enliven and enrich our communities through their fostering of regional and ethnic foodways. Taste, Memory may well be the most beautiful book ever written about food biodiversity and how it has landed on earth, in our mouths and in our hearts. Once you have read and digested Davids book, you will never again regard this two-word phrase as an abstraction, but as a vital element of our common food heritage, one that continues to nourish and enrich our lives. In turn,
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foreword

we must nourish it, or it will surely fade away. As Poppy Tooker famously says, Youve got to eat it to save it. Taste, Memory offers the rationale and the inspiration you need to embark upon your own voyage of food discovery. Gary Paul Nabhan June 2012

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