The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (27 page)

Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt. In Ireland under British rule the logic of economics dictated a monoculture of potatoes; in 1845, the logic of nature exercised its veto, and a million people—many of whom probably owed their existence to the potato in the first place—perished.

“As for their command over Nature,” wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his 1847 novel
Tancred,
“let us see how it will operate in a second deluge. Command over nature! Why the humblest root that serves for the food of man has mysteriously withered throughout Europe, and they are already pale at the possible consequences.”

• • •

In March 1998, patent number 5,723,765, describing a novel method for the “control of plant gene expression,” was granted jointly to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a cottonseed company called Delta & Pine Land. The bland language of the patent obscures a radical new genetic technology: introduced into any plant, the gene in question causes the seeds that plant makes to become sterile—to no longer do what seeds have always done. With the “Terminator,” as the new technique quickly became known, genetic engineers have discovered how to stop on command the most elemental of nature’s processes, the plant-seed-plant-seed cycle by which plants reproduce and evolve. The ancient logic of the seed—to freely make more of itself ad infinitum, to serve as both food and the means of making more food in the future—has yielded to the modern logic of capitalism. Now viable seeds will come not from plants but from corporations.

The dream of controlling the seed, and through the seed the farmer, is older than genetic engineering. It goes back at least to the development, in a handful of crops, of modern hybrids, high-yielding varieties that don’t “come true” from replanted seed, thereby forcing farmers to buy new seeds every spring. Yet compared to the rest of the economy, farming has largely resisted the trend toward centralization and corporate control. Even today, when only a handful of big companies are left standing in most American industries, there are still some two million farmers. What has stood in the way of concentration is nature: her complexity, diversity, and sheer intractability in the face of our most heroic efforts at control. Perhaps most intractable of all has been agriculture’s means of production, which of course is nature’s own: the seed.

It’s only in the last few decades, with the introduction of modern hybrids, that farmers began to buy their seeds from big companies. Even today a great many farmers save some seed every fall to replant in the spring. “Brown bagging,” as this practice is sometimes called, allows farmers to select strains particularly well adapted to local conditions.
*
Since these seeds are typically traded among farmers, the practice steadily advances the state of the genetic art. Indeed, over the centuries it has given us most of our major crop plants.

Infinitely reproducible, seeds by their very nature don’t lend themselves to commodification, which is why the genetics of most of our major crop plants have traditionally been regarded as a common heritage rather than as “intellectual property.” In the case of the potato, the genetics of the important varieties—the Russet Burbanks and Atlantic Superiors, the Kennebecs and Red Norlings—have always been in the public domain. Before Monsanto got involved, there had never been a national corporation in the potato seed business. There simply wasn’t enough money in it.

Genetic engineering changes this. By adding a new gene or two to a Russet or Superior, Monsanto can now patent the improved variety. Legally, it’s been possible to patent a plant for several years now, but biologically, these patents have been almost impossible to enforce. Genetic engineering has gone a long way toward solving this problem, since it allows Monsanto to test the potato plants growing on a farm to prove they’re the company’s intellectual property. The contracts farmers must sign to buy Monsanto seeds grant the company the right to perform such tests at will, even in future years. To catch farmers violating its patent rights, Monsanto has reportedly paid informants and hired Pinkertons to track down gene thieves; it has already sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement. With a technology such as the Terminator, the company will no longer have to go to all that trouble.
*

With the Terminator, seed companies can enforce their patents biologically and indefinitely. Once these genes are widely introduced, control over the genetics of our crop plants and the trajectory of their evolution will complete its move from the farmer’s field to the seed company—to which the world’s farmers will have no choice but to return year after year. The Terminator allows companies like Monsanto to enclose one of the last great com-mons in nature: the genetics of the crop plants that civilization has developed over the past ten thousand years.

At lunch I had asked Steve Young what he thought about all this, especially about the contract Monsanto forces him to sign and the prospect of sterile seeds. I wondered how the American farmer, the putative heir to a long tradition of agrarian independence, was adjusting to the idea of field men snooping around his farm and patented seeds he couldn’t replant.

Young told me he’d made his peace with corporate agriculture, and with biotechnology in particular. “It’s here to stay. It’s necessary if we’re going to feed the world, and it’s going to take us forward.”

I asked him if he saw any downside to biotechnology. Someone from Monsanto was with us at the table; Young’s reply was a long time in coming, and the moment grew uncomfortable. What he finally said silenced the table, and made me think again about the image of mastery he’d projected—about the computer-controlled fields, the chemical distributorship, the miles of patented high-tech spuds framed in his living room’s picture window, reaching clear to the horizon.

