on food
Lady of the land: Ira Wallace wants to save the world, one seed at a time
C-VILLE Weekly, July 2017
A few years ago, an envelope containing about 20 seeds and a note arrived at the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange office at Acorn Community in Mineral, Virginia. The note explained that the seeds were for a variety of bean that had been in the sender’s family for many years, and that if picked in the shelly bean stage—when the bean has just started to swell in the still-crisp yellow pod—and sautéed, the beans taste like mushrooms.
The note said something to the effect of, “Nobody in our family wants to carry it on. Hope you like it,” recalls Ira Wallace, a worker/owner of Southern Exposure, a cooperative company. Marge Mozelisky, the sender of that little envelope, got the seeds from her grandmother, Nellie Chernoff, who obtained the seeds from a Russian woman in the 1950s. Chernoff grew the beans in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada, until 1988, when Mozelisky took over the tradition of preserving the variety.
Prized for their unique flavor and creamy texture, Grandma Nellie’s mushroom beans are now offered in heirloom seed catalogs (including Southern Exposure Seed Exchange’s) and grown in gardens and on small farms all over North America.
“A plant with a story is more likely to survive,” says Wallace. “Taste is good, but when you have a story, a recipe, it takes you back to some time and some place that is really good.” It’s how a yellow podded bean from Russia ends up growing in a backyard garden—and eaten at dinner tables—halfway around the world in central Virginia.
Flip the scrip: Local Food Hub’s Fresh Pharmacy program cultivates a healthier community
C-VILLE Weekly, November 2017
It’s about 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the colder of the two warehouse storage rooms at the Local Food Hub, and the air smells of cardboard and brown paper, of bell peppers and root vegetables, and the earth that grew them. Boxed bushels of apples—which keep for months when refrigerated—sit on tall industrial shelves. Printed in bold red letters on the side of each apple box is a proposal, an instruction: Eat Virginia apples.
It’s a sound suggestion. As the popular aphorism goes, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” and there’s certainly truth to the saying, as a diet rich in nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables can beget better health.
But an apple a day isn’t enough for total health—there’s more to it than that. And, for some, a single apple, even one grown on a tree at an orchard just down the road, is difficult to come by.