The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (23 page)

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 relationship to the potato consolidated its dubious identity 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 shipwreck 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 damnable 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.

In time, all three nations would grow powerful on potatoes, which put an end to malnutrition and periodic famine in northern Europe and allowed the land to support a much larger population than it ever could have planted in grain. Since fewer hands were needed to farm it, the potato also allowed the countryside to feed northern Europe’s growing and industrializing cities. Europe’s center of political gravity had always been anchored firmly in the hot, sunny south, where wheat grew reliably; without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

The last redoubt of antipotato prejudice was in England, and there it was not confined to a hidebound or superstitious peasantry. Well into the nineteenth century, a significant portion of elite opinion in London regarded the potato as nothing more or less than a threat to civilization. Proof? All one had to do was point in the direction of Ireland.

• • •

England, 1794.
The wheat harvest in the British Isles failed in 1794, sending the price of white bread beyond the reach of England’s poor. Food riots broke out, and with them a great debate over the potato that would rage, on and off, for half a century. (The potato debate is recounted in Redcliffe Salaman’s definitive 1949 volume,
The History and Social Influence of the Potato,
and its rhetoric is brilliantly dissected in “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination,” an essay by the literary critic Catherine Gallagher.) Engaging the energies of the country’s leading journalists, agronomists, and political economists, the potato debate brought to the surface predictable English anxieties about class conflict and the “Irish problem.” But it also threw into sharp relief people’s deepest feelings about their food plants and the ways they root us, for better and worse, in nature. Do we control these plants? Or do they control us?

The debate was kicked off by the potato’s advocates, who argued that introducing a second staple would be a boon to England, a way to feed the poor when bread was dear and keep wages—which tended to track the price of bread—from rising. Arthur Young, a respected agronomist, had traveled to Ireland and returned convinced that the potato was “a root of plenty” that could protect England’s poor from hunger and give farmers more control over their circumstances at a time when the enclosure movement was undermining their traditional way of life.

The radical journalist William Cobbett also traveled to Ireland, yet he returned with a very different picture of the potato eaters. Whereas Young had seen self-reliance in the Irishman’s potato patch, Cobbett saw only abject subsistence and dependence. Cobbett argued that while it was true that the potato fed the Irish, it also impoverished them, by driving up the country’s population—from three million to eight million in less than a century—and driving down its wages. The prolific potato allowed young Irishmen to marry earlier and support a larger family; as the labor supply increased, wages fell. The bounty of the potato was its curse.

In his articles Cobbett depicted “this damned root” as a kind of gravitational force, pulling the Irishman out of civilization and back down into the earth, gradually muddying the distinctions between man and beast, even man and root. This is how he described the potato eater’s mud hut: “no windows at all; . . . the floor nothing but the bare earth; no chimney, but a hole at one end . . . surrounded by a few stones.” In Cobbett’s grim imagery, the Irish had themselves moved underground, joining their tubers in the mud. Once cooked, the potatoes “are taken up and turned into a great dish,” Cobbett wrote. “The family squat round this basket and take out the potatoes with their hands; the pig stands and is helped by some one, and sometimes he eats out of the pot. He goes in and out and about the hole, like one of the family.” The potato had single-handedly unraveled civilization, putting nature back in control of man.

“Bread root” was what the English sometimes called the potato, and the symbolic contrast between the two foods loomed large in the debate, never to the spud’s advantage. Catherine Gallagher points out that the English usually depicted the potato as mere food, primitive, unreconstructed, and lacking in any cultural resonance. In time, that lack would itself become precisely the potato’s cultural resonance: the potato came to signify the end of food being anything more than food—animal fuel. Bread, on the other hand, was as leavened with meaning as it was with air.

Like the potato, wheat begins in nature, but it is then transformed by culture. While the potato is simply thrown into a pot or fire, wheat must be harvested, threshed, milled, mixed, kneaded, shaped, baked, and then, in a final miracle of transubstantiation, the doughy lump of formless matter rises to become bread. This elaborate process, with its division of labor and suggestion of transcendence, symbolized civilization’s mastery of raw nature. A mere food thus became the substance of human and even spiritual communion, for there was also the old identification of bread with the body of Christ. If the lumpish potato was base matter, bread in the Christian mind was its very opposite: antimatter, even spirit.

