The Botany Of Desire Part 7

As I slowly chewed my potato salad, I considered which ingredient was more likely to be hazardous to my health, the NewLeafs or the Russets a la Thimet? The answer, I decided, is almost certainly potato number two. There might be unknowns about the NewLeafs, but the Russets I knew knew to be full of poison-and the answer says something important about genetically engineered plants I wasn't ready to hear, at least not before coming out to Idaho. After I talked to farmers like Danny Forsyth and Steve Young while walking fields made sterile by a drenching, season-long rain of chemicals, Monsanto's NewLeafs began to look like a blessing. Set against current practices, genetically modified potatoes represent a more sustainable way of growing food. The problem is, that isn't saying much. to be full of poison-and the answer says something important about genetically engineered plants I wasn't ready to hear, at least not before coming out to Idaho. After I talked to farmers like Danny Forsyth and Steve Young while walking fields made sterile by a drenching, season-long rain of chemicals, Monsanto's NewLeafs began to look like a blessing. Set against current practices, genetically modified potatoes represent a more sustainable way of growing food. The problem is, that isn't saying much.

After my lunch with the Youngs, I shook off my escort long enough to pay a visit to a nearby organic potato grower. I knew enough not to take someone from Monsanto to visit an organic farm. "If there's a source of evil in agriculture," an organic farmer from Maine had told me, "its name is Monsanto."

Mike Heath is a rugged, lined, laconic man in his mid-fifties. Like most of the organic farmers I've ever met, he looks as though he spends a lot more time outdoors than a conventional farmer, and he probably does: chemicals are, among other things, labor-saving devices. While we drove around his five hundred acres in a battered old pickup truck, I asked him what he thought about genetic engineering. He voiced many reservations-it was synthetic, there were too many unknowns-but his main objection to planting a biotech potato was simply that "it's not what my customers want."

I asked Heath about the NewLeaf potato. He had no doubt that resistance would come-"Face it," he said, "the bugs are always going to be smarter than we are"-and he felt it was unjust that Monsanto was profiting from the ruin of a "public good" such as Bt.

None of this particularly surprised me; what did was the fact that Heath himself had resorted to spraying Bt on his potatoes only once or twice in the last ten years. I had a.s.sumed that organic farmers used Bt and the other approved pesticides in much the same way conventional farmers use theirs, but as Mike Heath showed me around his farm, I began to understand that organic farming was a lot more complicated than simply subst.i.tuting good inputs for bad. A whole different metaphor seemed to be involved.

Instead of buying many inputs at all, Heath relies on a long and complex crop rotation to avoid a buildup of crop-specific pests. He's found, for instance, that planting wheat in a field prior to potatoes "confuses" the potato beetles when they emerge from their larval stage. He also plants strips of flowering plants on the margins of his potato fields-peas or alfalfa, usually-to attract the beneficial insects that dine on beetle larvae and aphids. If there aren't enough beneficial insects around to do the job, he'll introduce ladybugs. Heath also grows a dozen different varieties of potatoes, on the theory that biodiversity in a field, as in the wild, is the best defense against nature's inevitable surprises. A bad year with one variety will likely be offset by a good year with the others. He doesn't, in other words, ever bet the farm on a single crop.

By way of driving home a point, Heath dug some of his Yukon Golds for me to take home. "I can eat any potato in this field right now. Most farmers can't eat their spuds out of the field." I decided not to mention my lunch.

For fertilizers, Heath relies on "green manures" (growing cover crops and plowing them under), cow manure from a local dairy, and the occasional spraying of liquefied seaweed. The result was a soil that looked completely different from the other Magic Valley soils I'd fingered that day: instead of the uniform grayish powder I'd a.s.sumed was normal for the area, Heath's soil was dark brown and crumbly. The difference, I understood, was that this soil was alive. Much more than an inert mechanism for conducting water and chemicals to the crop's roots, it actually contributed nutrients of its own making to the plants. The biology, chemistry, and physics of this process, which goes by the name "fertility," is not at all well understood-soil truly is a wilderness-yet this ignorance doesn't prevent organic farmers and gardeners from nurturing it.

Heath's crops looked different, too: more compact plants (chemical fertilizers tend to make plants leafier); the occasional weed, and loads of insects flitting around. Here were the very opposite of "clean" fields, and, frankly, their weedy hedgerows and overall patchiness made them much less pretty to look at. To the eye, at least, the order of these fields seemed much softer and less complete, with a great deal of disorder percolating at the margins. Of course, what the eye failed to see was a more complex, less human order-the order, that is, of an ecosystem, one that is not so much imposed by the farmer as it is nourished and tweaked by him. It is the very complexity of such fields-the sheer diversity of species in both s.p.a.ce and time-that makes them productive year after year without many inputs. The system provides for most of its needs.

On the drive back to Boise, I thought about why Mike Heath's farm remains the exception, both in Idaho and elsewhere. Here was a genuinely new paradigm-a biological paradigm-and it seemed to work: Heath spends a fraction as much on inputs as Danny Forsyth or Steve Young, yet he was digging between three and four hundred bags per acre-just as many as Forsyth and only slightly fewer than Young.* But while organic agriculture is gaining ground, few of the mainstream farmers I met considered it a "realistic" alternative to the way we presently grow our food. But while organic agriculture is gaining ground, few of the mainstream farmers I met considered it a "realistic" alternative to the way we presently grow our food.

