The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (22 page)

What is to rescue the American food chain is a new kind of plant. Genetic engineering promises to replace expensive and toxic chemicals with expensive but apparently benign genetic information: crops that, like my NewLeafs, can protect themselves from insects and diseases without the help of pesticides. In the case of the NewLeaf, a gene borrowed from one strain of a common bacterium found in the soil—
Bacillus thuringiensis,
or “Bt” for short—gives the potato plant’s cells the information they need to manufacture a toxin lethal to the Colorado potato beetle. This gene is now Monsanto’s intellectual property. With genetic engineering, agriculture has entered the information age, and Monsanto’s aim, it would appear, is to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary “operating systems”—the metaphor is theirs—to run this new generation of plants.

The metaphors we use to describe the natural world strongly influence the way we approach it, the style and extent of our attempts at control. It makes all the difference in (and to) the world if one conceives of a farm as a factory or a forest as a farm. Now we’re about to find out what happens when people begin approaching the genes of our food plants as software.

• • •

The Andes, 1532.
The patented potatoes I was planting are descended from wild ancestors growing on the Andean altiplano, the potato’s “center of diversity.” It was here that
Solanum tuberosum
was first domesticated more than seven thousand years ago by ancestors of the Incas. Actually, some of the potatoes in my garden are closely related to those ancient potatoes. Among the half-dozen or so different varieties I grow are a couple of ancient heirlooms, including the Peruvian blue potato. This starchy spud is about the size of a golf ball; when you slice it through the middle the flesh looks as though it has been tie-dyed the most gorgeous shade of blue.

My blue potato is part of the cornucopia of potatoes developed by the Incas along with their ancestors and descendants. In addition to the blue potato, the Incas grew reds, pinks, yellows, and oranges; all manner of skinnies and fatties, smooth-skinneds and russets, short-season spuds and long, drought-tolerant and water-loving, sweet tubers and bitter ones (good for forage), starchy potatoes and others almost buttery in texture—some three thousand different spuds in all. This extravagant flowering of potato diversity owes partly to the Incas’ desire for variety, partly to their flair for experimentation, and partly to the intricacy of their agriculture, the most sophisticated in the world at the time of the Spanish conquest. While I was waiting for my potatoes to come up that May, I began reading about theirs (and then those of the Irish), hoping to get a clearer picture of the relationship between people and potatoes, and how that relationship had changed both the plant and ourselves.

The Incas figured out how to grow impressive yields of potatoes under the most inauspicious conditions, developing an approach that is still in use in parts of the Andes today. A more or less vertical habitat presents special challenges to both plants and their cultivators, because the microclimate changes dramatically with every change in altitude or orientation to the sun and wind. A potato that thrives on one side of a ridge at one altitude will languish in another plot only a few steps away. No monoculture could succeed under such circumstances, so the Incas developed a method of farming that is monoculture’s exact opposite. Instead of betting the farm on a single cultivar, the Andean farmer, then as now, made a great many bets, at least one for every ecological niche. Instead of attempting, as most farmers do, to change the environment to suit a single optimal spud—the Russet Burbank, say—the Incas developed a different spud for every environment.

To Western eyes, the resulting farms look patchy and chaotic; the plots are discontinuous (a little of this growing here, a little of that over there), offering none of the familiar, Apollonian satisfactions of an explicitly ordered landscape. Yet the Andean potato farm represented an intricate ordering of nature that, unlike Versailles in 1999, say, or Ireland in 1845, can withstand virtually anything nature is apt to throw at it.

Since the margins and hedgerows of the Andean farm were, and still are, populated by weedy wild potatoes, the farmer’s cultivated varieties have regularly crossed with their wild relatives, in the process refreshing the gene pool and producing new hybrids. Whenever one of these new potatoes proves its worth—surviving a drought or storm, say, or winning praise at the dinner table—it is promoted from the margins to the fields and, in time, to the neighbors’ fields as well. Artificial selection is thus a continual local process, each new potato the product of an ongoing back-and-forth between the land and its cultivators, mediated by the universe of all possible potatoes: the species’ genome.

