Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022.
Alexander, a United Kingdom-based documentary film producer, started growing his own food as a kid in Devon, England. After briefly trying to hawk red Brussel sprouts and other unique vegetables in the 1970s, he fell back on making documentaries movies when his vegetable stand didn’t take off. He might have been content with simply growing his own produce had it not been for a fateful encounter with a pepper.
While working on a TV project in Donetsk, Ukraine, in the fall of 1988, Alexander encountered a tennis ball-sized sweet pepper native to the region. Intrigued, he saved some seeds to cultivate back home in the UK. “Little did I know … that this moment was to mark the start of a journey of discovery that fundamentally changed the way I looked at and came to understand the often-visceral relationship we have we can have with what we grow and eat,” he recalled.
His mission started out personal—he just wanted to discover old forgotten varieties of tomatoes and peppers, and other veggies to grow and enjoy. Gradually, Alexander started looking for seeds from vegetables that stood to be wiped out completely. Along the way, he also began delving into the histories of produce.
So, he traveled the world, discovering new varieties and learning everything from the earliest documented domestication of peas in the Fertile Crescent roughly 8,500 years ago to how Afghanis were growing purple, yellow, white and black carrots more than 5,000 years ago.
Much of the history he compiled is proffered in this slim, readable volume and broken down into chapters devoted to specific vegetables. For each entry, he connects the roots of vegetable history stretching back millennia to his own stories of discovery.
He also takes readers along as he comes across a local type of Syrian fava bean featured in a salad he enjoys at a restaurant in Palmyra, Jordan, in 2011 or persuades an increasingly irritated elderly woman at a farmer’s market in Laos to sell him a bag of pea pods.
Alexander, who is also now a “seed guardian” for the UK-based Heritage Seed Library and has two refrigerators in his Wales garage packed with 499 seed samples, as of his book’s publication, also prompts introspection about where the origins of the food we eat. If you find yourself digging your own garden once you’ve gulped down the final chapter, don’t say we didn’t warn you.