Today being Gary Nabhan’s birthday, it seems only fitting that he should take up the story.
Though neither first nor the most perilous, the trip was easily the most productive of scientific expeditions to Ethiopia up until its time, in terms of its success in gathering seeds for future selection and use, in generating ideas that might help his country or others achieve food security, and in awakening recognition of Ethiopia’s unique biocultural heritage. Earlier explorers such as Pedro Paéz, Richard Burton, and John Speke had sought fame by being the first to describe the headwaters of the Blue or the White Nile, while others sought to rescue the legendary Ark of the Covenant from Ethiopia’s Emperor Menelik and his lineage. However, the European, Russian, and American public found Vavilov’s quest for unusual seeds in Abyssinia just as exciting, such that his remarkable “discoveries” there gave the Ethiopian highland region its reputation as one of the more distinctive centers of crop origin and diversification on the planet. Vavilov’s expeditions were regularly covered by the Russian, European and American press, as well as being widely celebrated among the diplomatic and scientific corps stationed in Ethiopia. Perhaps most important, the attention gave Ethiopians the pride and the inspiration to undertake a far more lasting effort toward conserving crops in situ than anyone of Vavilov’s generation could have imagined possible in any country.
Thus Vavilov’s place in Ethiopian history has been less heroic and more catalytic compared to that of Sir Richard Burton and his contemporaries, who are regularly referred to by travel guides in Ethiopia as “opening up” certain regions to scientific discovery. In fact, Vavilov’s work helped to inspire a later generation of Ethiopian agricultural scientists like Melaku Worede, conservation biologists like Tewolde Berhan, and thousands of Ethiopian families who stuck with their “farmer’s varieties” after attempts to lure them away to high-input hybrids after the famine of the 1980s. …
I decided that I should follow — to the extent that the current infrastructure of roads and bridges allowed — the same route that Vavilov took through a portion of the highlands between the Great Rift Valley and the Blue Nile Gorge. I invited gardener-photographer and longtime friend David Cavagnaro along for the ride. We would try to visit the very same grain, vegetable, and spice markets that Vavilov had been lured to some eight decades before us.
Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.
