When I came home from the farmer’s market last week juggling two giant bags of tomatoes, my kids looked at me like I was insane. And maybe I had gone a little overboard. I confess to falling into a sort of heirloom mania around this time of year, unable to resist picking up at least one of these gloriously nonconformist fruits in every color, shape, and size. For an American raised on cookie-cutter produce, heirloom varieties are a happy reminder of the diversity that exists out there in our fields.
Except that, increasingly, it doesn’t. Thousands of our global plant varieties have disappeared in recent decades, due to habitat loss, extreme weather, and just plain disuse in an era of industrial agriculture. Thousands more are under threat.
Read the full, original story here: “Heirloom tomatoes could save mankind“
