12 Lost Foods People Found Again, Like a Peanut That Survived as 40 Seeds in a Seed Vault

The small, intensely flavored Carolina African runner was the South’s original peanut, but by the Great Depression it had nearly vanished, pushed out by bigger varieties. Only 40 seeds survived, kept since the 1930s in a cold-storage seed vault at North Carolina State University.

A Clemson University horticulturist planted 20 of them, and 12 sprouted. Those 12 seeds became 1,200, then 60,000 in 2014 and a million in 2015. In November 2016 farmers brought in the first commercial harvest: 15 million peanuts.

By the 1860s the Bradford was the South’s most prized late-season melon, with a rind so soft you could slice it with a butter knife. That softness was also its problem: it didn’t ship well, and the last commercial crop was planted in 1922.

A food historian spent years looking for it and almost gave up. Then, on Oct. 31, 2012, he got an email from Nat Bradford, a landscape architect in Sumter, South Carolina: his family had kept the melon going in their backyard for almost a century. In 2013 he grew 465 of them.

Silphion was the most famous seasoning of the ancient Greek and Roman world. It grew around Cyrene, in today’s Libya, and the city stamped it on its coins. By the first century A.D., Roman writers were already describing it as gone.

A professor at Istanbul University believes it may still exist as Ferula drudeana, a rare plant on Mount Hasan in central Turkey whose shape matches the coins. It is not proven: only an ancient sample could settle it. About 600 of the plants are known, and a food historian has already cooked Roman recipes with it.

The Judean date was famous in ancient times and then lost for centuries. In the 1960s, date seeds turned up in the ruins of an ancient fortress near the Dead Sea, and they waited in storage for about 40 years. In 2005 scientists at the Arava Institute sprouted one: a male palm they named Methuselah, the oldest seed ever grown.

They later sprouted more, including a female palm named Hannah. Pollinated by Methuselah, she gave 111 dates in 2020 and almost 700 the next year. The institute says they taste like a semi-dry Medjool with honey notes.

Its dark green rind is speckled with yellow “stars” and a bigger “moon.” The melon reached American gardeners before 1900 and stayed in seed catalogs through the 1920s. Then many feared it was lost for good.

Seed Savers Exchange started looking for it in the mid-1970s. In 1980 one of its founders mentioned the melon on a TV show out of Kirksville, Missouri, and Merle Van Doren, a farmer near Macon, Missouri, got in touch: he was still growing it. In January 1982 a national magazine wrote about it, and gardeners came looking.

In the early 20th century, more than 17,000 apple varieties grew in North America, and many later disappeared. David Benscoter, a retired FBI agent, founded the nonprofit Lost Apple Project in 2015 and thinks he has found around 30 old apples.

He reads county fair records, seed catalogs and nursery books, looks for homestead orchards in ravines and at the bottom of hills, and knocks on the nearest door to ask for a few apples. In one fall alone, the team found 10, including the Sary Sinap in this USDA painting from 1900.

Coffea stenophylla was praised in the 1800s, then farmers gave up on it, and it hadn’t been seen in the wild in Sierra Leone since 1954. In 2018, researchers found two small wild populations in the country’s forests.

In a blind tasting, 81% of the judges mistook it for arabica, the coffee most of us drink, and it scored 80.25 on the specialty coffee scale. It also grows at average temperatures around 77°F, 11 to 12 degrees warmer than arabica, which could help coffee farms as the climate warms.

Carolina Gold, once the pride of South Carolina’s coast, had all but disappeared from the state’s fields. In the 1980s Richard Schulze, an eye doctor, tracked it down through a USDA rice breeder in Beaumont, Texas, who sent him 14 pounds of seed in 1986.

That fall Schulze harvested 64 pounds by hand. The next year it was 500, and in 1988 it was 10,000. He gave the harvests to the Savannah Association of the Blind, which sold the rice to fund its work.

In Danvers, Massachusetts, stands a pear tree that early English settlers planted in the 1630s. The town library calls it the oldest surviving cultivated tree in America, and it has outlived hurricanes, record snowstorms and the factories that grew up around it.

In April 2022, a public radio reporter found it covered in buds that would turn into pears. Just in case, a clone of it also grows in a USDA fruit collection in Corvallis, Oregon.

In 1997 the Livestock Conservancy counted the old heritage turkey breeds and found only 1,335 breeding birds in the entire United States.

It started a newsletter for breeders, worked with a university on research and helped farmers find buyers. By 2003 the breeding population had more than doubled to 4,275, and by 2007 it passed 10,000. The photo shows a Bourbon Red, one of those old breeds.

Red Fife is a bread wheat that David Fife’s family began growing on their Ontario farm in 1842, and for more than 40 years it set the standard for Canadian wheat. Newer varieties, including its own offspring, pushed it out, and from 1900 to 1988 it survived only in plant breeders’ seed collections, The Canadian Encyclopedia says.

In 1988 a historic mill site in British Columbia planted one pound of it for a “Living Museum of Wheat.” Now farmers across Canada grow it again, mostly organically. One family legend says the cow once ate every wheat head but one, and Mrs. Fife saved that one.

In 1975 Diane Ott Whealy helped start a seed exchange with two heirlooms from her grandfather’s family: a ‘German Pink’ tomato and ‘Grandpa Ott’s’ morning glory. Seed Savers Exchange still calls them the two varieties that started it all.

Fifty years later the organization cares for more than 20,000 seed varieties, and in 2025 it celebrated its 50th anniversary. The Moon and Stars watermelon from Merle Van Doren’s farm is in its collection too.