“Oh, there is a cost all right,” Young said darkly. “It gives corporate America one more noose around my neck.”

• • •

August.
A few weeks after I got home from Idaho, I dug my NewLeafs, harvesting a gorgeous-looking pile of spuds, several real lunkers among them. The plants had performed brilliantly, though so had all my other potatoes: the beetle problem never got out of hand, perhaps because the diversity of species in my garden had attracted enough beneficial insects to check the bugs. Who knows? My scapegoat tomatillos may also have helped. The fact is, a true test of my NewLeafs would have meant planting a monoculture.

By the time I harvested my crop, the question of eating my NewLeafs was moot. Whatever I thought about the safety of these potatoes really didn’t matter. Not just because I’d already tasted Mrs. Young’s NewLeaf potato salad but because Monsanto and my government had long ago taken the decision as to whether or not to eat a biotech spud out of my hands. Chances are I’ve eaten plenty of NewLeafs already, at McDonald’s or in bags of Frito-Lay chips, though without a label, there’s no way of knowing for sure.

So if I’ve eaten probable NewLeafs already, why was it I kept putting off eating these definite NewLeafs? Maybe just because it was August and there were so many more interesting fresh potatoes around—fingerlings with dense, luscious flesh, Yukon Golds (Mike Heath’s as well as my own) that looked and tasted as though they’d been buttered in the skin—that the idea of cooking with the sort of bland commercial variety Monsanto puts its genes into seemed almost beside the point.

There was this, too: I’d called some of the government agencies in Washington that had signed off on the NewLeaf, and what they said didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. The Food and Drug Administration told me that, because it operates on the assumption that genetically modified plants are “substantially equivalent” to ordinary plants, the regulation of these foods has been voluntary since 1992. Only if Monsanto feels there is a safety concern is it required to consult with the agency about its NewLeafs. I’d always assumed the FDA had tested the new potato, maybe fed a bunch of them to rats, but it turned out this was not the case. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even officially regard the NewLeaf as a food.
What?
It seems that since the potato contains Bt, it is, at least in the eyes of the federal government, not a food at all but a pesticide, putting it under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. Feeling a bit like Alice in a bureaucratic wonderland, I phoned the EPA to ask about my potatoes. As the EPA sees it, Bt has always been a safe pesticide, the potato has always been a safe food, so put the two together and you’ve got something that should be safe both to eat and to kill bugs with. Evidently the machine metaphor has won the day in Washington too: the NewLeaf is simply the sum of its parts—a safe gene added to a safe potato.

I also phoned Margaret Mellon at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., to ask her advice about my spuds. Mellon is a molecular biologist and lawyer and a leading critic of biotech agriculture. She couldn’t offer any hard scientific proof that my NewLeafs were unsafe to eat, but she pointed out that there was also no scientific proof for the notion of “substantial equivalence.”
*

“That research simply hasn’t been done.”

Mellon talked about genetic instability, a phenomenon which strongly suggests that a biotech plant is
not
simply the sum of its old and new genes, and she talked about the fact that we know nothing about the effect of Bt in the human diet, a place it has never been before. I pressed: Was there any reason why I shouldn’t eat these spuds?

“Let me ask
you
a question: Why would you want to?”

This was a good question. So for several weeks late that summer my NewLeafs remained in a shopping bag on the porch. Then I took the bag with me on vacation, thinking maybe I’d sample them there, but the bag came home untouched—except, that is, for one potato I’d taken out of it. A fishmonger had told me about a Martha Stewart tip for keeping grilled fish from sticking to a barbecue: rub the grill with a raw potato sliced down the middle. It works, by the way.

But I was still left with my bag of NewLeafs sitting there on the porch. And there they sat until Labor Day, when I got an invitation to a potluck supper at the town beach. Perfect! I signed up to make a potato salad. The day of the supper, I brought the bag of spuds into the kitchen and set a pot of water on the stove. But before the water even had a chance to boil, I was stricken by this obvious thought: Wouldn’t I have to tell people at the picnic what they were eating? I had no reason to think the potatoes weren’t perfectly safe, but if the idea of eating genetically modified food without knowing it gave me pause, I couldn’t very well ask my neighbors to do so. (That would be rather more potluck than they were counting on.) So of course I’d have to tell them all about the NewLeafs—and then, no doubt, bring home a big bowl of untouched potato salad. For surely there’d be other potato salads at the potluck, and who, given the choice, was ever going to opt for the one with the biotech spuds? I suddenly understood with perfect clarity why Monsanto doesn’t want to label its genetically modified food.

So I turned down the flame under the pot and went out to the garden to harvest a pile of ordinary spuds for my potato salad. The NewLeafs went back out into the limbo of my porch.

