Fall Harvest: Celebrating Diversity with Crops and Cuisine from Around the World

In this month's issue, we sit down with Martina Huber and Eric Schranz , two scientists at Wageningen University, who celebrated their first harvest of semi-tropical crops with a community festival. Their plants, which were grown directly in Dutch soil, are part of a broader experiment shedding light on the diverse relationships between people, food, and crops.

Written and edited by William Dwyer

Good afternoon to the both of you! Can you start by introducing yourself to our readers? Where are you calling from today?

Martina: Hello! I’m Martina Huber, I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Biosystematics group at Wageningen University. I completed my masters in Austria, which is where I grew up, and got my PhD in Plant Physiology in Utrecht.?

Eric: I’m Eric Shranz. I’m originally American, from Colorado. I did my undergrad at Cornell, my PhD at Wisconsin, and I’m now a professor of Biosystematics at Wageningen, where I’ve been for 12 years.

You are both researchers in the Biosystematics group at Wageningen. Before we dive into your work, what were the influences that steered you towards your present research?

Martina: There is one major event that deeply affected my decision to study biology. I spent a gap year in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, doing volunteer work at a tropical rainforest research station, where I discovered my fascination for biology, and for an NGO that supports sugarcane harvesters. Seeing the working conditions of the people there deeply affected me. The topic of my PhD was finding ways to make rice farming more sustainable, with a focus in SouthEast Asia. I did my field research in the Philippines, at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). I arrived with a study design to answer my research question, but working in the field with contract workers that live right outside the research station in severe poverty, I realized just how one-dimensional, how isolated, science can be. After my PhD, I was sure I wouldn’t go on in academia but Eric convinced me to join him in a project. My goal since has been to explore the social dimensions to the crops we grow and eat. You can’t disentangle food from people.?

Eric: I somehow oddly wanted to be a plant biologist as a young kid. Some people think it’s lucky to know what you want to do so early, but what a weird decision to be a 7-year old and decide you want to be a plant biologist. I think that was partly from growing up in the Rocky Mountains. I just always liked plants and connected with them. I liked that they were clearly at the center of ecosystems. Influence-wise, Michael Pollan has been a huge inspiration for me. His books get me excited about understanding how plants drive human evolution, perhaps as much as the other way around. I also want to mention the influence of my collaborator, Tinde van Andel, an ethnobotanist. Her research on the transport of rice and other plants from West Africa to Suriname and its ties to the slave trade is a powerful illustration of the ties between plants and people.

The Earth is warming, and semi-tropical crops might soon grow reliably in Northern Europe. How did you consider climate change when designing your project?

Eric: I think it’s important for us to start with a disclaimer: we are not pretending that our project is going to be a cornucopia for solving climate change. The focus was really around culture exchange. In the Netherlands and the US, where I’m from, we often see these preconceived notions of food as just this thing we see at the grocery store, something without an identity. For example, we all eat bananas and we might know they’re tropical, but we eat them without thinking much about the connection to?SouthEast Asian origins and their links to culture. There are many projects in agriculture attempting to grow tropical crops like vanilla in greenhouses, but it’s important to question who these initiatives are serving. Often, the approach is centered around growing exotic crops in a high-tech way for well-off consumers, which ends up commodifying crops that have deep meaning to some communities. I like to think of food in the Michael Pollan or Thanksgiving way, which despite a complicated history, is really about celebrating food, migration of people, and cultural exchange. These ideas are at the heart of this project. We’re starting at the local scale with the Wageningen community, and we’re not pretending it will save the world. It was a way of sparking conversations about how food and culture overlap.?

Martina: Another focus of this project was to bring more diversity in the Dutch agricultural system. One way to do that, especially within the context of climate adaptation, is to bring new crops that previously couldn’t be cultivated in the Netherlands. Our aim was precisely not to do this in a high-tech way, but contrary - as simple as possible with as little input as possible and with that, making it adaptable by different communities to grow their own vegetables. So we grew all the plants in the field under simple, inexpensive tents, which also makes it more sustainable. And like Eric said, the end goal wasn’t so much to scale up and have new tropical crops land in supermarkets overnight, but to nurture this awareness that food is deeply connected to people, their homes, and their culture.

