stone-walled room that once served as a cow barn for the Rockefeller family’s country estate, no less.

I’m fairly confident when I say that last week at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture—a sprawling farm/restaurant nestled in a rural corner of Westchester County, New York, on land donated by the Rockefeller family—I witnessed the globe’s first-ever meeting between a roster of renowned chefs and a set of utterly obscure, highly accomplished plant breeders, mostly from US land grant universities.

The meeting was the brainchild of the visionary US chef Dan Barber. In his revered Blue Hill restaurants (one in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, one at Stone Barns, site of the conference), Barber displays a culinary sensibility that’s two parts Alice Waters (reverence for, even fetishization of, seasonal ingredients) andshiver through the crowd. In a later conversation, Bloomfield said she hoped to find a breeder to develop a tomato variety for the New York region that could match the intense flavor of those grown in Northern California.

The Latin American contingent brought a different perspective. Chefs Atala of Brazil and Acurio of Peru spoke of the stunning variety of fruits, vegetables, and grains that still flourish in indigenous-populated regions of Latin America—and how that heritage is threatened by globalization and the severe economic pressures faced by smallholder farmers. Their remarks reminded me that here in the United States, where European settlers virtually wiped out indigenous populations, we have a relatively small seed heritage to preserve—and much of it has already been obliterated by the rise of industrial farming