EPILOGUE

I hadn’t been in the garden for a couple of weeks, and, as always is the case by the end of the summer, the place was an anarchy of rampant growth and ripe fruit, all of it threatening to burst the geometry of my beds and trellises and paths. The pole beans had climbed clear to the tops of the sunflowers, which stood draped in their bulging green and yellow pods. The pumpkins had trailed halfway across the now-unmowable lawn, and the squash leaves, big as pizzas, threw dark pools of shade in which the lettuces looked extremely happy—as, unfortunately, did the slugs, who were dining on my chard in the squashy shade. The vines of the last potatoes lay flopped over their hills, exhausted.

The garden had come to this, had reached this pitch of green uproar in the few short weeks since May, when I’d set out seedlings in a considered pattern I no longer could discern. The neat, freshly hoed rows had once implied that I was in charge here, the gardener in chief, but clearly this was no longer the case. My order had been overturned as the plants went blithely about their plant destinies. This they were doing with the avidity of all annuals, reaching for the sun, seizing ground from neighbors, fending off or exploiting one another whenever the opportunity arose, ripening the seeds that would bear their genes into the future, and generally making the most of the dwindling days till frost.

For a while every season, I do try to keep the whole thing under some semblance of control, pulling the weeds, clipping back the squash so that the chard might breathe, untangling the bean vines before they choke their frailer neighbors. But by the end of August I usually give it up, let the garden go its own way while I simply try to keep up with the abundance of the late-summer harvest. By this point what’s going on in the garden is no longer my doing, even if it was I who got the whole thing rolling back in May. As much as I love the firm grasp and cerebral order of spring, there’s a ripe, almost sensual pleasure in its August abandonment, too.

But I’d come here looking for something, and eventually I found it: a row of Kennebecs, their tops already sprawled dead on the ground. One of the many virtues of potatoes is that they can be left in the ground all winter, to be dug only as needed; historically, this has been a great blessing to peasants subject to marauding armies, since potatoes in the ground can’t very well be ransacked.

I think there is no harvest more satisfying than the harvest of potatoes. I love the moment when the spade turns over the crust of black soil for the first time since spring and the chino-colored lumps tumble out onto the fresh dirt. After gathering up the first flush of easy ones, you should lay the spade aside (or else you’re apt to bruise the remaining potatoes). Go for the rest by hand, forcing your fingers down into the richly manured soil, feeling around in the dark for those unmistakable forms, the identity of which the hand has no need of the eye to confirm. That’s because potatoes are always cooler to the touch than stone, heavier too, and somehow always a happier fit in the hand.

Not that any given spud is ever such a paragon of form. No two of them ever alike, most potatoes are odd, misshapen, asymmetrical things, their shapes determined as much by the accidents of adjacent rocks and soil as by any genetic instruction followed to the letter. Maybe this is why we like to give our chthonic spuds such sunny and Apollonian forms, slicing them into translucent chips and geometrical fries. Yet compared to the undifferentiated night in which they grow, the bright potatoes feel in the hand like form incarnate.

Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, shining wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It’s the smell of fresh soil in the spring, but fresh soil somehow distilled or improved upon, as if that wild, primordial scene had been refined and bottled:
eau de pomme de terre.
You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there’s the cozy kitchen too, for the smell of potatoes is, at least by now, to us, the smell of comfort itself, a smell as blankly welcoming as spud flesh, a whiteness that takes up memories and sentiments as easily as flavors. To smell a raw potato is to stand on the very threshold of the domestic and the wild.

Once I’d filled a basket with my spuds, I stood and considered the state of the garden, the daunting magnificence of its declension from May’s straightforward rows and intentions. Whenever I hear or read the word
garden,
I always picture something so much less wild than this, probably because in common usage
garden
stands as the opposite of
wilderness.
The gardener knows better than to believe this, though. He knows that his garden fence and path and cherished geometries hold in their precarious embrace, if not a wilderness in any literal sense, then surely a great, teeming effulgence of wildness—of plants and animals and microbes leading their multifarious lives, proposing so many different and unexpected answers to the deep pulse of their genes and the wide press of their surroundings—of everything affecting everything else.