Your field experiments include tropical crops indigenous to Indonesia and Suriname. What has been your experience growing these understudied crops, and have you consulted anyone’s expertise along the way?

Martina: The plants themselves were actually not the big issue, but we did face some logistical challenges. The idea of growing tropical crops side-by-side in an environment so different from their country of origin makes any sort of planning really difficult. We had a lot of help from university staff and from our seed supplier EastWest seeds, and we tackled technical questions (i.e., how much water to use, how many seeds to sow) together as they arose.?

Eric: I totally agree with Martina, and want to acknowledge Chris Mueller, from EastWest seeds, who put us in touch with Orasa, from Thailand?and her Dutch husband, who have been growing Thai vegetables in tunnels similar to ours in the Netherlands. Ultimately, there’s nothing like doing it yourself. You can’t really learn it by talking. Gardening is about trying. And this was our first trial.

Where is the project headed next?

Eric: For the next phase of the project, we’re looking to reach immigrant communities in the big cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam. A few universities (including Wageningen) have joined forces with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS).?We are now working with AMS and other partners in Amsterdam to launch an initiative called “Damsko”, which is creating indoor community gardens for city residents, particularly those with a recent migration background. Currently, one of the biggest bottlenecks in growing new crops is lack of access to seed diversity. People trying to grow things like taro or long bean typically only have one or two seed packets. But what would happen if we could bring 20 or 30 varieties of these crops, put them on display and encourage people to select their preferred varieties? This idea is called participatory plant breeding. Instead of telling people what to do, we supply biodiversity, let communities pick the crops they're interested in, and over the course of several years see which varieties are most desired and best adapted to the Dutch environment. Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that a lot of what we think are new ideas are just new wine in old bottles, so to speak. But today is a different moment in history, and I think projects like this one are much more likely to succeed now than they did 20 years ago.?

Martina: After the “Harvest Festival” this fall, I got many responses from people. For example, a woman is writing a Surinamese vegetarian cookbook, and she wrote a newspaper article that featured the use of vegetables we shared with her. It was fascinating to see what impact our Festival created on campus and how many people this project touched. There was risk involved, if you can call it that, because neither Eric nor I are experts with any of these crops nor are either of us social scientists. But by openly admitting our knowledge gaps, we?gave an opportunity for people familiar with these crops to approach us, teach us, and connect diverse cuisines and cultures. The next steps of the project will be to grow this multicultural community and have a space to exchange seeds, knowledge of plants, how to grow them, recipes and stories.

Communities around the globe have cultivated these crops for generations. How do you envision your research extending this legacy? And how might Dutch growers and consumers enjoy these crops while preserving their rich heritage?

Eric: It’s important to point out that we are not looking for the next superfood. Some crops which have been cultivated for generations (i.e. quinoa) are introduced in our European supermarkets as superfoods without much consideration for their heritage, which I think can be perceived as a form of cultural appropriation. The primary goal is to understand how immigrant communities grow and value crops from their homeland. People sometimes get so excited about growing vegetables and fruits that remind them of home that they get tears in their eyes. We want to celebrate the diversity of immigrant communities and the fact that they can grow crops in a place like the Netherlands where you don’t necessarily think they belong.?

Martina: I think what Eric is trying to say, and it really gets at the root of the project, is that preserving the crops’ heritage isn’t as much an active process as it is getting the seeds into the hands of communities that understand them. Our role as universities is to create a space for dialogue and to leverage the resources we have access to and provide these to the communities and be in dialogue with them and exchange knowledge. As academics, we should also show appreciation for cultural forms of knowledge and bring those to the surface.

Our Call for Authors "Undoing the Ivory Tower"

The Good Scientists team would love to hear your thoughts on the comment section below! Would you like to become a Guest Author? Submit your article idea here. Reach out to [email protected] for more info.