Pascal and Rachel Poot are not like other growers. They let the plants ‘fend for themselves’. In this way, they develop their best properties and qualities for survival. What’s more, they genetically pass on to their seeds and to future generations of plants the ‘démerde attitude’. Thanks to this attitude, we can benefit from organic seeds with nutritional and taste qualities superior to the majority of vegetables produced in France. When I heard about the Poot, and the way they grow tomatoes on straw bales, I was immediately blown away. They’ve been on my list of heroes ever since. I admire them and consider them heroes of biodiversity.
I turned to them for a seed donation, which I then share with the participants in my seed-giving rituals. I got to know them along the path I took to understand plants. In 2004, I learned about OMGs. In 2014, I realised that a handful of seeds was worth all the gold in the world and that it had the power to feed or destabilise people. In 2015, I started collecting farmers’ seeds and learning to garden. In 2016, I communicated the seed issue through a pamphlet and theatrical performances. In 2018, I realised that plants have consciousness and intelligence. Today, I’m convinced that they have a soul.
What fascinates me about plants is their desire to live and to go further, expressed through their capacity to adapt. Plants are not ‘green plants’, inanimate, immobile and idiotic. The Poot family understood this very well too, and developed their sense of observation and fine intuition to put them to good use for seeds.
I’ve taken my love of seeds a step further. I recognise a few aberrations in the agricultural system that are not always the result of chance. Here are some of them:
– I realised that by creating OMGs, the agri-food giants were committing a crime against humanity, practising genetic manipulation and eugenics under the pretext of wanting to feed the planet. In the depths of my being, I rejected the idea that some people thought they were God because they had analysed and patented DNA strings. Discovering does not mean ‘creating’ or ‘giving life’… These plants, as old as the hills, existed long before patents and their commercialisation. So when they don’t appear in the catalogue of species and varieties, farms, even organic ones, become ‘outlaws’ when they grow and market them, because they are not patented. Pascal laments: “When seeds that are 10,000 years old become illegal because they are not patented, that’s scandalous!
– Nature et Progrès, the founders of organic agro-ecology, can no longer use the AB or bio label on the packaging of their products, even though they created the organic concept in the 1960s.
– In organic farming, we use F1 hybrids, even though they have been manipulated in the lab and degenerate from one crop to another. F1 hybrids are crosses of 2 pure lines that the seed companies have degenerated in the lab, by inbreeding to the maximum… With population seeds, we apply eugenics, we keep the best, these are Nazi ideas…’, Pascal laments. According to him, hybrid tomatoes never yield more than 8kg per square metre for conventional growers, whereas he produces 15kg/m² with his farmers’ seeds.
– The majority of consumers want fruit and vegetables that are graded, pretty and without blemishes, and reject ugly, twisted or misshapen fruit and vegetables when they are more nutritional and tasty. Our responsibility as consumers plays a part in the evolution of plants. Pascal gives the example of the Stuttgart onion, which used to keep until June, as opposed to February nowadays. In the past, onions of this variety were flat and kept better. But chefs in top restaurants asked for them to be more oval, so easier to peel. So the seed companies selected only the seeds of the rare oval onions in order to multiply them and make the variety oval, but without the ability to keep.
Ultimately, all our habits and ways of doing things have an impact on the ‘naturalness of nature’. So through my workshops, performances and seed-giving rituals, I’m inviting everyone to sow seeds and draw inspiration from the Poot. If you’re one of those people who still has a bit of a collective conscience and a critical sense, I urge you to get hold of the ‘naturally natural’ Poot seeds. It would be a way of safeguarding the ‘naturalness of nature’ and becoming heroes of biodiversity, like the Poot.
