If you've been on this list for a while, you know that while my main topic is seed starting, I have several other, adjacent topics that find their way in here. Today is dedicated to one such.

I've always been interested in food - cooking, eating, trying new flavors and recipes. My mom says that even as a kid, it was clear that I would grow up to cook because I was always hovering around, interested in what she was up to in the kitchen.

Food is what got me into gardening and seed starting in the first place. I was looking for tasty ingredients, some of which I could get only by starting and growing my own from seed.

Thus began my years of trial and error (mostly error) of learning to grow from seed. By the time I finally figured it out, and had a full set of self-watering seed pots to save me from my inevitable watering fails, Thai basil (one of the herbs I was learning to grow) was readily available as plant starts. Sigh.

Anyway, all this is to say that I'm really interested in all things edible and follow lots of sub-plots of the food world very closely, from nutrition to wild foraging, trendy cookbooks, and , today's topic: food safety and supply chains.

I follow a fantastic Substack called The Rotten Apple by Karen Constable all about food safety and food fraud.

"How could you possibly write something new every week about food fraud?" you may be wondering. Turns out, it's a huge topic, and there are many, many unsung professionals out there thinking full-time about food fraud and keeping us safer for it.

Food fraud is usually when a seller, on purpose, adulterates or mislabels food in order to sell it for a higher price. Think melamine in milk, or dyes in spices to make them appear fresher, or falsified expiration dates, etc.

This week Karen Constable wrote a long and detailed post about what the conflict in Iran is doing to food supply chains, and how that is likely to affect food prices and the prevalence of food fraud.

Food fraud is not my first concern when considering the effects of war, but with even a minute's thought, it's an obvious and widespread effect. With shipping and trade routes severely disrupted, containers of food bound for one place will be both spending more time at sea (raising the temptation to falsely alter expiration dates, particularly on fresh items like produce, dairy and seafood), and being diverted to new destinations altogether where rules like allowed pesticide residues, for example, are different, and could lead to mislabeling.

In particular, grain that spends more time at sea is more susceptible to mycotoxin contamination, and there will be a real incentive for food traders to modify test results in order to not lose their entire inventory.

This last bit gets really into the weeds, but is perhaps one of the most interesting details for me: Food manufacturers, who need to ensure a steady stream of ingredients to continue production, are already diversifying their suppliers to guard against the shortages they foresee. This, in turn, creates real headaches for purchasers to verify new vendors and guard against opportunistic food fraudsters looking to capitalize on the disruption.

Of course the professional inconvenience of food managers is small potatoes compared to the people whose lives are directly affected by the war. And at the same time, today's supply chain disruptions could very well cause next month's (or next year's) devastating outbreak of food poisoning.

Every so often we get these shocks to our global systems that make us look more closely at our local food supplies. The full zombie apocalypse with literally nothing on the shelves isn't super likely, of course. But when supply lines are tight, prices can shoot up, and reliable ingredients become unavailable.

A surprising number of gardeners I know talk in terms of backyard food security, saying things like "well obviously I can't grow everything our family eats in a suburban yard, but it's nice to know there's at least something to eat right here at home."

Seed starting and seed saving are a big part of that security. Seeds keep well and are very inexpensive - free if you're saving them yourself! If you have the skills, it only takes a tiny handful of seeds to create a surprisingly abundant harvest.

This is not meant to be a post to scare you into buying anything, BTW. Only to validate that, yes, the food supply chain is global and sensitive, and can be disrupted by forces far beyond your control, and that's legitimately worrying.

If you have the means and the ability, being a gardener who starts, saves, and shares seeds - and who also shares their know-how - is a valuable contribution to us all. Decentralizing the seed supply makes it less vulnerable to disruption. Unlike global commodities operating at scales way beyond the reach of regular folks, seed security is somewhere we, as individual gardeners, can make a contribution.

Humans have been starting seeds for millennia without Orta pots, and will continue to do so. Seeds are inexpensive to buy, and are often free at seed libraries or seed swaps.

You truly do not have to spend money to build seed starting skills and local seed security.

This newsletter and our planning resources (below, in the footer of every email) are always free.

The products and services we sell are meant to give gardeners a boost, to fit finicky seed-starting into busy lives, where you *know* you want to succeed with seeds, but don't have the time or mental bandwidth to do the fussy daily watering, or the deep dive research into seed sources to verify quality.

From a practical standpoint, even the most abundant backyard vegetable gardens aren't going to produce enough calories to feed most families.

There is very much an emotional element to seeds and growing too.

As I wrote about over the last few weeks, science is showing more and more clearly that simply being in the garden and in nature is good for mental and physical health.

There is also this perspective from Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, that I'll leave you with:

"The refusal to be complicit can be a kind of resistance to dominant paradigms, but it’s also an opportunity to be creative and joyful and say, I can’t topple Monsanto, but I can plant an organic garden; I can’t counter fill-in-the-blank of environmental destruction, but I can create native landscaping that helps pollinators in the face of neonicotinoid pesticides which research has suggested is especially harmful to wild bees and bumblebees.

"So much of what we think about in environmentalism is finger-wagging and gloom-and-doom, but when you look at a lot of those examples where people are taking things into their hands, they’re joyful. That’s healing not only for land but for our culture as well — it feels good. It’s also good to feel your own agency. We need to feel that satisfaction that can replace the so-called satisfaction of buying something."

Until next time,

Anne

When you’re ready, here are some more ways I can help you grow a thriving garden from seed:

1. Plan your seed-starting schedule with our ​free printable planner.​

2. Download the free ​Orta Seed Starting Handbook with all the basics you need to succeed with seeds.​

3. Take the guesswork out of watering with Orta Self-Watering Pots. (Find discounted factory seconds here!)

4. Join the Orta Seed Club to have 5 hand-picked, unusual & high-yielding varieties delivered to you every season.

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