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Since 1966, the European Union has had the most restrictive laws in the world on agricultural biodiversity. To be marketed, a variety has to be distinct, uniform and stable, which in principle means the individual plants have to be effectively identical. This has never suited organic farmers or any other smaller scale growers, including home gardeners. Finally, after a few false starts, a new regulation permitted the marketing of “organic heterogeneous material” from January 2022.
One of the organisations that campaigned for the new regulation is Let’s Liberate Diversity, an association of European groups. I went along to their 10th anniversary forum to hear how farmers and food producers were responding to the new regulation.
Notes
- Find out more about Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen and Biocivam Aude.
- Let’s Liberate Diversity published a round-up of all the events at the Budapest forum.
- The farmers Yumi Biagini is working with are looking for varieties from climate analogues, places that currently experience the kind of climate that they expect in the future. There used to be a marvellously easy tool to find climate analogues, but it seems to have vanished without trace. Best I can find is this explanation from Oregon State University.
- Rouge de Bordeaux photograph from Moulin du Courneau on Instagram. 3F image from Drie Fonteinen.
- Here is the transcript.
At the end of the previous episode on 
It has been a difficult year for food supplies, and even more so for food markets. Prices everywhere seem to be higher than they have been for a long time, and that’s just in retail shops. On international commodity markets, things have been wild. Wheat shot up after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, but had started rising well before that, in mid 2021. Prices began to drift down in mid-May, while fighting was still intense and no wheat had yet left the Black Sea. As became clear, there was no great global shortage of wheat, although it had become scarce.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, barbecue restaurants have featured in two really important decisions of the US Supreme Court. Katzenbach v. McClung held that Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama, despite being a minuscule mom and pop operation, was nevertheless subject to the Civil Rights Act and could not deny table service on the basis of race. Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, in addition to denying the owner’s racist justification that “his religious beliefs compel him to oppose any integration of the races whatever,” also established that plaintiffs in civil rights cases were entitled to recover their legal fees if successful. Ollie’s, apart from a brief later renaissance, closed in 2001. Piggie Park is still going strong, still claiming to be the World’s Best Bar-B-Q.
World Philosophy Day happens later this week, which makes it a good time to be asking what constitutes good behaviour in a host and, equally, in a guest. I’m prompted by a recent article that took the rise in food allergies and intolerances as a starting point to ask how a host should act when faced with a guest whose professed allergies seem a tad suspect. Is it OK to ignore guest requests as snowflake signifiers? What should guests do when faced with intolerable food that they failed to inform their host about? In a perfect world, hosts and guests would accommodate one another’s needs; the world, however, is not perfect.