Growing Heritage: The politics of heritage vegetables

Food consumption is a highly politicised arena these days and consumers are called on to consider their habits and choices in ways which can be demanding and contradictory.

Increasingly in recent years, we are called on to think of some foods—particularly vegetables and seeds—as heritage at risk, and to take responsibility for saving them (paradoxically through eating them). Until a few years ago, the conservation of crops was mainly considered a matter for agricultural scientists, governments and the UN. Now consumers are called on to take part through seed catalogues, newspaper features, restaurant menus and supermarket packaging. Heritage conservation bodies have opened collections of rare fruit and vegetables to visitors, and a number of anti-capitalist groups are campaigning for their protection. Such a wide range of social actors, engaging with different audiences have not surprisingly produced a varied, even contradictory, set of claims about what heritage is and what ought to be done for it. For example, many suggest that the growing and eating of heritage crops represents a resistance to the damaging dominance of the supermarkets on our food system. Yet major UK supermarket chains proudly announce heritage vegetable and fruit products in their stores. There is often reference to their ‘illegality’ and they are given away free at seed swap events. Yet where they are for sale, ‘heritage’ seeds, fruit and vegetables are associated with premium product lines and upmarket dining.

Scholarship has not kept pace with this rapid change, and to date food heritage has received little critical scrutiny, either in the mainstream media or in academia, the claims of its proponents usually taken at face value. While heritage discourse tends to assume objects simply are (and always were) innately ‘heritage’, this study uses a discourse analysis of over 500 ‘texts’ —from newspaper articles to food packets—to trace how the concept of ‘heritage vegetables’ is being shaped in the interests of various groups today.