The Search for Esiah's Seeds

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dan Saladino tells the story Esiah Levy who shared seeds and changed lives.

It all started with a squash. Soon after he started to grow his own food he cut open a particularly delicious variety and discovered hundreds of seeds inside. He felt compelled to share them with people so they could enjoy the same experience. So began a mission to encourage anyone who would listen, where ever they lived, whatever their background, to grow their own food.

In his spare time and using allotments and his mother’s garden he grew food, built a seed bank and sent seeds around the world through . He created a project called SeedShare to distribute the varieties he selected, from corn to pumpkins, tomatoes to beans to fellow gardeners around the world, He also made friends with other seed savers including Vivien Sansour, a Palestinian woman who had created a seed library to save disappearing crops on the West Bank.

When Esiah Levy passed away suddenly and tragically young at the beginning of this year, Vivien set out to find out what had happened to the seeds he had shared and who had planted them.

Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.3	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:19.8	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.4	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.7	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:44.5	Okay, should we just go? You happy?
0:49.1	Yeah.
0:50.1	Yeah.
0:51.1	I am all the now.
0:52.1	Yeah. This is Vivian Sandor and she runs something called a heritage seed library.
0:59.0	We met in January and it was freezing and you were telling your story about seed saving yeah well I am a seed
1:06.7	saver and I'm actually more of a seed storyteller I'm very much interested in the way seeds tell people's stories.
1:17.0	Very recently someone visited my Seed Library and noted to me that they were looking at all the jars and they were like your jars each one has
1:26.2	somebody's name. What I was doing I think I'm in love with seeds because I love people andian after she had given a talk about her
1:33.3	stories. I've met Vivian after she had given a talk about her attempts to
1:41.4	save disappearing Palestinian food traditions in the West Bank.
1:46.0	Conflict, loss of land, problems accessing water had all resulted in crops and seeds becoming lost. Through her Airloom Sea Project
	...

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