It was nearly 400 years ago that the Pilgrims sat down with the Wampanoag to share the feast that is immortalized as Thanksgiving. We don’t know the exact menu. According to Kathleen Wall, foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation, venison, fowl and corn were documented by attendees, but, beyond that, we can only speculate. I asked if we could speculate about chestnuts.

“We can’t say for sure, but the odds are pretty good,” she says. “They’re right in season. Both cultures knew them and used them.”

In some places, one in four forest trees was a chestnut, and the tallest stood 12 stories high. Then a fungus killed almost all of them. The chestnut blight was first spotted in 1904 and is believed to have arrived here in Asian chestnut trees, which have some resistance to it. American chestnuts have none, and all but a few hundred of the 3 to 4 billion trees were wiped out in just a couple of decades.

A group of scientists at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, headed by Bill Powell and Chuck Maynard, announced on Nov. 4 that they had bred a blight-resistant American chestnut by introducing a gene from wheat.

Over the past year, I’ve written quite a bit in this column about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and I’m going to put that issue on the shelf for a while. But I couldn’t do it without mentioning the blight-resistant American chestnut, because it’s everything that the GMOs now in our food supply are not. It wasn’t created for personal profit or for the benefit of corporations or farmers. It contributes to a wholesome, healthful diet. And it’s intended solely for the public good.

Read full original article: Unearthed: Thanks to science, we may see the rebirth of the American chestnut

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