Cocooned in a warm barn, nestled between tomato vines and nasturtium tendrils, an evening of nourishment unfolded at OmVed Gardens in London. Chefs and growers sat down together to share in the story of seed, told through a feast of dishes featuring the wonderful flavours of tomorrow’s flourishing food system. To ensure we have exciting, diverse, nutritious, tasty food far into the future, we need to nurture close collaborations that stretch from seed to plate. This night was a pilot, the first of (we hope) many, that will cultivate these connections, and spark the belief and transformation we need to counter the complex web of challenges our food is facing.
In partnership with Tomorrow’s Kitchen, we brought thirty seed producers, each working with rare, radical, diverse, resilient, underused varieties, together with thirty passionate and inventive chefs from the UK’s vibrant restaurant scene.
Corporate food production, with its preference for uniformity and stability on supermarket shelves, has robbed us of the incredible diversity of crops once stewarded on our isles. Diversity that once gifted us grains and vegetables of every shape and colour. That increased our resilience against health issues and bolstered our harvests’ resilience against pests, diseases, droughts, and floods. Crops that were adapted to each area in which they grew, lending themselves to regional recipes passed down for generations, along with the stories and rituals that sustained them. Today, the number of cultivated plant varieties has dropped from 30,000 to just 170, with 75 per cent of our food now coming from just 12 crops.
Our incredible network of seed guardians is reviving these lost heritage varieties and tending to new, adaptive crop populations with the traits needed to thrive in increasingly turbulent conditions. Chefs have a unique ability to further this work, making use of the expanding range of flavours available; increasing awareness and demand for all that our fields can offer, beyond the limits we have grown accustomed to. To showcase what can blossom from these collaborations, our Seed to Plate feast featured three dishes born from three new partnerships between chef and grower.
Together, we sampled grilled radicchios with pickled ‘Resilient’ shishito peppers and sheep’s ricotta; Hebredian Rye risotto with Desert Spirit Landrace pumpkin, Sakuma Wiki kale and amaranth; and a spicy massaman curry featuring fourth-generation seed-saved yellow and red pepper and roasted landrace pumpkin.
As taste buds were tickled by new flavours, textures, and pairings, ideas became solidified into plans. Growers spoke of breeding vegetables to be more suited to kitchens: thinner-skinned squashes, square-shouldered peppers. Chefs plotted farm visits, discussed how to platform growers on their menus. Friendships formed.
Grounding these conversations, Future Resilience Seed Coordinator Holly Silvester and Founder of Tomorrow’s Kitchen Jack Feeny were joined by food writer Dan Saladino of BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme, who impressed on the audience the importance of sharing stories of our food. Guests offered their own tales, touching on relationships, missing or thriving, across the journey of food from soil to service.
With an introduction from Dan Saladino, attendees watched Dr Debal Deb and The Last Harvest, which shares the story of his encounter with the seed saver and scientist who has preserved over 1400 varieties of rice from the brink of extinction in India, and the “special properties” held within these seeds. The film beautifully brought to life how vital this work is, and the positive journeys of resistance that can unfold from its centre.
Openness and excitement towards these new connections emanated from the barn, spilling into the surrounding gardens. There is such untapped potential when it comes to utilising the pull the hospitality industry has over what people eat, cook, buy, and know to look out for. We are so looking forward to accompanying these collaborations and supporting chefs and growers to nurture mutually beneficial relationships that feed their creativity as well as their customers. We are deeply grateful to the Savitri Waney Charitable Trust and The Samworth Foundation for making this event possible.
Photographs by Leo Cinicolo Photography.
