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| John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, left, is a much wilder, more "Dionysian" character than your 4th-grade teacher wanted you to know |
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| Semper Augustus - Unknown, pre-1640. Tulips of this kind, caused by a rare viral infection, sparked economic insanity in 17th century Holland |
Potatoes have evolved to satisfy the human desire of control, in Pollan's opinion, and he demonstrates that with the history of potatoes in Europe. When the potato arrived there, it was highly unpopular—as a member of the poisonous solanacea family (along with the tomato), as a food of the 'conquered savage', and as a tuber, which most Europeans had never eaten before. However, the Irish poor welcomed it with open arms for its ability to grow vast quantities of food in the near-barren soil they had, its high nutritional value1, and its help in freeing them from the British Economy, which followed the price of bread and kept them poor. Alas, they experienced a 266% population boom depending on one potato variety (hilariously called "The Lumper"), which fell victim to Phytophthora infestans, a.k.a. Late Blight, which all but wiped out the crop. Pollan says, "one in every eight Irishmen—a million people—died of starvation in three years..."2 Many more went blind or suffered other illnesses from lack of nutrition. Pollan calls the Irish example, "...the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly."3 It is not mere chance, then, that he tells this story along with its modern analog, set in Idaho.
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| A modern field of potatoes |
You know how popular potatoes are. Why, you're probably eating one of McDonald's perfect, golden fries right now, you slob. Well, in order for McDonalds to get their fries so crispy and golden, every year they need millions of tons of one type of potato, the Russet Burbank this time, completely free from defects. Enter industrial potato farming. You'll want to check out the map in that link. If you zoom in, you'll see thousands of green circles, each a potato field 135 acres in size (or about 1/2 mile in diameter). At the center of each is a machine called a pivot (visible as lines here), a quarter-mile-long hose on a frame that stands high above the field and that stretches to the outside of the circle. The farmers use the pivot to spray water, fertilizer, and more poisons than you can imagine throughout the season.
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| A pivot irrigating a field of organic potatoes in Jordan. |
Many of these fields are completely sterilized every season through the application of herbicides and pesticides. With no bacterial or insect life in it, the soil cannot produce any minerals for plants to use, so farmers must buy in all the nutrients necessary for their plants, as well as poisons to use throughout the growing season, many of them targeting the delightful fellow at left: the Colorado Potato Beetle. This pest lives virtually anywhere you
can grow a potato, and just a few can strip a plant of leaves in a matter of days or hours (they're bright green inside when you squish them, by the way). Aside from them, worms and grubs love to burrow into potatoes under the soil, and diseases can wipe out whole fields. Woe are we, then, that we insist on demanding perfection in our vegetables; monoculture far worse than that of Ireland's potato experiment requires powerful toxins to sustain it.
Enter Monsanto, a genetic engineering company with a nasty reputation among organic farmers, in a move that, surprisingly, seems less evil than one might expect of them, in light of the plight of Idaho potato farmers. Back in the 90's, they engineered a potato variety they called New Leaf, by adding a gene from a bacterium commonly used to kill farm pests like the potato beetle, called Bacillus thuringiensus (BT). This gene allowed the plants to produce their own BT toxin in every cell, which would kill any pest that took even the slightest nibble. In Idaho, some farmers are lucky to see a $50 profit per acre of land in a good year, so eliminating a few sprays of the ol' beetle buster could potentially save them a lot of money, and reduce exposure to toxic chemicals for them and the American Consumer, so why did New Leaf fail to catch on?
Well, it seemed all but established in the food industry when McDonalds started buying New Leaf potatoes for its fries. When consumers found out, though, they got scared, understandably. GMOs still rile people up, so it's no surprise that back in the 90's, anti-New Leaf sentiments among McDonalds' customer base could climb high enough to prompt the company to stop buying them, sounding their death knell. If I were to make the choice between GMOs and poisons, I, like Pollan, would probably choose GMOs, but I'd rather not eat either. Pollan makes the point that we have no way to know how GM foods will affect our health, but we do know that shitloads of poison (I'm paraphrasing) are bad for us.
He also makes the point, however, that every genetically modified organism is different, and bound to affect us in different ways. A flounder gene in corn might do no harm, but a platypus gene in wheat might turn on the cancer switch. It's also hard to know if the genes we're not used to eating might cause a buildup of chemicals in us that intensifies and causes harm over generations. In the interest of bashing pesticides and GMOs equally, I'd like to share a story from Pollan's visit to Monsanto's lab, where he helped a scientist plant some baby New Leafs.
First, Pollan learned that there are two ways to modify the genes of a plant. The more science-y method involves inserting the desired genes into a bacterium with an enzyme, then soaking a slip from the desired plant in a culture of the bacteria before planting and growing it. This works best with broad-leafed plants, like the potato. More on that in a minute. The other method is a lot more awesome than that. It involves soaking steel balls in DNA, loading them in a 22mm cartridge, and shooting them at a leaf. If you're lucky, the DNA ends up in the right spot, and the plant expresses the genes in the qualities you were going for.
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| I'D REALLY LIKE WINGS AND A TAIL! |
Anyway, back to the potato. So the process of developing a hearty variety of potato with bacteria genes is not as linear as the phrase "genetic engineering" would suggest. They plant thousands of slips impregnated with the new DNA at once and wait for the plants to come up. Because the gene-embedding is so inaccurate, almost every new plant is different. So what do the scientists do? Select the ones that display the right qualities and breed them! Just like farmers have been doing for thousands of years. They simply give nature a cheat code to unlocking a combination of genes that the species would have taken millennia to develop on its own, if ever.
As a final thought I'll leave you with this one Pollan left me with: The species of Earth have been developing over billions of years by exerting pressures on one another and reacting to those pressures. Plants developed complex chemical processes, like the synthesis and storage of sugars, because their end products enticed animals to spread their genes all over the planet. Even in the instances of 'artificial' selection, in which humans have encouraged plants to grow bigger or more robustly, the plants are only improving upon traits they already had in order to spread their genes more efficiently through humans. Genetic engineering is the first technology in the history of this planet that allows humans to exert their will entirely over other species. Humans don't select and encourage the best specimen, they select the trait and force it into the species solely for their benefit. The GM plant is no longer a subject with a will of its own, but truly the object humans have always thought of it as.
All told, The Botany of Desire is an excellent book that is worth much more than the three days it will take you to devour it. It is fascinating and informative, and entertaining to boot. Let me know if you want to borrow my copy.
Dreaming of Cider Orchards,
The Regular Farmer
1. It lacks only vitamin A, which milk provides, so mashed potatoes alone can keep a person healthy.
2. Pollan, Michael. Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World. New York City: Random House Inc. 2001 p. 230
3. Ibid. p. 230-231