The genetic diversity cultivated by the Incas and their descendants is an extraordinary cultural achievement and a gift of incalculable value to the rest of the world. A free and unencumbered gift, one might add, quite unlike my patented and trademarked NewLeafs. “Intellectual property” is a recent, Western concept that means nothing to a Peruvian farmer, then or now.
*
Of course, Francisco Pizarro was looking for neither plants nor intellectual property when he conquered the Incas; he had eyes only for gold. None of the conquistadores could have imagined it, but the funny-looking tubers they encountered high in the Andes would prove to be the single most important treasure they would bring back from the New World.

• • •

May 15.
After several days of drenching rain, the sun appeared this week, and so did my NewLeafs: a dozen deep green shoots pushed up out of the soil and commenced to grow—faster and more robustly than any of my other potatoes. Apart from their vigor, though, my NewLeafs looked perfectly normal—they certainly didn’t beep or glow, as a few visitors to my garden jokingly inquired. (Not that the glowing notion is so far-fetched: I’ve read that plant breeders have developed a luminescent tobacco plant by inserting a gene from a firefly. I’ve yet to read
why
they would do this, except perhaps to prove it could be done: a demonstration of power.) Yet as I watched my NewLeafs multiply their lustrous, dark green leaves those first few days, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first unwitting beetle, I couldn’t help thinking of them as existentially different from the rest of my plants.

All domesticated plants are in some sense artificial, living archives of both cultural and natural information that people have helped to “design.” Any given type of potato reflects the human desires that have been bred into it. One that’s been selected to yield long, handsome french fries or unblemished, round potato chips is the expression of a national food chain and a culture that likes its potatoes highly processed. At the same time, some of the more delicate European fingerlings growing beside my NewLeafs imply an economy of small-market growers and a cultural taste for eating potatoes fresh—for none of these varieties can endure much travel or time in storage. I’m not sure exactly what cultural values to ascribe to my Peruvian blues; perhaps nothing more than a craving for variety among a people who ate potatoes morning, noon, and night.

“Tell me what you eat,” Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously claimed, and “I will tell you what you are.” The qualities of a potato—as of any domesticated plant or animal—are a fair reflection of the values of the people who grow and eat it. Yet all these qualities already existed in the potato, somewhere within the universe of genetic possibilities presented by the species
Solanum tuberosum.
And though that universe may be vast, it is not infinite. Since unrelated species in nature cannot be crossed, the breeder’s art has always run up against a natural limit of what a potato is willing, or able, to do—that species’ essential identity. Nature has always exercised a kind of veto over what culture can do with a potato.

Until now. The NewLeaf is the first potato to override that veto. Monsanto likes to depict genetic engineering as just one more chapter in the ancient history of human modifications of nature, a story going back to the discovery of fermentation. The company defines the word
biotechnology
so broadly as to take in the brewing of beer, cheese making, and selective breeding: all are “technologies” that involve the manipulation of life-forms.

Yet this new biotechnology has overthrown the old rules governing the relationship of nature and culture in a plant. Domestication has never been a simple one-way process in which our species has controlled others; other species participate only so far as their interests are served, and many plants (such as the oak) simply sit the whole game out. That game is the one Darwin called “artificial selection,” and its rules have never been any different from the rules that govern natural selection. The plant in its wildness proposes new qualities, and then man (or, in the case of natural selection, nature) selects which of those qualities will survive and prosper. But about one rule Darwin was emphatic; as he wrote in
The Origin of Species,
“Man does not actually produce variability.”

Now he does. For the first time, breeders can bring qualities at will from anywhere in nature into the genome of a plant: from fireflies (the quality of luminescence), from flounders (frost tolerance), from viruses (disease resistance), and, in the case of my potatoes, from the soil bacterium known as
Bacillus thuringiensis.
Never in a million years of natural or artificial selection would these species have proposed those qualities. “Modification by descent” has been replaced by . . . something else.