So where exactly does that leave us—the gardeners and descendants of Johnny Appleseed who would try to make something of this wildness? Standing amid this sweet wreck of a garden this August afternoon, lifting a basket heavy with potatoes, I thought about Chapman in his coffee sack, about the fanatical tulip fanciers and pot growers of Amsterdam, about the Monsanto scientists in their lab coats, and wondered what they had in common. All of them had ventured into the garden—into Darwin’s Ever-Expanding Garden of Artificial Selection—for the purpose of marrying powerful human drives to the equally powerful drives of plants; all were practitioners of the botany of desire. In the nature of things, this made them—Chapman-like, potatolike—figures of the margins, moving between the realms of the wild and the cultivated, the anciently given and the newly made, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. All of them had taken part in the great, never-to-be-concluded conversation between those two presiding deities, adding their two cents to the dialogue of Dionysian energy and Apollonian order that has produced the beauty of a Queen of Night tulip, the sweetness of a Jonagold apple, the perception sponsored in a human brain by
Cannabis sativa
X
indica.

Somewhere between those two poles, all gardeners—indeed, all of us—stake out their ground, some of them, like Appleseed, leaning to the side of Dionysian wildness (he’d love this garden now); others, like the scientists at Monsanto, pushing toward the Apollonian satisfactions of control. (The lab coats would probably have liked the garden better earlier in the season, before all hell broke loose.) Still others are harder to place on the continuum: I mean, where exactly do you put the marijuana grower tending his hydroponic closet of clones—that Apollonian edifice dedicated to the pursuit of Dionysian pleasure? It’s a good thing one doesn’t have to take sides.

With the exception of John Chapman, who had the imagination to identify with the bees, all these other botanists of desire went about their work from a straightforward and, it seems to me, blinkered humanist perspective. They took it for granted that domestication was something people did to plants, never the other way around. It probably never occurred to Dr. Adriaen Pauw, the Dutch burgher who owned eleven twelfths, or twelve thirteenths, of the world’s population of Semper Augustus tulips, that those tulips in some sense owned him—that he’d devoted the better part of his life to advancing their numbers and happiness. But the tulipomania he unwittingly helped fire was an inestimable boon to the genus
Tulipa,
which may be said to have had the last laugh. Its fortunes, at least, have been ascendant in the world ever since the Dutch burghers lost their fortunes on its account.

Witting or not, all these characters have been actors in a coevolutionary drama, a dance of human and plant desire that has left neither the plants nor the people taking part in it unchanged. Okay, desire might be too strong a word for whatever it is that drives plants to reinvent themselves so that we might do their bidding, but then, our own designs have often been no more willful than the plants’. We too cast unconscious evolutionary votes every time we reach for the most symmetrical flower or the longest french fry. The survival of the sweetest, the most beautiful, or the most intoxicating proceeds according to a dialectical process, a give-and-take between human desire and the universe of all plant possibility. It takes two, but it doesn’t take intention, or consciousness.

I keep coming back to that image of John Chapman floating down the Ohio River, snoozing alongside his mountain of apple seeds—seeds that held sleeping within them the apple’s American future, the golden age to come. The barefoot crank knew something about how things stand between us and the plants, something we seem to have lost sight of in the two centuries since. He understood, I think, that our destinies on the river of natural history are twined. And while I personally don’t think he was right to judge grafting a “wickedness,” his judgment does bespeak an instinctive feeling for the necessity of wildness and the value of multiplicity over monoculture. Though Chapman would probably disagree, genetic engineering is probably no more wicked than grafting, though it too wars against wildness and multiplicity (albeit much more fiercely). It too places its bet—a very large bet—on the Apollonian One as against the Dionysian Many.

The NewLeaf marks an evolutionary turn that may or may not take us somewhere we want to be. Just in case it doesn’t, though, we’d be wise to follow Chapman’s example, to save and seed all manner of plant genes: the wild, the unpatentable, even the seemingly useless, patently ugly, and just plain strange. Next year in place of the NewLeaf I plan to plant a great many different Old Leafs; instead of one perfect potato, I’ll make Chapman’s bet on the field. To shrink the sheer diversity of life, as the grafters and monoculturists and genetic engineers would do, is to shrink evolution’s possibilities, which is to say, the future open to all of us. “This is the assembly of life that it took a billion years to evolve,” the zoologist E. O. Wilson has written, speaking of biodiversity. “It has eaten the storms—folded them into its genes—and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.” To risk this multiplicity is to risk unstringing the world.

Biodiversity
is a word that was not in John Chapman’s vocabulary, though it’s a good one to describe the crazy archive of apple genes he had with him that summer afternoon on the Ohio. His view of our place in nature was eccentric even by the standards of his day. But I’m convinced that there is some usable truth there, if not in his words, then certainly in his deeds. I’m thinking specifically of the way he rigged up his canoe that day, the two hulls side by side, so that the weight of the apple seeds balanced the weight of the man, each helping to keep the other steady on the river. Laughable as an example of naval architecture, perhaps, but seaworthy, surely, as a metaphor. Chapman’s craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together.