It was nearly 40 years ago that Wendell Berry, in his singular prose, condemned the profligacy of U.S. consumerism and castigated our society’s wrongdoings by prophesying a coming reckoning in the The Unsettling of America. In that manifesto, he also argued eloquently that agriculture is, as the word itself would suggest, a cultural act. Berry, the poet, is utterly convinced that there is more profound, innate human expression in a single seed than any poetic verse. The seed is a product of collaboration, of partnership often spanning millennia between complete strangers who would not recognize each other’s worlds at all, apart from their seeds. What poem can compare to the seed?
At its finest, Seed: The Untold Story taps into this very sentiment: the seed as a collective cultural act with an intrinsic and inexpressible value. Seeds quite literally give humans life. But Seed digs deeper than this, arguing seeds are our heritage, identity, history and, in the final tally, part-and-parcel of the human species. We co-evolved with our crops. Just as the prehistoric Mixtec of the Oaxaca Valley carefully developed corn over thousands of years, corn in turn shaped what it meant to be a human in the Americas. Our seeds define who we are, where we came from and where we are headed.
It is this final component that is so worrisome to Seed’s directors, Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel. If seeds indicate our most likely future as Berry warned a generation ago, we are all wholly and totally fucked. In the past 100 years, approximately 92% of the world’s agricultural diversity—the food that we eat everyday—has been lost to neglect and the vagaries of global market capitalism. If we resurrected our great-grandparents, after the novelty of television and the vacuity of social media no longer held their attention, they would be shocked at the poverty of our apple varieties, tomato selection and cauliflower diversity. Twenty-first century subsistence consists of a shocking paucity of choices.
This is no joking matter. The disappearance of thousands of varieties of food crops is not just a burden to taste buds only able to sample a half-dozen flavors of radish. In less than 100 years our policies, shopping habits, wars, pollution and inattention have destroyed thousands of years of human innovation. Agriculture is culture; carelessly discarding seeds is like burning books. Except that books are only 3,500 years old. Seeds are ancient, primordial. In fact, it was the seed that permitted humans the resources to develop alphabets, paper and literature in the first place! Seeds begat books.
As Seed emphasizes, the destruction of a millennia of cultural heritage and collective generational knowledge is unfortunately not even the biggest worry for the future of seeds. That ignominy belongs instead to the disgusting Supreme Court ruling of 2013 that determined seeds to be a patentable intellectual property. What single entity invented corn and wheat and barley? How can control over these most basic cultural artifacts, hand-crafted over thousands of years, be arbitrarily granted to a cabal of lawyers and geneticists for their own profit? This is surely beyond the imagination of even Berry when he foresaw doomsday in our increasing alienation from our food.
Seed brings new material into this discussion. The enormous problems facing our agricultural future are the foundation of the film, but not its true subject. Instead, Seed traces the careful labor of half-dozen renegades who are quietly stockpiling and perpetuating heirloom vegetable varieties. The film bounces from New York to New Mexico to Iowa to Hawaii, showcasing the dogged work of seed-savers who have taken up the task of preserving a cultural heritage their fellow citizens and even fellow farmers seem unconcerned with. These activists speak truth to power by carefully parting the soil and dropping in a few seeds. At its best, Seed is engaging, empowering and energizing; the viewer truly cares about the various strains of beans, corn and amaranth.
The trouble with the film is its freneticism. Seed is incapable of any sort of narrative focus. In addition to the seed-savers, it covers anti-GMO wheat farmers in Oregon, interviews the inimitable Jane Goodall, makes a foray into the Oaxaca valley to explore the genesis of corn and follows an intrepid and charismatic food pioneer to the Amazon and the Kalahari. Each of these episodes is appealing in and of themselves, but wedging so many overlapping, tangentially-related narratives into a 94-minute film is just too ambitious. None of the stories feel complete.
Even though Seed offers only partial stories of its protagonists, the film executes its thesis quite completely. It convincingly argues that agriculture is culture and the seed is the precious artifact resulting from this cultural act. Because seeds are threatened by the myopic and rapacious forces of unchecked neoliberal capitalism, thousands of years of culture are also in danger. Seed-savers and food pioneers are the vanguard of the resistance and should be celebrated and reinforced. In the end, like Berry’s canonical book, Seed is a call to arms; arms straining not with rifles but in planting a row of pole beans and watching nature’s magic transpire.
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