They may be right. In a dozen different ways, a farm like Mike Heath's simply can't be reconciled to the logic of a corporate food chain. For one thing, Heath's type of agriculture doesn't leave much room for the Monsantos of this world: organic farmers buy remarkably little-some seed, a few tons of manure, maybe a few gallons of ladybugs. The organic farmer's focus is on a process, rather than on products. Nor is that process readily systematized, reduced to, say, a prescribed regimen of sprayings like the one Danny Forsyth laid out for me-regimens that are typically designed by companies selling chemicals. Most of the intelligence and local knowledge needed to run Mike Heath's farm resides in the head of Mike Heath. Growing potatoes conventionally requires intelligence, too, but a larger portion of it resides in laboratories in distant places such as St. Louis, where it is employed developing inputs like Roundup or the NewLeaf.

This sort of centralization of agriculture is not likely to be reversed any time soon, if only because there's so much money in it and, in the short run at least, it's so much easier for the farmer to buy prepackaged solutions from big companies. "Whose Head Is the Farmer Using?" asks the t.i.tle of a Wendell Berry essay; "Whose Head Is Using the Farmer?" At a certain point, a point already long past, the farmer's attempt at the perfect control of nature evolved into the control of the farmer by the corporations that promoted that dream in the first place. It is only because that dream is so elu-sive that the control of farmers by its merchants became so inescapable.

Organic farmers like Mike Heath have turned their backs on what is unquestionably the greatest strength-and still greater weakness-of industrial agriculture: monoculture and the economies of scale it makes possible. Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring nature as a machine, yet nothing else in agriculture is so poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a vast field of identical plants will always be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds, and disease-to all the vicissitudes of nature. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and from which virtually every agricultural product is designed to deliver him.

To put the matter baldly, a farmer like Mike Heath is working hard to adjust his fields to the logic of nature, while Danny Forsyth is working even harder to adjust his fields to the logic of monoculture and, standing behind that, the logic of an industrial food chain. One small case in point: when I asked Mike Heath what he did about net necrosis, the bane of Danny Forsyth's potato crop, I was disarmed by the simplicity of his answer. "That's only really a problem with Russet Burbanks," he explained. "So I plant other kinds." Forsyth can't do that. He's part of a food chain-at the far end of which stands a perfect McDonald's french fry-that demands he grow Russet Burbanks and nothing else.

This, of course, is where biotechnology comes in, to the rescue of Forsyth's Russet Burbanks and, Monsanto is betting, to the whole industrial food chain of which they form a part. Monoculture is in crisis. The pesticides that make it possible are rapidly being lost, either to resistance or to worries about their dangers. As the fertility of the soil has declined under the onslaught of chemicals, so too in many places have crop yields. "We need a new silver bullet," an entomologist with the Oregon Extension Service told me, "and biotech is it." Yet a new silver bullet is not the same thing as a new paradigm. Rather, it's something that will allow the old paradigm to survive. That paradigm will always construe the problem in Danny Forsyth's field as a Colorado beetle problem, rather than what it is: a problem of potato monoculture.

What Mike Heath's disarming answer to my question about net necrosis-"That's only really a problem with Russet Burbanks"-suggests is that the problem of monoculture may itself be as much a problem of culture culture as it is of agriculture. Which is to say, it's a problem in which all of us are implicated, not just farmers and companies like Monsanto. I was starting to appreciate that the conventional journalistic narrative that usually organizes a story like this-evil technology foisted by greedy corporation-leaves out an important element, which is us and as it is of agriculture. Which is to say, it's a problem in which all of us are implicated, not just farmers and companies like Monsanto. I was starting to appreciate that the conventional journalistic narrative that usually organizes a story like this-evil technology foisted by greedy corporation-leaves out an important element, which is us and our our desire for control and uniformity. So much of what I'd seen in Idaho-from the clean fields to the computer-controlled crop circles-goes back to that perfect McDonald's french fry at the eating end of the food chain. desire for control and uniformity. So much of what I'd seen in Idaho-from the clean fields to the computer-controlled crop circles-goes back to that perfect McDonald's french fry at the eating end of the food chain.

On my way back to Boise I did a drive-through at a McDonald's and ordered a bag of the fries in question. There's no way of knowing for sure, but these fries may well have been my second meal of NewLeafs in a day; at the time, McDonald's used NewLeafs in its french fries. A Monsanto executive had told me that without McDonald's early support the NewLeaf might never have gotten off the ground, since McDonald's is one of the largest buyers of potatoes in the world.*

You know, their fries really are gorgeous: slender golden rectangles long enough to overshoot their trim red containers like a bouquet. A farmer had told me that only the Russet Burbank will give you a fry quite that long and perfect. To look at them is to appreciate that these aren't just just french fries: they're Platonic ideals of french fries, the image and the food rolled into one, and available anywhere in the world for somewhere around a dollar a bag. You can't beat it. french fries: they're Platonic ideals of french fries, the image and the food rolled into one, and available anywhere in the world for somewhere around a dollar a bag. You can't beat it.

I wanted and fully expected to find precisely the same Platonic french fry here in Nowhere, Idaho, that I'd had countless times at home and could expect to find anytime I wanted to in Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, even Azerbaijan or the Isle of Man. What is that, if not a control thing?-and not just on the part of McDonald's. But whatever is behind it, this expectation can't be fulfilled unless McDonald's has seen to it that millions of acres of Russet Burbanks are planted all over the world. The global desire can't be gratified without the global monoculture, and that global monoculture now depends on technologies like genetic engineering. It just may be that we can't have the one without the other.

This alignment of global desire and technology has been a great boon for the Russet Burbank, at least in terms of sheer numbers. Has there ever been a more successful potato in the history of the world? Yet its success is a precarious thing, for this particular set of potato genes (or rather now, potato genes plus one Bt gene and one antibiotic-resistance gene, courtesy of Monsanto) has also never been more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature or the f.e.c.klessness of a single species: us. Whether in evolutionary terms a monoculture really represents long-term success for a species is an open question. The Lumper, Ireland's favorite potato before the famine, was once nearly as dominant as the Russet Burbank; today, its genes are as hard to find as the dodo's.

