LEICESTER, N.C. — It was a dewy morning when I joined Chris Smith, author of “The Whole Okra,” at the Utopian Seed Project’s experimental farm near Asheville, North Carolina. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. and the summer sun already had burned off the previous night’s mountain chill and a blanket of humid heat was descending on the narrow valley. But our destination — two long, leafy rows of okra plants — was on the edge of the farm, still shaded by the looming mountain to the east.
As we approached the crops, I asked Smith, founder of the seed project, what variety of okra had been planted there.
“This is just 32 different varieties,” he said.
I stifled a laugh. Just 32 different varieties.
That number seems huge, since the average American is familiar with just one variety of okra: Clemson spineless green, developed by Clemson University’s horticultural research department in South Carolina and introduced in 1939. It produces an abundance of green, grooved pods over a long growing season and remains a national favorite for farmers and home gardeners alike. When you get a side dish of fried okra at a diner, it likely has been made from Clemson spineless.
Credit: Grace Dickinson
Credit: Grace Dickinson
On the other hand, Smith’s planting is rather small when you consider that there are thousands of okra varieties in the world. The U.S. Department of Agriculture lists more than a thousand entries for okra, while the databases of other countries list even more. India’s gene bank reports more than 4,000 types of okra.
Smith, a British expat, had his first encounter with okra during a 2006 visit to the U.S. It was disappointing: a serving of Clemson spineless, chopped into bits and fried in flavorless oil. Six years later, he was given a dried okra pod filled with seeds, which he was inspired to plant. Thus began a project that would see Smith called the “Okra King of America,” a tongue-in-cheek title bestowed on him by Southern horticulturalist and writer Felder Rushing.
Smith doubled down on his okra fascination in 2018 while working at Sow True Seed, an Asheville supplier of organic and heirloom seeds. He procured a small plot of land from Frances Tacy, owner of the regenerative agriculture community Franny’s Farm, where Smith planted 72 varieties of okra.
Credit: Grace Dickinson
Credit: Grace Dickinson
“I hadn’t seen any other trials like that,” he said, “where they’d grown that much just to explore, just with a simple open mind of seeing what was out there.”
As Smith’s plant trials started to bloom and thrive, his somewhat obscure interest suddenly was made tangible in a colorful, dynamic tableau. “There were dwarf plants and crazy tall plants and all these different colored pods, and it was really beautiful to see all that diversity,” he said.
Smith kept planting more varieties of okra, saving and mixing seeds, harvesting and drying the flowers, and exploring ways to prepare and eat all parts of the plant.
Ultimately, he wrote “The Whole Okra.” Published in 2019, the book takes a deep dive into the history and botany of okra, as well as providing recipes that go far beyond the usual fried Southern side dish, including coconut cream okra leaf with tilapia, okra seed pancakes and charred okra with okra seed aioli and crispy onions.
“I kind of began with the premise of ‘in defense of okra,’” he said, “but it transitioned into less needing to defend it and more just wanting to celebrate it.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
The book gained a following quickly and, to this day, Smith hears from okra lovers. “I get people that just reach out and tell me how much they love okra,” he said, but they didn’t know “there were all these varieties or that you could eat the leaves or that you could do this with the flour or the fiber.”
While those early crop trials and the book project were immersive and time-consuming, Smith said, the research wasn’t difficult. “Nothing was complicated,” he said. “There wasn’t deep science going on here. I didn’t need huge grants. I didn’t need to be in an academic institution. I was just literally growing a bunch of varieties that were accessible to me without special connections.”
The relative simplicity of the work, and the community that grew around it, inspired Smith to start the Utopian Seed Project, a nonprofit that does trial plantings in the Southeast.
“It’s not just okra that needs this leg up, in terms of talking about the importance of varietal diversity,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of crops that don’t get that attention. The Utopian Seed Project was an opportunity for us to take what we did with okra to a much broader range of crops.”
Credit: Peter Taylor
Credit: Peter Taylor
Smith operates the project’s experimental farm on the same land where he planted those first okra varieties. It’s a modest operation, but what it lacks in space, it makes up for in diversity: About 50 different species are growing on the farm, including 12 varieties of taro, 10 varieties of sorghum and 10 varieties of sweet potato.
The project has the potential to make a powerful impact. Growing such a diversity of crops on a larger scale could make the food system more resilient in the face of a warming climate and more dramatic weather events, Smith said.
In addition to crop trials at the experimental farm, outreach and education are a core part of the Utopian Seed Project’s mission. In partnership with regional chefs, the organization presents a series of annual food events called Trial to Table, each one celebrating the different varieties of a given crop and ways to prepare it.
Credit: Grace Dickinson
Credit: Grace Dickinson
The project also encourages and facilitates seed saving through the Appalachian Seed Growers Collective. Saving seeds year after year can promote regional adaptation over time and also helps prevent major breakdowns in the seed supply chain.
Sustainability and resilience are the driving ideas behind much of Smith’s work, but there also is a crucial, perhaps simpler motivation: Greater crop diversity means a more dynamic, interesting eating experience.
“There is a really beautiful potential food system out there that doesn’t get applied,” he said. “You see the same things. That’s always been fairly sad to me, in terms of a food consumer wanting to enjoy and explore that diversity and all the flavors and nutritional elements that go with it.”
These unknown varieties and crops simply need a communications department to market them better, Smith joked.
“We’re just stepping into that space and taking away the excuse that people don’t know, by letting them know,” he said. “And then, maybe they still eat Clemson spineless every year, but that’s fine. As long as you know that there’s lots of other options out there and some of them are delicious and better than Clemson spineless. That’s our job.”
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