Chase 🌾 🏳️‍🌈 🌾

Raise your hand if you're also heartbroken you missed the

𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕝 𝕊𝕪𝕞𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕚𝕦𝕞 𝕠𝕟 𝔼𝕕𝕚𝕓𝕝𝕖 𝔸𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕦𝕞𝕤

Papers include: Production of shallot using a banana-shallot intercropping for effective land use (V. Alveno, M.A. Chozin, A. Maharijaya) Onion maggot and onion thrips over forty years of integrated pest management (M.R. McDonald, K. Vander Kooi, T. Blauel) Preparing Flemish leek growers for future challenges (L. Lippens, L. Lauwers, J. Bodyn, A. Waverijn, S. Buysens, L. De Reycke)

Our domestic onion (Allium cepa L.) originated in the rocky, dry mountains of northern Iran. We know this because there are still wild relatives of our cepa onion growing there. These cousins are separate species from A. cepa, but are similar enough that they can be crossed with our onion.

These wild onions are Allium vavilovii (Popov & Vved.) (first cousin) and Allium asarense (R.M.Fritsch & Matin) (second cousin). Here's a free paper about them!

They look like our onions... kinda. They both share a life stage where they turn into big sticks with a bulb right in the center.

Part of what I love is the name. A. vavilovii literally translates to "Vavilov's onion". If you don't know Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), consider this your introduction! Vavilov was a legendary Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist. He travelled the globe, hunting down these wild relatives of our food crops, partially to build stronger crops, partially to understand the history of domestication and the movement of people. Please lose yourself in one of the coolest, mindblowingest wikipedia pages out there, describing the history and places of domestication largely built by him.

Horrifically, while we now know that Vavilov was a genius, things... didn't go great with Stalin. Stalin's personal favorite agronomist Trofim Lysenko was a monster and a master of jingoistic pseudoscience. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics (the science we use now), focusing instead on Lamarkism (absolutely false horseshit). Lysenko had Vavilov sacked, grabbed by the Soviet secret police, interrogated for 11 months, and died in prison, likely due to starvation and pneumonia. You can decide if that was a better fate than his geneticist peers, who were just outright shot.

Lysenko would go on to set agricultural policy that would result in multiple famines that killed approximately 25-75 million people in USSR and Mao's China.

Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.

Daily reminder: Leafy greens like kales uptake all those delicious heavy metals in urban soils like lead and cadmium.

Don’t eat sidewalk-crack kale.

Here's some cool references from the EPA on safe urban gardening:

REUSING POTENTIALLY CONTAMINATED LANDSCAPES: Growing Gardens in Urban Soils

Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.

Soil scientists aren't food distribution effort experts, political lobbyists, food bank organizers, or social program builders. We can just tell you what is or is not safe to grow plants in. Same goes for ecologists, we just know about how our plants respond to different environments and potentially how that could be harmful to people.

My training, my expertise, my job, is not anything to do with access to food. I can just share my expertise and my field in ways I hope are helpful.

Asking me to do more, to overreach into fields I have no knowledge in, and have no training in, and have no social connections in, is unreasonable. And it's disrespectful to the people who DO that work. Who have put in the years of training, education, and on the ground work to know how to work with communities, distributors, and governments.

It's like housing. True, recent story: In a very similar way, a park manager suddenly ends up the decisionmaker in housing for unhoused people. Not trained in housing, in justice, in history of the topics, or the law. But put on the spot for where to move people because so-and-so downtown wants those homeless people... somewhere else. "Don't you have a park somewhere else they could go?"

Not their job. Not their expertise. Even with their most well-intentioned efforts, they aren't equipped to do the job. This isn't a reasonable ask.

This idea that "Authorities" are a unified, faceless mass of nameless bureaucrats rather than individuals with specific expertises to handle specific topics is how we get into fucked up situations like this.

So where are you seeing these "Authorities" doing outreach? Are you just reading what dumb shit an ecologist vague-blogged at 2am on tumblr, like my post above? Are you actually seeking out the people who work hard in your region trying to feed people?