Part of the pleasure those fries gave me was how perfectly they conformed to my image and expectation of them-to the Idea of Fries in my head, that is, an idea that McDonald's has successfully planted in the heads of a few billion other people around the world. Here, then, is a whole other meaning of the word monoculture. monoculture. Like the agricultural practice that goes by that name, this one too-the monoculture of global taste-is about uniformity and control. Indeed, the monocultures of the field and the monocultures of our global economy nourish each other in crucial ways. The two are complexly intertwined expressions of the same Apollonian desire, our impulse, I mean, to elevate the universal over the particular or local, the abstract over the concrete, the ideal over the real, the made over the natural. The spirit of Apollo celebrates "the One," Plutarch wrote, "denying the many and abjuring multiplicity." Against Dionysus's "variability" and "wantonness" he poses the power of "uniformity [and] orderliness." Apollo is the G.o.d, then, of monoculture, whether of plants or of people. And though Apollo has surely had many more exalted manifestations than this one, he is here, too, in every bag of McDonald's french fries. Like the agricultural practice that goes by that name, this one too-the monoculture of global taste-is about uniformity and control. Indeed, the monocultures of the field and the monocultures of our global economy nourish each other in crucial ways. The two are complexly intertwined expressions of the same Apollonian desire, our impulse, I mean, to elevate the universal over the particular or local, the abstract over the concrete, the ideal over the real, the made over the natural. The spirit of Apollo celebrates "the One," Plutarch wrote, "denying the many and abjuring multiplicity." Against Dionysus's "variability" and "wantonness" he poses the power of "uniformity [and] orderliness." Apollo is the G.o.d, then, of monoculture, whether of plants or of people. And though Apollo has surely had many more exalted manifestations than this one, he is here, too, in every bag of McDonald's french fries.

Ireland, 1846. "On the 27th of last month [July] I pa.s.sed from Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all luxuriance of an abundant harvest." So begins a letter written in the summer of 1846 by a Catholic priest named Father Mathew. "Returning on the 3rd [of August] I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands, and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless." "On the 27th of last month [July] I pa.s.sed from Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all luxuriance of an abundant harvest." So begins a letter written in the summer of 1846 by a Catholic priest named Father Mathew. "Returning on the 3rd [of August] I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands, and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless."

The arrival of the blight was announced by the stench of rotting potatoes, a stench that became general in Ireland late in the summer of 1845, then again in '46 and '48. Its spores carried on the wind, the fungus would appear in a field literally overnight: a black spotting of the leaves followed by a gangrenous stain spreading down the plant's stem; then the blackened tubers would turn to evil-smelling slime. It took but a few days for the fungus to scorch a green field black; even potatoes in storage succ.u.mbed.

The potato blight visited all of Europe, but only in Ireland did it produce a catastrophe. Elsewhere, people could turn to other staple foods when a crop failed, but Ireland's poor, subsisting on potatoes and exiled from the cash economy, had no alternative. As is often the case in times of starvation, the problem was not quite so simple as a shortage of food. At the height of the famine, Ireland's docks were heaped with sacks of corn destined for export to England. But the corn was a commodity, determined to follow the money; since the potato eaters had no money to pay for corn, it sailed for a country that did.

The potato famine was the worst catastrophe to befall Europe since the Black Death of 1348. Ireland's population was literally decimated: one in every eight Irishmen-a million people-died of starvation in three years; thousands of others went blind or insane for lack of the vitamins potatoes had supplied. Because the poor laws made anyone who owned more than a quarter acre of land ineligible for aid, millions of Irish were forced to give up their farms in order to eat; uprooted and desperate, the ones with the energy and wherewithal emigrated to America. Within a decade, Ireland's population was halved and the composition of America's population permanently altered.

Contemporary accounts of the potato famine read like visions of h.e.l.l: streets piled with corpses no one had the strength to bury, armies of near-naked beggars who'd p.a.w.ned their clothes for food, abandoned houses, deserted villages. Disease followed on famine: typhus, cholera, and purpura raced unchecked through the weakened population. People ate weeds, ate pets, ate human flesh. "The roads are beset with tattered skeletons," one witness wrote. "G.o.d help the people."

The causes of Ireland's calamity were complex and manifold, involving such things as the distribution of land, brutal economic exploitation by the English, and a relief effort by turns heartless and hapless, as well as the usual accidents of climate, geography, and cultural habit. Yet this whole edifice of contingency rested at bottom upon a plant-or, more precisely, upon the relations.h.i.+p between a plant and a people. For it was not the potato so much as potato monoculture that sowed the seeds of Ireland's disaster.

Indeed, Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, but they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper. Potatoes, like apples, are clones, which means that every Lumper was genetically identical to every other Lumper, all of them descended from a single plant that just happened to have no resistance to Phytophthora infestans. Phytophthora infestans. The Incas too built a civilization atop the potato, but they cultivated such a polyculture of potatoes that no one fungus could ever have toppled it. In fact, it was to South America that, in the aftermath of the famine, breeders went to look for potatoes that could resist the blight. And there, in a potato called the Garnet Chile, they found it. The Incas too built a civilization atop the potato, but they cultivated such a polyculture of potatoes that no one fungus could ever have toppled it. In fact, it was to South America that, in the aftermath of the famine, breeders went to look for potatoes that could resist the blight. And there, in a potato called the Garnet Chile, they found it.

Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt. In Ireland under British rule the logic of economics dictated a monoculture of potatoes; in 1845, the logic of nature exercised its veto, and a million people-many of whom probably owed their existence to the potato in the first place-perished.

"As for their command over Nature," wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his 1847 novel Tancred, Tancred, "let us see how it will operate in a second deluge. Command over nature! Why the humblest root that serves for the food of man has mysteriously withered throughout Europe, and they are already pale at the possible consequences." "let us see how it will operate in a second deluge. Command over nature! Why the humblest root that serves for the food of man has mysteriously withered throughout Europe, and they are already pale at the possible consequences."

In March 1998, patent number 5,723,765, describing a novel method for the "control of plant gene expression," was granted jointly to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a cottonseed company called Delta & Pine Land. The bland language of the patent obscures a radical new genetic technology: introduced into any plant, the gene in question causes the seeds that plant makes to become sterile-to no longer do what seeds have always done. With the "Terminator," as the new technique quickly became known, genetic engineers have discovered how to stop on command the most elemental of nature's processes, the plant-seed-plant-seed cycle by which plants reproduce and evolve. The ancient logic of the seed-to freely make more of itself ad infinitum, to serve as both food and the means of making more food in the future-has yielded to the modern logic of capitalism. Now viable seeds will come not from plants but from corporations.

The dream of controlling the seed, and through the seed the farmer, is older than genetic engineering. It goes back at least to the development, in a handful of crops, of modern hybrids, high-yielding varieties that don't "come true" from replanted seed, thereby forcing farmers to buy new seeds every spring. Yet compared to the rest of the economy, farming has largely resisted the trend toward centralization and corporate control. Even today, when only a handful of big companies are left standing in most American industries, there are still some two million farmers. What has stood in the way of concentration is nature: her complexity, diversity, and sheer intractability in the face of our most heroic efforts at control. Perhaps most intractable of all has been agriculture's means of production, which of course is nature's own: the seed.

It's only in the last few decades, with the introduction of modern hybrids, that farmers began to buy their seeds from big companies. Even today a great many farmers save some seed every fall to replant in the spring. "Brown bagging," as this practice is sometimes called, allows farmers to select strains particularly well adapted to local conditions.* Since these seeds are typically traded among farmers, the practice steadily advances the state of the genetic art. Indeed, over the centuries it has given us most of our major crop plants. Since these seeds are typically traded among farmers, the practice steadily advances the state of the genetic art. Indeed, over the centuries it has given us most of our major crop plants.

Infinitely reproducible, seeds by their very nature don't lend themselves to commodification, which is why the genetics of most of our major crop plants have traditionally been regarded as a common heritage rather than as "intellectual property." In the case of the potato, the genetics of the important varieties-the Russet Burbanks and Atlantic Superiors, the Kennebecs and Red Norlings-have always been in the public domain. Before Monsanto got involved, there had never been a national corporation in the potato seed business. There simply wasn't enough money in it.

Genetic engineering changes this. By adding a new gene or two to a Russet or Superior, Monsanto can now patent the improved variety. Legally, it's been possible to patent a plant for several years now, but biologically, these patents have been almost impossible to enforce. Genetic engineering has gone a long way toward solving this problem, since it allows Monsanto to test the potato plants growing on a farm to prove they're the company's intellectual property. The contracts farmers must sign to buy Monsanto seeds grant the company the right to perform such tests at will, even in future years. To catch farmers violating its patent rights, Monsanto has reportedly paid informants and hired Pinkertons to track down gene thieves; it has already sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement. With a technology such as the Terminator, the company will no longer have to go to all that trouble.*

With the Terminator, seed companies can enforce their patents biologically and indefinitely. Once these genes are widely introduced, control over the genetics of our crop plants and the trajectory of their evolution will complete its move from the farmer's field to the seed company-to which the world's farmers will have no choice but to return year after year. The Terminator allows companies like Monsanto to enclose one of the last great com-mons in nature: the genetics of the crop plants that civilization has developed over the past ten thousand years.

At lunch I had asked Steve Young what he thought about all this, especially about the contract Monsanto forces him to sign and the prospect of sterile seeds. I wondered how the American farmer, the putative heir to a long tradition of agrarian independence, was adjusting to the idea of field men snooping around his farm and patented seeds he couldn't replant.

Young told me he'd made his peace with corporate agriculture, and with biotechnology in particular. "It's here to stay. It's necessary if we're going to feed the world, and it's going to take us forward."

I asked him if he saw any downside to biotechnology. Someone from Monsanto was with us at the table; Young's reply was a long time in coming, and the moment grew uncomfortable. What he finally said silenced the table, and made me think again about the image of mastery he'd projected-about the computer-controlled fields, the chemical distributors.h.i.+p, the miles of patented high-tech spuds framed in his living room's picture window, reaching clear to the horizon.

"Oh, there is a cost all right," Young said darkly. "It gives corporate America one more noose around my neck."

August. A few weeks after I got home from Idaho, I dug my NewLeafs, harvesting a gorgeous-looking pile of spuds, several real lunkers among them. The plants had performed brilliantly, though so had all my other potatoes: the beetle problem never got out of hand, perhaps because the diversity of species in my garden had attracted enough beneficial insects to check the bugs. Who knows? My scapegoat tomatillos may also have helped. The fact is, a true test of my NewLeafs would have meant planting a monoculture. A few weeks after I got home from Idaho, I dug my NewLeafs, harvesting a gorgeous-looking pile of spuds, several real lunkers among them. The plants had performed brilliantly, though so had all my other potatoes: the beetle problem never got out of hand, perhaps because the diversity of species in my garden had attracted enough beneficial insects to check the bugs. Who knows? My scapegoat tomatillos may also have helped. The fact is, a true test of my NewLeafs would have meant planting a monoculture.