Now, it is true that genes occasionally move between species; the genome of many species appears to be somewhat more fluid than scientists used to think. Yet for reasons we don’t completely understand, distinct species do exist in nature, and they exhibit a certain genetic integrity—sex between them, when it does occur, doesn’t produce fertile offspring. Nature presumably has some reason for erecting these walls, even if they are permeable on occasion. Perhaps, as some biologists believe, the purpose of keeping species separate is to put barriers in the path of pathogens, to contain their damage so that a single germ can’t wipe out life on Earth at a stroke.

The deliberate introduction into a plant of genes transported not only across species but across whole phyla means that the wall of that plant’s essential identity—its irreducible wildness, you might say—has been breached, not by a virus, as sometimes happens in nature, but by humans wielding powerful new tools.

For the first time the genome itself is being domesticated—brought under the roof of human culture. This made the potato I was growing slightly different from the other plants in this book, all of which had been both the subjects and the objects of domestication. While the other plants coevolved in a kind of conversational give-and-take with people, the NewLeaf potato has really only taken, only listened. It may or may not profit from the gift of its new genes; we can’t yet say. What we can say, though, is that this potato is not the hero of its own story in quite the same way the apple has been. It didn’t come up with this Bt scheme all on its evolutionary own. No, the heroes of the NewLeaf story are scientists working for Monsanto. Certainly the scientists in the lab coats have something in common with the fellow in the coffee sack: both work, or worked, at disseminating plant genes around the world. Yet although Johnny Appleseed and the brewers of beer and makers of cheese, the high-tech pot growers and all the other “biotechnologists” manipulated, selected, forced, cloned, and otherwise altered the species they worked with, the species themselves never lost their evolutionary say in the matter—never became solely the objects of our desires. Now the once irreducible wildness of these plants has been . . . reduced. Whether this is a good or bad thing for the plants (or for us), it is unquestionably a
new
thing.

What is perhaps most striking about the NewLeafs coming up in my garden is the added human intelligence that the insertion of the
Bacillus thuringiensis
gene represents. In the past that intelligence resided outside the plant, in the minds of the organic farmers and gardeners (myself included) who used Bt, commonly in the form of a spray, to manipulate the ecological relationship between certain insects and a certain bacterium in order to foil those insects. The irony about the new Bt crops (a similar gene has been inserted into corn plants) is that the cultural information they encode happens to be knowledge that’s always resided in the heads of the very sorts of people—that is, organic growers—who most distrust high technology. Most of the other biotech crops—such as the ones Monsanto has engineered to withstand Roundup, the company’s patented herbicide—encode a very different, more industrial sort of intelligence.

One way to look at genetic engineering is that it allows a larger portion of human culture and intelligence to be incorporated into the plants themselves. From this perspective, my NewLeafs are just plain smarter than the rest of my potatoes. The others will depend on my knowledge and experience when the Colorado potato beetles strike. The NewLeafs, already knowing what I know about bugs and Bt, will take care of themselves. So while my genetically engineered plants might at first seem like alien beings, that’s not quite right; they’re more like us than other plants because there’s more of us in them.

• • •

Ireland, 1588.
Like an alien species introduced into an established ecosystem, the potato had trouble finding a foothold when it first arrived in Europe toward the end of the sixteenth century, probably as an afterthought in the hold of a Spanish ship. The problem was not with the European soil or climate, which would prove very much to the potato’s liking (in the north anyway), but with the European mind. Even after people recognized that this peculiar new plant could produce more food on less land than any other crop, most of European culture remained inhospitable to the potato. Why? Europeans hadn’t eaten tubers before; the potato was a member of the nightshade family (along with the equally disreputable tomato); potatoes were thought to cause leprosy and immorality; potatoes were mentioned nowhere in the Bible; potatoes came from America, where they were the staple of an uncivilized and conquered race. The justifications given for refusing to eat potatoes were many and diverse, but in the end most of them came down to this: the new plant—and in this respect it was quite unlike my NewLeaf—seemed to contain in its being too little of human culture and rather too much unreconstructed nature.