I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what food really is—and maybe more importantly, what it isn’t.
We’re putting together our September issue of Seed World Canada, and the theme is food: the future of it, the systems that shape it, and the seed innovations driving it. But in one of the conversations that shaped my thinking for this issue, someone said something that’s been echoing in my head ever since:
“Food isn’t just a commodity. And treating it like one can have real consequences.”
That comes from Noa Lincoln, professor in the Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
I’ve always known food is more than just something to be bought and sold, but hearing it put so plainly—and hearing it again and again in conversations about indigenous agriculture, environmental policy, and sustainability—has forced me to really reflect on the seed industry’s role in all this.
Because let’s be honest: in our world, food is a commodity. It’s traded, it’s speculated on, it’s part of a global market. The same goes for seed. As someone who’s covered this industry for more than a decade, I see it every day—millions invested into breeding programs, technology platforms, IP protections, marketing campaigns. And I’m not saying any of that is wrong. In fact, it’s what makes modern agriculture possible.
But here’s the thing: if we only see food as a commodity—just a yield number on a spreadsheet or a dollar value on a futures contract—we miss something fundamental.
We forget that in many Indigenous cultures, food is more than sustenance. It’s knowledge. It’s ritual. It’s a language spoken across generations. It’s not just what we eat—it’s how we eat, why we grow, and who we share it with.
I am reminded this week how Hawaiian culture treats food not just as fuel but as part of their entire worldview. Crops like taro weren’t just planted—they were revered, tied to mythology, teaching, and spirituality. Kids learned to farm not just because it fed them, but because it shaped them.
Today I met Amjad Ahmad, who heads up the Sustainable and Organic Agriculture Program at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He’s an attendee of the National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB) meeting here in Kona, Hawai’i, and was on hand at the Variety Showcase proudly displaying his nuña beans, often referred to as “popping” or “pop” beans because the seed expands rapidly when heated in oil. It’s an up-and-coming snack food, both crunchy and salty — everything we look for in a tasty snack food.
But these beans also come with a story. For centuries, Indigenous communities in the Andes Mountains of South America have cultivated the nuña bean as a vital food source. This vibrant, nutty-tasting legume is especially valued for its unique ability to pop when roasted, a trait that makes it ideal for cooking in areas where firewood is limited, as it uses less fuel than traditional boiling methods.
That’s a far cry from the industrial food system most of us live in now. In that system, food is a line item. A product. And seeds? They’re the inputs feeding the machine.
Of course, the answer is not to abandon modern agriculture. But I do think we need to hold two ideas in our heads at the same time:
- Food is a commodity. It takes capital and technology and scale to feed 8 billion people.
- Food is also a public good. It carries values beyond its market price—cultural, environmental, and even spiritual ones.
Reconciling those two truths is the hard part. But maybe that’s exactly where our industry has a role to play.
If we can view seed not just as a business asset, but as the foundation of food cultures and food systems—systems that have meaning beyond economics—then maybe we can build something better.
Maybe we can start thinking about food and seed policy as something that should be treated more like clean water or clean air: a right, not just a commodity. That doesn’t mean taking the economics out of agriculture. It means redefining success—not just in terms of bushels and ROI, but in terms of resilience, equity, and connection.
I don’t have all the answers. But I do know this: the stories we tell about food—and seed—shape how we value them. And that’s something worth thinking about.
