Part 6 (1/2)

Admittedly, my experiments in the garden are unscientific and far from foolproof or conclusive. Is it the new neem tree oil I sprayed on the potatoes that's controlling the beetles so well this year, or the fact I planted a pair of tomatillos nearby, the leaves of which the beetles seem to prefer to potatoes? (My scapegoats, I call them.) Ideally, I'd control for every variable but one, but that's hard to do in a garden, a place that, like the rest of nature, seems to consist of nothing but but variables. ”Everything affecting everything else” is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem. variables. ”Everything affecting everything else” is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem.

In spite of these complexities, it is only by trial and error that my garden ever improves, so I continue to experiment. Recently I planted something new-something very new, as a matter of fact-and embarked on my most ambitious experiment to date. I planted a potato called ”NewLeaf” that has been genetically engineered (by the Monsanto corporation) to produce its own insecticide. This it does in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root, and-this is the unsettling part-every spud.

The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome, voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight, starving the tubers in the process. Supposedly, any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of a NewLeaf leaf is doomed, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in every part of these plants.

I wasn't at all sure I really wanted wanted the NewLeaf potatoes I'd be digging at the end of the season. In this respect my experiment in growing them was very different from anything else I've ever done in my garden-whether growing apples or tulips or even pot. All of those I'd planted because I really wanted what the plants promised. What I wanted here was to gratify not so much a desire as a curiosity: Do they work? Are these genetically modified potatoes a good idea, either to plant or to eat? If not mine, then whose desire the NewLeaf potatoes I'd be digging at the end of the season. In this respect my experiment in growing them was very different from anything else I've ever done in my garden-whether growing apples or tulips or even pot. All of those I'd planted because I really wanted what the plants promised. What I wanted here was to gratify not so much a desire as a curiosity: Do they work? Are these genetically modified potatoes a good idea, either to plant or to eat? If not mine, then whose desire do do they gratify? And finally, what might they have to tell us about the future of the relations.h.i.+p between plants and people? To answer these questions, or at least begin to, would take more than the tools of the gardener (or the eater); I'd need as well the tools of the journalist, without which I couldn't hope to enter the world from which these potatoes had come. So you could say there was something fundamentally artificial about my experiment in growing NewLeaf potatoes. But then, artificiality seems very much to the point. they gratify? And finally, what might they have to tell us about the future of the relations.h.i.+p between plants and people? To answer these questions, or at least begin to, would take more than the tools of the gardener (or the eater); I'd need as well the tools of the journalist, without which I couldn't hope to enter the world from which these potatoes had come. So you could say there was something fundamentally artificial about my experiment in growing NewLeaf potatoes. But then, artificiality seems very much to the point.

Certainly my NewLeafs are aptly named. They're part of a new cla.s.s of crop plant that is transforming the long, complex, and by now largely invisible food chain that links every one of us to the land. By the time I conducted my experiment, more than fifty million acres of American farmland had already been planted to genetically modified crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton, and potatoes that have been engineered either to produce their own pesticide or to withstand herbicides. The not-so-distant future will, we're told, bring us potatoes genetically modified to absorb less fat when fried, corn that can withstand drought, lawns that don't ever have to be mowed, ”golden rice” rich in Vitamin A, bananas and potatoes that deliver vaccines, tomatoes enhanced with flounder genes (to withstand frost), and cotton that grows in every color of the rainbow.

It's probably not too much to say that this new technology represents the biggest change in the terms of our relations.h.i.+p with plants since people first learned how to cross one plant with another. With genetic engineering, human control of nature is taking a giant step forward. The kind of reordering of nature represented by the rows in a farmer's field can now take place at a whole new level: within the genome of the plants themselves. Truly, we have stepped out onto new ground.

Or have we?

Just how novel these plants really are is in fact one of the biggest questions about them, and the companies that have developed them give contradictory answers. The industry simultaneously depicts these plants as the linchpins of a biological revolution-part of a ”paradigm s.h.i.+ft” that will make agriculture more sustainable and feed the world-and, oddly enough, as the same old spuds, corn, and soybeans, at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should be concerned. The new plants are novel enough to be patented, yet not so novel as to warrant a label telling us what it is we're eating. It would seem they are chimeras: ”revolutionary” in the patent office and on the farm, ”nothing new” in the supermarket and the environment.

By planting my own crop of NewLeafs, I was hoping to figure out which version of reality to believe, whether these were indeed the same old spuds or something sufficiently novel (in nature, in the diet) to warrant caution and hard questions. As soon as you start looking into the subject, you find that there are many questions about genetically modified plants that, fifty million acres later, remain unanswered and, more remarkable still, unasked-enough to make me think mine might not be the only experiment going on.

May 2. Here at the planter's end of the food chain, where I began my experiment after Monsanto agreed to let me test-drive its NewLeafs, things certainly look new and different. After digging two shallow trenches in my vegetable garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes Monsanto had sent and opened the grower's guide tied around its neck. Potatoes, you will recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from actual seeds but from the eyes of other potatoes, and the dusty, stone-colored chunks of tuber I carefully laid at the bottom of the trench looked much like any other. Yet the grower's guide that comes with them put me in mind not so much of planting vegetables as booting up a new software release. Here at the planter's end of the food chain, where I began my experiment after Monsanto agreed to let me test-drive its NewLeafs, things certainly look new and different. After digging two shallow trenches in my vegetable garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes Monsanto had sent and opened the grower's guide tied around its neck. Potatoes, you will recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from actual seeds but from the eyes of other potatoes, and the dusty, stone-colored chunks of tuber I carefully laid at the bottom of the trench looked much like any other. Yet the grower's guide that comes with them put me in mind not so much of planting vegetables as booting up a new software release.