By the time I harvested my crop, the question of eating my NewLeafs was moot. Whatever I thought about the safety of these potatoes really didn't matter. Not just because I'd already tasted Mrs. Young's NewLeaf potato salad but because Monsanto and my government had long ago taken the decision as to whether or not to eat a biotech spud out of my hands. Chances are I've eaten plenty of NewLeafs already, at McDonald's or in bags of Frito-Lay chips, though without a label, there's no way of knowing for sure.

So if I've eaten probable NewLeafs already, why was it I kept putting off eating these definite NewLeafs? Maybe just because it was August and there were so many more interesting fresh potatoes around-fingerlings with dense, luscious flesh, Yukon Golds (Mike Heath's as well as my own) that looked and tasted as though they'd been b.u.t.tered in the skin-that the idea of cooking with the sort of bland commercial variety Monsanto puts its genes into seemed almost beside the point.

There was this, too: I'd called some of the government agencies in Was.h.i.+ngton that had signed off on the NewLeaf, and what they said didn't exactly fill me with confidence. The Food and Drug Administration told me that, because it operates on the a.s.sumption that genetically modified plants are "substantially equivalent" to ordinary plants, the regulation of these foods has been voluntary since 1992. Only if Monsanto feels there is a safety concern is it required to consult with the agency about its NewLeafs. I'd always a.s.sumed the FDA had tested the new potato, maybe fed a bunch of them to rats, but it turned out this was not the case. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration doesn't even officially regard the NewLeaf as a food. What? What? It seems that since the potato contains Bt, it is, at least in the eyes of the federal government, not a food at all but a pesticide, putting it under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. Feeling a bit like Alice in a bureaucratic wonderland, I phoned the EPA to ask about my potatoes. As the EPA sees it, Bt has always been a safe pesticide, the potato has always been a safe food, so put the two together and you've got something that should be safe both to eat and to kill bugs with. Evidently the machine metaphor has won the day in Was.h.i.+ngton too: the NewLeaf is simply the sum of its parts-a safe gene added to a safe potato. It seems that since the potato contains Bt, it is, at least in the eyes of the federal government, not a food at all but a pesticide, putting it under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. Feeling a bit like Alice in a bureaucratic wonderland, I phoned the EPA to ask about my potatoes. As the EPA sees it, Bt has always been a safe pesticide, the potato has always been a safe food, so put the two together and you've got something that should be safe both to eat and to kill bugs with. Evidently the machine metaphor has won the day in Was.h.i.+ngton too: the NewLeaf is simply the sum of its parts-a safe gene added to a safe potato.

I also phoned Margaret Mellon at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., to ask her advice about my spuds. Mellon is a molecular biologist and lawyer and a leading critic of biotech agriculture. She couldn't offer any hard scientific proof that my NewLeafs were unsafe to eat, but she pointed out that there was also no scientific proof for the notion of "substantial equivalence."*

"That research simply hasn't been done."

Mellon talked about genetic instability, a phenomenon which strongly suggests that a biotech plant is not not simply the sum of its old and new genes, and she talked about the fact that we know nothing about the effect of Bt in the human diet, a place it has never been before. I pressed: Was there any reason why I shouldn't eat these spuds? simply the sum of its old and new genes, and she talked about the fact that we know nothing about the effect of Bt in the human diet, a place it has never been before. I pressed: Was there any reason why I shouldn't eat these spuds?

"Let me ask you you a question: Why would you want to?" a question: Why would you want to?"

This was a good question. So for several weeks late that summer my NewLeafs remained in a shopping bag on the porch. Then I took the bag with me on vacation, thinking maybe I'd sample them there, but the bag came home untouched-except, that is, for one potato I'd taken out of it. A fishmonger had told me about a Martha Stewart tip for keeping grilled fish from sticking to a barbecue: rub the grill with a raw potato sliced down the middle. It works, by the way.

But I was still left with my bag of NewLeafs sitting there on the porch. And there they sat until Labor Day, when I got an invitation to a potluck supper at the town beach. Perfect! I signed up to make a potato salad. The day of the supper, I brought the bag of spuds into the kitchen and set a pot of water on the stove. But before the water even had a chance to boil, I was stricken by this obvious thought: Wouldn't I have to tell people at the picnic what they were eating? I had no reason to think the potatoes weren't perfectly safe, but if the idea of eating genetically modified food without knowing it gave me pause, I couldn't very well ask my neighbors to do so. (That would be rather more potluck than they were counting on.) So of course I'd have to tell them all about the NewLeafs-and then, no doubt, bring home a big bowl of untouched potato salad. For surely there'd be other potato salads at the potluck, and who, given the choice, was ever going to opt for the one with the biotech spuds? I suddenly understood with perfect clarity why Monsanto doesn't want to label its genetically modified food.

So I turned down the flame under the pot and went out to the garden to harvest a pile of ordinary spuds for my potato salad. The NewLeafs went back out into the limbo of my porch.

EPILOGUE.

I hadn't been in the garden for a couple of weeks, and, as always is the case by the end of the summer, the place was an anarchy of rampant growth and ripe fruit, all of it threatening to burst the geometry of my beds and trellises and paths. The pole beans had climbed clear to the tops of the sunflowers, which stood draped in their bulging green and yellow pods. The pumpkins had trailed halfway across the now-unmowable lawn, and the squash leaves, big as pizzas, threw dark pools of shade in which the lettuces looked extremely happy-as, unfortunately, did the slugs, who were dining on my chard in the squashy shade. The vines of the last potatoes lay flopped over their hills, exhausted.