The political economists also weighed in on the potato debate, and though they framed their arguments in somewhat more scientific terms, their rhetoric too betrays deep anxieties about nature’s threat to civilization’s control. Malthusian logic started from the premise that people are driven by the desires for food and sex; only the threat of starvation keeps the population from exploding. The danger of the potato, Malthus believed, was that it removed the economic constraints that ordinarily kept the population in check. This in a nutshell was Ireland’s problem: “the indolent and turbulent habits of the lower Irish can never be corrected while the potato system enables them to increase so much beyond the regular demand for labour.”

In the same way that the potato exempts the potato eater from the civilizing processes of bread making, it also exempts him from the discipline of the economy. Political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo regarded the market as a sensitive mechanism for adjusting the size of the population to the demand for labor, and the price of bread was that mechanism’s regulator. When the price of wheat rose, people had to curb both of their animal appetites and so produced fewer babies. The problem with “the potato system” is that, under it, the
Homo economicus
who adjusts his behavior to the algebra of need is replaced by a far less rational actor—
Homo appetitus,
as Gallagher calls him. If Economic Man operated under the coolly rational sign of Apollo, Appetite Man was in thrall to earthy, fecund, amoral Dionysus. Since the Irishman grew and ate his own potatoes, and since his potatoes (unlike wheat flour) could not easily be stored or traded, they never became commodities and were therefore, like him, subject to no authority but nature’s own.

In the eyes of the political economists, capitalist exchange was a lot like baking, since it represented a way of civilizing anarchic nature—the anarchic nature, that is, of both plants and people. Without the discipline of commodity markets, man is thrown back on his instincts: unlimited food and sex leading inexorably to overpopulation and misery. David Ricardo was convinced that the potato was both the cause and symbol of this regression, this surrender of control to nature. As long as humans need to eat, we can never completely insulate ourselves from the vicissitudes of nature; the best we can do, Ricardo believed, was to rely on a staple that, like wheat, can be stored against storms and droughts and readily converted into money to buy other foods. The potato offered no such security. By refusing to transcend its own nature and become a commodity, the potato threatened, in Gallagher’s words, to “wipe out the progress an advanced economy has made in liberating humankind from dependence on shifty nature.”

About this much, at least, history would prove the political economists terribly correct. The control with which the potato appeared to have blessed the Irish would turn out to be a cruel illusion. Dependence on the potato had in fact made the Irish exquisitely vulnerable, not to the vicissitudes of the economy so much as to those of nature. This they would abruptly discover late in the summer of 1845, when
Phytophthora infestans
arrived in Europe, probably on a ship from America. Within weeks the spores of this savage fungus, borne on the wind, overspread the continent, dooming potatoes and potato eaters alike.

• • •

St. Louis, June 23.
While my NewLeafs were bushing up nicely during a spell of hot early-summer weather, I traveled to Monsanto’s headquarters in St. Louis, where the ancient, noble dream of control of nature is in full and extravagant flower. If the place to go to understand the relationship of people and potato was a mountainside farm in South America in 1532 or a lazy bed near Dublin in 1845, today it is just as surely a research greenhouse on a corporate campus outside St. Louis.

My NewLeafs are clones of clones of plants that were first engineered more than a decade ago in a long, low-slung brick build-ing on the bank of the Missouri that would look like any other corporate complex if not for its stunning roofline. What appear from a distance to be shimmering crenellations of glass turn out to be the twenty-six greenhouses that crown the building in a dramatic sequence of triangular peaks. The first generation of genetically altered plants—of which the NewLeaf potato is one—has been grown under this roof, in these greenhouses, since 1984; especially in the early days of biotechnology, no one knew for sure if it was safe to grow these plants outdoors, in nature. Today this research and development facility is one of a small handful of such places—Monsanto has only two or three competitors in the world—where the world’s crop plants are being redesigned.

Dave Starck, one of Monsanto’s senior potato people, escorted me through the clean rooms where potatoes are genetically engineered. He explained that there are two ways of splicing foreign genes into a plant: by infecting it with agrobacterium, a pathogen whose modus operandi is to break into a plant cell’s nucleus and replace its DNA with some of its own, or by shooting it with a gene gun. For reasons not yet understood, the agrobacterium method seems to work best on broadleaf species such as the potato, the gene gun better on grasses, such as corn and wheat.