As we gather around tables this holiday season, our food traditions will take center stage in how we meaningfully connect with family and friends. The journey these traditions take to reach our plates and our hearts keeps us deeply rooted in both where and who we come from. Yet many of us honor these traditions each year without realizing the full extent of the incredible journey they took, or the long chains of ancestors that stewarded them for countless generations before us.

The story of where our food comes from—including the land where it grew, and the people who nurtured the plants, seeds, and agricultural traditions from which great meals and memories are made—is one that goes back centuries, even millennia. Every bite we take is the culmination of countless human hands carrying out this work in cooperation with nature, then passing the knowledge and the ingredients on to one another in an act of enduring love.

In my new role as executive director at Seed Savers Exchange, I’m in awe of the amount of love that has been passed down through the more than 20,000 heirloom varieties entrusted to our public-access seed bank for safekeeping and sharing. The wide diversity of crops represented in our collection, and the unique stewardship chains from which they came, represent a rich history of food and garden heritage that defines so much of our American experiences. Seeing these treasures up close at Heritage Farm and hearing their carefully researched stories, it’s impossible not to feel overwhelmed by gratitude for all the stewards, past and present, whose skillful hands have kept them alive.

Grandma Betty Rose helps pitch hay on her family’s farm.

Seed Savers Exchange has inspired me to dig deep into my own family food traditions over the last 20 years, long before taking on my new role. As a young woman just beginning to discover my roots in the late 1990s, Seed Savers Exchange and its community planted a message in my heart that seeds are an important part of our cultural heritage, which gave me a whole new lens through which to explore my family history. While I learned about the Appalachian foodways of my Grandma Betty, I began to ask questions about her family’s homesteading traditions, and soon learned that we had some deep agricultural roots associated with these foodways of which I was previously unaware. My grandma had taught me how to garden and can tomatoes, but the level of self-sufficiency from the land which she described experiencing while growing up (with her parents George and Ebbie Rose) was very different than our current way of life.

We bonded strongly over the memories she shared of her childhood, and old family photos came to new life as she pointed out gardens her family tended, tools they used to work the land, and buildings that housed animals or stored supplies like food, coal, and Delco batteries for electricity. I was enchanted by visions of her family—my family—grafting fruit trees, raising honeybees, digging up wild ginseng, saving seeds, growing sweet potato slips for the community, and experiencing running water and electricity in their home for the very first time. (They were the first in their area to have both, thanks to those Delco batteries!)

Great-grandpa George Rose cultivates the family garden.

The more I learned about the way my grandma lived growing up—sharing garden work with neighbors, caring for animals, preserving the harvests, and, in general, living so closely with the land—the more I found my interest in agriculture become deeper and my connection to my roots grow stronger. But my concern for the loss of these agrarian traditions in our society was growing too.

While the food my grandma so expertly cooked (like cornbread, fried green tomatoes, and soup beans) reflected her Southern origins, many of the other traditions from her past seemed to live on only in memory and in those old black-and-white photographs. And the more I investigated the other branches of my family tree, the more I discovered the same story, just told from different angles. The mark of our ancestors was still imprinted in the meals we enjoyed, but the self-sufficiency to grow these foods from the land ourselves was almost gone within a couple of generations.

These early impressions endured—and ultimately guided the decisions I would make later in my life. I pursued horticulture in part because I wanted to regain the skills to grow fresh food and save our own seeds that had been lost in my family. This path, in turn, introduced me to the world of organic farming, where I gained valuable experience with vegetable production and land stewardship from people who were actively practicing these skills in modern times. That plant breeding was a possible area of focus at my university was a revelation. Learning a craft that would allow me to carry on the work previously done by our ancestors not only resonated with me but also seemed like a practical way to address many of the agricultural challenges our society faces today.

Great-grandma Ebbie Rose tends to her chickens.

The last decade of my work trying to restore this cultural connection to seed has focused on practicing the art and science of plant breeding—most recently at Johnny’s Selected Seeds, a small-scale seed company in the Northeast where I helped develop new and improved varieties for organic growers. The ability to not only save seed, but also select for desirable characteristics that keep our food heritage resilient and adaptive is something I am eager to pass on to future generations.

And that concern for future generations is one reason the mission of Seed Savers Exchange resonates as strongly with me today as it did two decades ago. Since its 1975 founding, Seed Savers nonprofit mission has never wavered in its commitment to spreading one very important message—that seeds and crop biodiversity are at the heart of our cultural experiences in America, and that these precious resources need careful protection.

I am so honored to now be a part of this organization, helping carry out this important work. Because I have personally experienced what a profound difference this message can make in someone’s life, I want to make sure the joy of connecting to our agricultural heritage is something other people experience too. As you enjoy your own food traditions over the holidays, remember the long and beautiful journey these traditions took to reach our tables. The heirloom varieties that have stood the test of time along this journey offer both a living link to our past as well as a source of hope and resilience for the future.

That is why I hope you will join me in honoring these heirlooms with a donation to Seed Savers Exchange for the holidays—to help us ensure that rare varieties in our living collection, the traditions they foster, and the generational connections they help forge will continue to thrive.

It takes many hands to steward the seeds and traditions we cherish and nurture, and you can play an important role in this effort with a tax-deductible, year-end donation towards our mission.

With your support, Seed Savers Exchange can not only protect the seeds in our collection but also foster a healthy seed-keeping culture that nourishes both the heart and soul of these traditions, keeping them alive and well in the coming year and for generations to come!

Donate today