The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

Pollan notes his own desire as a gardener to regard his plants in the early summer and his hope that they remain "pristine rows" (184). He recalls the destruction of the neat allées of Versailles in a freak windstorm—an example of our hubris in thinking we can withstand the forces of nature. Agriculture is an attempt to banish the complexities of nature, but it is also an experiment that gives rise to unexpected outcomes.

The garden is a place to try techniques before using them on an entire farm. Pollan decided to plant NewLeaf potatoes, which were genetically engineered by the company Monsanto to produce their own insecticides. Pollan refers to genetic engineering as “the biggest change in terms of our relationship with plants since people first learned how to cross one plant with another” (188). The companies that market these genetically engineered plants claim that they represent a “paradigm shift” (189) in agriculture but are still the same plants we know and love. Pollan planted his NewLeaf potatoes to try to get at the truth. Even companies like Monsanto tout this new technology as a means of replacing the unsustainability of using pesticides and fertilizers. The NewLeaf borrows a bacterium from the soil called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, to make a toxin that kills off the Colorado potato beetle.

Pollan plants potatoes descended from those planted by the Incas, as the Andean altiplano is the potato’s “center of diversity” (192). Growing potatoes in a vertiginous landscape, the Inca farmer was a mastermind of planting different spuds in different environmental niches. The genetic variety that the Incas produced was a cultural achievement, and the potatoes that conquistadors encountered in the New World was “the most important treasure they would bring back” (194)to Europe.

While Monsanto describes genetic engineering as just another chapter in agriculture, Pollan believes it is something far more monumental, as it’s the first-time breeders can purposely introduce qualities into the genomes of plants. Therefore, even the genome of plants has been domesticated. As Pollan notes, “this potato is not quite the hero of its own story in quite the way the apple has been” (197). While the apple engineered its own evolution, the NewLeaf potato did not. Instead, they already incorporate the knowledge of the grower (who would use Bt as an insecticide) within the plant, so they are already self-sufficient in a way other plants did not.

While most European nations regarded the potato as too foreign to gain favor, the Irish immediately adopted it after potatoes were introduced, as the English had already grabbed most of the arable land on the island. The potato, combined with milk, gave the Irish all the nutrition they needed to survive and gave them a measure of control over their lives, as they could grow it on the marginal land the English left them and did not have to worry about the fluctuating price of bread. The potato was a harder sell in the rest of Europe, but Germany, France, and Russia were eventually home to spuds, which allowed them to end malnutrition and famine but gave rise to bigger populations.

When the wheat harvest failed in England in 1794, it gave rise to food riots and a debate about whether the English, who regarded the potato as Irish, should turn to a second crop. The journalist William Cobbett went to Ireland and reported that, in his mind, the potato had increased the population to such an extent that the Irish were now debased, brought down to the same ground level as the "tubers" (200) they ate. The English associated bread with the need for harvesting, civilization, and even Christianity. Yet the potato seemed to unloose people from the need to care about the economy and the market (and the price of bread), thereby letting the population increase unchecked. The English were correct in that the potato made the Irish vulnerable, though not to the economy but to a fungus brought, likely from America, in 1845.

Pollan travels to Monsanto’s headquarters in St. Louis, where he learns that there are two ways to genetically change a plant—either through an agrobacterium that breaks through the cell’s nucleus and replaces the DNA with some of its own, or with a gene gun that literally shoots new DNA with a .22 shell into a plant. In these processes, the DNA can wind up incorrectly placed in the genome, and a woman Pollan meets at Monsanto says the process is effective “anywhere between 10 percent and 90 percent of the time” (209). This statistic underscores the uncertainty of this process, and the uncertainty of the result it might have. For example, we already know that Bt corn kills monarch butterflies. The problem is “gene flow,” that the new genes travel to other organisms, and this “biological pollution” (211), as Pollan calls it, might be difficult to contain. One possible result of using Bt is insects that are resistant to it, as those who survive can mate with others who survive, producing a breed of resistant bugs. Monsanto is trying to prevent this problem by asking farmers not to spray some of their crops with Bt.

Pollan visits Idaho potato farmers for whom the NewLeaf potatoes are a godsend, as they have to spray their crops with pesticides and fertilizers that have high environmental, health, and economic costs. Seeing the toxins that bathe potatoes, Pollan starts to see NewLeaf potatoes as far preferable. However, he visits an organic farmer who explains that his method of repelling pests is to use techniques such as crop rotation, growing flowers that attract insects that dine on pests, and ladybugs. This system of agriculture is not conducive to the corporate system that controls most agriculture, as it does not rely on many seeds or other products, and it’s a system that resides in the head of the farmer rather than in a corporate structure. Industrial agriculture relies on monoculture, or growing one crop, making this crop vulnerable to infestation, while organic farmers use diversification of their crops.

Industrial agriculture relies heavily on monoculture, which is, as Pollan writes, “as much a problem of culture as it is of agriculture” (226). We like our potatoes, for example, served as uniform McDonald’s French fries. In short, we want control over how our food is served. The Irish also relied on monoculture, as they grew a potato called the Lumper. While the potato blight affected other parts of Europe, they could turn to other crops, while the Irish could not. The result was tragic and disastrous, as over a million people starved in three years. The Irish were the victims not only of monoculture but also the brutal exploitative policies of the British.

Now, Monsanto is producing a patented plant whose seeds are not fertile. Called the “Terminator” (233), this technology seeks to control the production of seeds from plants so that farmers have to buy new seeds each year. As Pollan considers whether to eat his NewLeaf potatoes, he tries to figure out the science about whether they are healthy to eat, but the monitoring of NewLeaf is left to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rather than the Food and Drug Administration because it’s considered a pesticide. The EPA considers it a safe pesticide. A scientist tells him that the research on the NewLeaf simply hasn’t been done, and Pollan leaves the potatoes uneaten.