Useful plants and their uses

The third entry is la variété paysanne, and the adjective inside it is the one word on this page an English reader should handle carefully. « Peasant » looks like the obvious rendering, and historically it is the same word, taken from Old French. It has aged badly here, though. Outside a history book it is archaic or insulting: to call somebody a peasant is to call them coarse, and no farmer in these islands would accept the label. Paysan carries none of that by default. It is the ordinary word for somebody who works the land — un paysan breton, le monde paysan, l’agriculture paysanne — and it has been taken up as a badge of pride, which is why la Confédération paysanne is a name a farmers’ union chose for itself. So une variété paysanne is a variety kept and reselected by growers themselves, generation after generation, and the term waiting for it is « a landrace ». Write « peasant variety » and you put back a sneer the French never had in it.