The garden had come to this, had reached this pitch of green uproar in the few short weeks since May, when I'd set out seedlings in a considered pattern I no longer could discern. The neat, freshly hoed rows had once implied that I was in charge here, the gardener in chief, but clearly this was no longer the case. My order had been overturned as the plants went blithely about their plant destinies. This they were doing with the avidity of all annuals, reaching for the sun, seizing ground from neighbors, fending off or exploiting one another whenever the opportunity arose, ripening the seeds that would bear their genes into the future, and generally making the most of the dwindling days till frost.

For a while every season, I do try to keep the whole thing under some semblance of control, pulling the weeds, clipping back the squash so that the chard might breathe, untangling the bean vines before they choke their frailer neighbors. But by the end of August I usually give it up, let the garden go its own way while I simply try to keep up with the abundance of the late-summer harvest. By this point what's going on in the garden is no longer my doing, even if it was I who got the whole thing rolling back in May. As much as I love the firm grasp and cerebral order of spring, there's a ripe, almost sensual pleasure in its August abandonment, too.

But I'd come here looking for something, and eventually I found it: a row of Kennebecs, their tops already sprawled dead on the ground. One of the many virtues of potatoes is that they can be left in the ground all winter, to be dug only as needed; historically, this has been a great blessing to peasants subject to marauding armies, since potatoes in the ground can't very well be ransacked.

I think there is no harvest more satisfying than the harvest of potatoes. I love the moment when the spade turns over the crust of black soil for the first time since spring and the chino-colored lumps tumble out onto the fresh dirt. After gathering up the first flush of easy ones, you should lay the spade aside (or else you're apt to bruise the remaining potatoes). Go for the rest by hand, forcing your fingers down into the richly manured soil, feeling around in the dark for those unmistakable forms, the ident.i.ty of which the hand has no need of the eye to confirm. That's because potatoes are always cooler to the touch than stone, heavier too, and somehow always a happier fit in the hand.

Not that any given spud is ever such a paragon of form. No two of them ever alike, most potatoes are odd, misshapen, asymmetrical things, their shapes determined as much by the accidents of adjacent rocks and soil as by any genetic instruction followed to the letter. Maybe this is why we like to give our chthonic spuds such sunny and Apollonian forms, slicing them into translucent chips and geometrical fries. Yet compared to the undifferentiated night in which they grow, the bright potatoes feel in the hand like form incarnate.

Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, s.h.i.+ning wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It's the smell of fresh soil in the spring, but fresh soil somehow distilled or improved upon, as if that wild, primordial scene had been refined and bottled: eau de pomme de terre. eau de pomme de terre. You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there's the cozy kitchen too, for the smell of potatoes is, at least by now, to us, the smell of comfort itself, a smell as blankly welcoming as spud flesh, a whiteness that takes up memories and sentiments as easily as flavors. To smell a raw potato is to stand on the very threshold of the domestic and the wild. You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there's the cozy kitchen too, for the smell of potatoes is, at least by now, to us, the smell of comfort itself, a smell as blankly welcoming as spud flesh, a whiteness that takes up memories and sentiments as easily as flavors. To smell a raw potato is to stand on the very threshold of the domestic and the wild.

Once I'd filled a basket with my spuds, I stood and considered the state of the garden, the daunting magnificence of its declension from May's straightforward rows and intentions. Whenever I hear or read the word garden, garden, I always picture something so much less wild than this, probably because in common usage I always picture something so much less wild than this, probably because in common usage garden garden stands as the opposite of stands as the opposite of wilderness. wilderness. The gardener knows better than to believe this, though. He knows that his garden fence and path and cherished geometries hold in their precarious embrace, if not a wilderness in any literal sense, then surely a great, teeming effulgence of wildness-of plants and animals and microbes leading their multifarious lives, proposing so many different and unexpected answers to the deep pulse of their genes and the wide press of their surroundings-of everything affecting everything else. The gardener knows better than to believe this, though. He knows that his garden fence and path and cherished geometries hold in their precarious embrace, if not a wilderness in any literal sense, then surely a great, teeming effulgence of wildness-of plants and animals and microbes leading their multifarious lives, proposing so many different and unexpected answers to the deep pulse of their genes and the wide press of their surroundings-of everything affecting everything else.

So where exactly does that leave us-the gardeners and descendants of Johnny Appleseed who would try to make something of this wildness? Standing amid this sweet wreck of a garden this August afternoon, lifting a basket heavy with potatoes, I thought about Chapman in his coffee sack, about the fanatical tulip fanciers and pot growers of Amsterdam, about the Monsanto scientists in their lab coats, and wondered what they had in common. All of them had ventured into the garden-into Darwin's Ever-Expanding Garden of Artificial Selection-for the purpose of marrying powerful human drives to the equally powerful drives of plants; all were pract.i.tioners of the botany of desire. In the nature of things, this made them-Chapman-like, potatolike-figures of the margins, moving between the realms of the wild and the cultivated, the anciently given and the newly made, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. All of them had taken part in the great, never-to-be-concluded conversation between those two presiding deities, adding their two cents to the dialogue of Dionysian energy and Apollonian order that has produced the beauty of a Queen of Night tulip, the sweetness of a Jonagold apple, the perception sponsored in a human brain by Cannabis sativa Cannabis sativa X X indica. indica.

Somewhere between those two poles, all gardeners-indeed, all of us-stake out their ground, some of them, like Appleseed, leaning to the side of Dionysian wildness (he'd love this garden now); others, like the scientists at Monsanto, pus.h.i.+ng toward the Apollonian satisfactions of control. (The lab coats would probably have liked the garden better earlier in the season, before all h.e.l.l broke loose.) Still others are harder to place on the continuum: I mean, where exactly do you put the marijuana grower tending his hydroponic closet of clones-that Apollonian edifice dedicated to the pursuit of Dionysian pleasure? It's a good thing one doesn't have to take sides.

