Seeds of Change pwned by Safeway

Re-useable shopping bag for sale at a Safeway supermarket in California.

I’ll be honest, I don’t mind the chance to dump on organic seed supplier Seeds of Change since they have sold their address list to tons of crap-ass gardening-related companies who love to spam me. Since they were bought out by Mars (The people that make M&Ms, not the hostile alien planet) I’ve stopped using them anyway. I love Mars bars (which have become impossible to find in the US for some reason), but it grosses me out that an organic seed supplier is now owned by the same company that is responsible for the loathsome semi-food product Uncle Ben’s Rice. It’s also just fundamentally wrong to trade on their name for a line of frozen ready-meals. You figure it out. Clearly they’ve drifted far from the company Kenny Ausubel founded in 1989 and documented in his 1994 book Seeds of Change: The Living Treasure : The Passionate Story of the Growing Movement to Restore Biodiversity and Revolutionize the Way We Think About Food. Further debate on any ethical muddiness, etc. is best left to slinging elsewhere. The strength of Seeds of Change as a brand has greatly weakened from the time in the 1990s when they were the most visible organic seed company to now when they don’t even have a proper Wikipedia entry, and that’s probably just as well.

Get your seeds locally, look for certified biodynamic sources. More info on seed sourcing in this great article at Fork + Bottle.