By ”opening and using this product,” the card informed me, I was now ”licensed” to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I would dig come September would be mine to eat or sell, but their genes would remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under several U.S. patents, including 5,196,525; 5,164,316; 5,322,938; and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of these spuds to plant next year-something I've routinely done with my potatoes in the past-I would be breaking federal law. (I had to wonder, what would be the legal status of any ”volunteers”-those plants that, with no prompting from the gardener, sprout each spring from tubers overlooked during the previous harvest?) The small print on the label also brought the disconcerting news that my potato plants were themselves themselves registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474). registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474).

If proof were needed that the food chain that begins with seeds and ends on our dinner plates is in the midst of revolutionary change, the small print that accompanied my NewLeafs will do. That food chain has been unrivaled for its productivity: on average, an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement-that power over nature-has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quant.i.ties of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of ”inputs,” as they're called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer's power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities.

All this I'd heard before, of course, but always from environmentalists or organic farmers. What is new is to hear the same critique from industrial farmers, government officials, and the agribusiness companies that sold farmers on all those expensive inputs in the first place. Taking a page from Wendell Berry, of all people, Monsanto declared in a recent annual report that ”current agricultural technology is unsustainable.”

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. 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 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 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. 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 b.u.t.tery 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 relations.h.i.+p between people and potatoes, and how that relations.h.i.+p 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 alt.i.tude or orientation to the sun and wind. A potato that thrives on one side of a ridge at one alt.i.tude will languish in another plot only a few steps away. No monoculture could succeed under such circ.u.mstances, 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 refres.h.i.+ng 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 unenc.u.mbered 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. 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 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 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 l.u.s.trous, 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. they would do this, except perhaps to prove it could be done: a demonstration of power.) Yet as I watched my NewLeafs multiply their l.u.s.trous, 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. 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 ident.i.ty. Nature has always exercised a kind of veto over what culture can do with a potato. 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 ident.i.ty. 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 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. 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 partic.i.p.ate 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, The Origin of Species, ”Man does not actually produce variability.” ”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. 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. 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-s.e.x 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 ident.i.ty-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 new thing. 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 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 relations.h.i.+p 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. 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p. 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. 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 s.h.i.+p. 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.

Oh, but what about Ireland? Ireland was the exception that proved the rule-indeed, the exception that largely wrote the rule, since that country's extraordinary relations.h.i.+p to the potato consolidated its dubious ident.i.ty in the English mind. Ireland embraced the potato very soon after its introduction, a fateful event sometimes credited to Sir Walter Raleigh, sometimes to the s.h.i.+pwreck of a Spanish galleon off the Irish coast in 1588. As it happened, the cultural, political, and biological environment of Ireland could not have better suited the new plant. Cereal grains grow poorly on the island (wheat hardly at all), and, in the seventeenth century, Cromwell's Roundheads seized what little arable land there was for English landowners, forcing the Irish peasantry to eke out a subsistence from soil so rain-soaked and stingy that virtually nothing would grow in it. The potato, miraculously, would, managing to extract prodigious amounts of food from the very land the colonial English had given up on. And so, by the end of the seventeenth century, the plant had made a beachhead in the Old World; within two centuries it would overrun northern Europe, in the process substantially remaking its new habitat.

The Irish discovered that a few acres of marginal land could produce enough potatoes to feed a large family and its livestock. The Irish also found they could grow these potatoes with a bare minimum of labor or tools, in something called a ”lazy bed.” The spuds were simply laid out in a rectangle on the ground; then, with a spade, the farmer would dig a drainage trench on either side of his potato bed, covering the tubers with whatever soil, sod, or peat came out of the trench. No plowed earth, no rows, and certainly no Agricultural Sublime-a d.a.m.nable defect in English eyes. Potato growing looked nothing like agriculture, provided none of the Apollonian satisfactions of an orderly field of grain, no martial ranks of golden wheat ripening in the sun. Wheat pointed up, to the sun and civilization; the potato pointed down. Potatoes were chthonic, forming their undifferentiated brown tubers unseen beneath the ground, throwing a slovenly flop of vines above.

The Irish were too hungry to worry about agricultural aesthetics. The potato might not have presented a picture of order or control in the field, yet it gave the Irish a welcome measure of control over their lives. Now they could feed themselves off the economic grid ruled by the English and not have to worry so much about the price of bread or the going wage. For the Irish had discovered that a diet of potatoes supplemented with cow's milk was nutritionally complete. In addition to energy in the form of carbohydrates, potatoes supplied considerable amounts of protein and vitamins B and C (the spud would eventually put an end to scurvy in Europe); all that was missing was vitamin A, and that a bit of milk could make up. (So it turns out that mashed potatoes are not only the ultimate comfort food but all a body really needs.) And as easy as they were to grow, potatoes were even easier to prepare: dig, heat-by either boiling them in a pot or simply dropping them into a fire-and eat.

Eventually the potato's undeniable advantages over grain would convert all of northern Europe, but outside Ireland the process was never anything less than a struggle. In Germany, Frederick the Great had to force peasants to plant potatoes; so did Catherine the Great in Russia. Louis XVI took a subtler tack, reasoning that if he could just lend the humble spud a measure of royal prestige, peasants would experiment with it and discover its virtues. So Marie Antoinette took to wearing potato flowers in her hair, and Louis hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, however, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly convinced of the crop's value, made off in the night with the royal tubers.