With the exception of John Chapman, who had the imagination to identify with the bees, all these other botanists of desire went about their work from a straightforward and, it seems to me, blinkered humanist perspective. They took it for granted that domestication was something people did to plants, never the other way around. It probably never occurred to Dr. Adriaen Pauw, the Dutch burgher who owned eleven twelfths, or twelve thirteenths, of the world's population of Semper Augustus tulips, that those tulips in some sense owned him-that he'd devoted the better part of his life to advancing their numbers and happiness. But the tulipomania he unwittingly helped fire was an inestimable boon to the genus Tulipa, Tulipa, which may be said to have had the last laugh. Its fortunes, at least, have been ascendant in the world ever since the Dutch burghers lost their fortunes on its account. which may be said to have had the last laugh. Its fortunes, at least, have been ascendant in the world ever since the Dutch burghers lost their fortunes on its account.

Witting or not, all these characters have been actors in a coevolutionary drama, a dance of human and plant desire that has left neither the plants nor the people taking part in it unchanged. Okay, desire might be too strong a word for whatever it is that drives plants to reinvent themselves so that we might do their bidding, but then, our own designs have often been no more willful than the plants'. We too cast unconscious evolutionary votes every time we reach for the most symmetrical flower or the longest french fry. The survival of the sweetest, the most beautiful, or the most intoxicating proceeds according to a dialectical process, a give-and-take between human desire and the universe of all plant possibility. It takes two, but it doesn't take intention, or consciousness.

I keep coming back to that image of John Chapman floating down the Ohio River, snoozing alongside his mountain of apple seeds-seeds that held sleeping within them the apple's American future, the golden age to come. The barefoot crank knew something about how things stand between us and the plants, something we seem to have lost sight of in the two centuries since. He understood, I think, that our destinies on the river of natural history are twined. And while I personally don't think he was right to judge grafting a "wickedness," his judgment does bespeak an instinctive feeling for the necessity of wildness and the value of multiplicity over monoculture. Though Chapman would probably disagree, genetic engineering is probably no more wicked than grafting, though it too wars against wildness and multiplicity (albeit much more fiercely). It too places its bet-a very large bet-on the Apollonian One as against the Dionysian Many.

The NewLeaf marks an evolutionary turn that may or may not take us somewhere we want to be. Just in case it doesn't, though, we'd be wise to follow Chapman's example, to save and seed all manner of plant genes: the wild, the unpatentable, even the seemingly useless, patently ugly, and just plain strange. Next year in place of the NewLeaf I plan to plant a great many different Old Leafs; instead of one perfect potato, I'll make Chapman's bet on the field. To shrink the sheer diversity of life, as the grafters and monoculturists and genetic engineers would do, is to shrink evolution's possibilities, which is to say, the future open to all of us. "This is the a.s.sembly of life that it took a billion years to evolve," the zoologist E. O. Wilson has written, speaking of biodiversity. "It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady." To risk this multiplicity is to risk unstringing the world.

Biodiversity is a word that was not in John Chapman's vocabulary, though it's a good one to describe the crazy archive of apple genes he had with him that summer afternoon on the Ohio. His view of our place in nature was eccentric even by the standards of his day. But I'm convinced that there is some usable truth there, if not in his words, then certainly in his deeds. I'm thinking specifically of the way he rigged up his canoe that day, the two hulls side by side, so that the weight of the apple seeds balanced the weight of the man, each helping to keep the other steady on the river. Laughable as an example of naval architecture, perhaps, but seaworthy, surely, as a metaphor. Chapman's craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together. is a word that was not in John Chapman's vocabulary, though it's a good one to describe the crazy archive of apple genes he had with him that summer afternoon on the Ohio. His view of our place in nature was eccentric even by the standards of his day. But I'm convinced that there is some usable truth there, if not in his words, then certainly in his deeds. I'm thinking specifically of the way he rigged up his canoe that day, the two hulls side by side, so that the weight of the apple seeds balanced the weight of the man, each helping to keep the other steady on the river. Laughable as an example of naval architecture, perhaps, but seaworthy, surely, as a metaphor. Chapman's craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together.

SOURCES.

Listed below, by chapter, are the princ.i.p.al works referred to in the text, as well as others that supplied me with facts or influenced my thinking.

INTRODUCTION: THE HUMAN b.u.mBLEBEE.

David Attenborough's 1995 public television series The Private Life of Plants The Private Life of Plants probably did more than any book to open my eyes to the natural and human world as seen from the plant's point of view. The series' brilliant time-lapse photography immediately makes you realize that our sense of plants as pa.s.sive objects is a failure of imagination, rooted in the fact that plants occupy what amounts to a different dimension. probably did more than any book to open my eyes to the natural and human world as seen from the plant's point of view. The series' brilliant time-lapse photography immediately makes you realize that our sense of plants as pa.s.sive objects is a failure of imagination, rooted in the fact that plants occupy what amounts to a different dimension.

