When Lane Selman launched the Culinary Breeding Network’s first Variety Showcase in Portland back in 2014, it wasn’t with a slick marketing campaign or corporate sponsor. It started with a simple question: What if chefs, plant breeders, and the public all sat down at the same table—literally—to talk about flavor, food and seeds?
That one question has grown into a national movement. Over the past decade, the Variety Showcase has become one of the most celebrated events connecting the hidden world of seed development with the very visible world of food culture. And at the center of it all is Selman—agronomist, entomologist, outreach specialist, and community builder. She came to Kona, Hawai’i, this week to put on the event at the National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB) conference in partnership with GoFarm Hawai’i.
“I just thought: Why am I the one rating flavor on a one-to-nine scale?” Selman recalls, laughing. “Who knows more about taste than chefs?”
From the Field to the Fork
Selman works at Oregon State University, supporting organic farmers and plant breeders in participatory research. While running variety trials with researchers like Jim Myers, she realized something was missing. “We were evaluating for disease resistance, vigor, adaptability,” she says. “But we weren’t asking: how do these varieties taste?”
So she enlisted Portland chefs to taste-test different varieties of peppers—roasted, sautéed, raw. The ballots were blind-coded. The feedback was clear: chefs didn’t just care about flavor. They cared about shape, waste, ease of cutting, even how uniformly a pepper roasted. In short, they were selecting for traits plant breeders could work with.
“It hit me—these chefs should be in the room with breeders. They were describing traits we could breed for, but we’d never know that if we didn’t talk to them.”
Where the Seed Meets the Palate
That insight planted the seed for the first-ever Variety Showcase. The 2014 event featured 14 tables, each staffed by a plant breeder and showcasing a specific crop—from mild habaneros to multi-colored carrots. Chefs and consumers were invited to taste the differences among breeding lines and heirloom varieties, often blind, then flip their ballots to see what they had just eaten.
“People think cilantro is cilantro,” Selman says. “But we had six varieties on the table—and the public got to experience the range. It’s a lightbulb moment.”
By 2023, the Showcase was pulling in over 800 people—chefs, farmers, breeders, home gardeners, and seed savers—all tasting, talking, and building new relationships around food and seed. A carrot breeder once told Selman that the feedback he got in four hours at the Showcase was more valuable than what he got from a whole year of standard trialing.
Seeds of Culture, Seeds of Change
The Variety Showcase’s Hawaiian counterpart—co-organized by Jay Bost of GoFarm Hawai‘i—adds a layer of cultural preservation and food sovereignty.
The Hawai‘i Showcase held this week highlights crops like breadfruit (ʻulu), taro (kalo), and local avocado varieties. With more than 85% of Hawai‘i’s food currently imported, Selman sees the Showcase as a powerful tool for rethinking what’s possible.
“There’s so much here that people can eat—and historically did eat,” she says. “Part of the Showcase is just helping folks get excited about that again.”
Some tables feature new breeding lines. Others center on heirloom varieties or culturally significant crops. Many showcase flavor variation within a single crop—like the 10 avocado varieties offered for tasting at one table. Even without breeders present, the conversations flow: What do you like? Why? What’s easy to use? What’s delicious?
Bridging Science and Society
What makes the Variety Showcase so radical isn’t just its content—it’s the format. It flips the typical seed-to-table pipeline on its head by bringing the end user back into the breeding conversation. That includes chefs who shape demand, farmers who grow the crops, and consumers who ultimately choose what ends up on their plates.
And for Selman, the success of the Showcase lies in its collaborative nature. “I’m not a breeder,” she says. “But I understand enough to translate between these worlds—breeders, chefs, eaters. I want people to see that seeds aren’t just a background part of the food system. They are the food system.”
As Selman celebrates 10 years of the Showcase, she’s thinking about scale—but not in the corporate sense. It’s about growing deeper, not just bigger. “I want more people to have this experience,” she says. “Whether it’s in Portland, Hawai‘i, or anywhere else, the goal is the same: to reconnect flavor, culture, and the seed.”
And perhaps more than anything, Selman hopes her work helps people realize something profound: that the varieties we eat every day didn’t just appear—they were dreamed up, selected, and stewarded over time. And if we’re thoughtful about it, they can taste better, nourish more, and reflect the places and people they come from.
“The Variety Showcase isn’t just about taste,” she says. “It’s about values—what we grow, what we keep, what we celebrate.”