On the history of domestication and the relations.h.i.+p between plants and people, I found these books particularly illuminating: Anderson, Edgar. Anderson, Edgar. Plants, Man and Life Plants, Man and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952). A cla.s.sic on the origins of agriculture. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952). A cla.s.sic on the origins of agriculture. Balick, Michael J., and Paul Alan c.o.x. Balick, Michael J., and Paul Alan c.o.x. Plants, People and Culture: The Science of Ethn.o.botany Plants, People and Culture: The Science of Ethn.o.botany (New York: Scientific American Library, 1996). (New York: Scientific American Library, 1996). Bronowski, J. Bronowski, J. The Ascent of Man The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). Budiansky, Stephen. Budiansky, Stephen. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New York: William Morrow, 1992). (New York: William Morrow, 1992). Coppinger, Raymond P., and Charles Kay Smith. "The Domestication of Evolution," Coppinger, Raymond P., and Charles Kay Smith. "The Domestication of Evolution," Environmental Conservation, Environmental Conservation, vol. 10, no. 4, Winter 1983, pp. 28391. This essay puts domestication into the context of evolution, suggesting that what const.i.tutes "fitness" in nature fundamentally changed during the Neolithic era. vol. 10, no. 4, Winter 1983, pp. 28391. This essay puts domestication into the context of evolution, suggesting that what const.i.tutes "fitness" in nature fundamentally changed during the Neolithic era. Diamond, Jared. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Excellent on the history and botany of domestication, why some species partic.i.p.ate and others do not. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Excellent on the history and botany of domestication, why some species partic.i.p.ate and others do not. Eiseley, Loren. Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage Books, 1959). As much myth as science, this book manages to dramatize the rise of the angiosperms. (New York: Vintage Books, 1959). As much myth as science, this book manages to dramatize the rise of the angiosperms. Nabhan, Gary Paul. Nabhan, Gary Paul. Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989). (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989).

On the wider subject of evolution and natural selection: Darwin, Charles. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species, The Origin of Species, edited by J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin Books, 1968). edited by J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin Books, 1968). Dawkins, Richard. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Dennett, Daniel C Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Goodwin, Brian. Goodwin, Brian. How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994). (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994). Jones, Steve. Jones, Steve. Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated (New York: Random House, 1999). (New York: Random House, 1999). Ridley, Matt. Ridley, Matt. The Red Queen: s.e.x and the Evolution of Human Nature The Red Queen: s.e.x and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). Wilson, E. O. Wilson, E. O. The Diversity of Life The Diversity of Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

CHAPTER 1: THE APPLE.

Though he probably won't approve of the portrait of his hero I brought back with me, William Ellery (Bill) Jones was as generous, knowledgeable, and companionable a guide to Johnny Appleseed country as anyone could hope for. Bill also introduced me to several other people in Ohio and Indiana who helped me to piece together Chapman's elusive story: Steven Fortriede at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne; Myrtle Ake, who showed me the Chapman family graveyard in Dexter City; and David Ferre, a pomologist with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

The literary and historical record on John Chapman is remarkably thin. The indispensable source on Chapman's life remains Robert Price's 1954 biography, Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth Johnny Appleseed: Man and Myth (Gloucester, Ma.s.s.: Peter Smith, 1967). Also indispensable is the 1871 account of Chapman's life published by (Gloucester, Ma.s.s.: Peter Smith, 1967). Also indispensable is the 1871 account of Chapman's life published by Harper's New Monthly Magazine Harper's New Monthly Magazine (vol. 43, pp. 611). For showing me that Chapman was a historical figure worth taking seriously, I owe a debt to Edward Hoagland's excellent (vol. 43, pp. 611). For showing me that Chapman was a historical figure worth taking seriously, I owe a debt to Edward Hoagland's excellent American Heritage American Heritage profile, "Mushpan Man," which is reprinted in Hoagland's essay collection profile, "Mushpan Man," which is reprinted in Hoagland's essay collection Heart's Desire Heart's Desire (New York: Summit Books, 1988). For contemporary accounts of Chapman, I highly recommend (New York: Summit Books, 1988). For contemporary accounts of Chapman, I highly recommend Johnny Appleseed: A Voice in the Wilderness, Johnny Appleseed: A Voice in the Wilderness, an anthology of historical writings on Chapman edited by William Ellery Jones (West Chester, Pa.: Chrysalis Books, 2000). Also worth reading are Chapman's obituary in the Fort Wayne an anthology of historical writings on Chapman edited by William Ellery Jones (West Chester, Pa.: Chrysalis Books, 2000). Also worth reading are Chapman's obituary in the Fort Wayne Sentinel Sentinel (March 22, 1845) and Steven Fortriede, "Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Myth," (March 22, 1845) and Steven Fortriede, "Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Myth," Old Fort News Old Fort News (vol. 41, no. 3, 1978). (vol. 41, no. 3, 1978).

On the botany, culture, and history of the apple, I profited from interviews and conversations with Bill Vitalis, formerly of the Ellsworth Hill Orchard in Connecticut; Clay Stark and Walter Logan at Stark Brothers Nurseries in Missouri; Tom Vorbeck at Applesource in Illinois; Terry and Judith Maloney at West County Cider in Ma.s.sachusetts; and, at the USDA Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, Phil Forsline, Herb Aldwinckle, and Susan Brown.

These books on apples, sweetness, and environmental history were particularly helpful: Beach, S. A. Beach, S. A. The Apples of New York The Apples of New York (Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1905). (Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1905). Browning, Frank. Browning, Frank. Apples Apples (New York: North Point Press, 1998). Browning, an orchardist and journalist, traveled to Kazakhstan, visiting the apple's center of diversity with Aimak Djangaliev. (New York: North Point Press, 1998). Browning, an orchardist and journalist, traveled to Kazakhstan, visiting the apple's center of diversity with Aimak Djangaliev. Carlson, R. F., et al. Carlson, R. F., et al. North American Apples: Varieties, Rootstocks, Outlook North American Apples: Varieties, Rootstocks, Outlook (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970). (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970). Childers, Norman F. Childers, Norman F. Modern Fruit Science Modern Fruit Science (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975). (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975). Crosby, Alfred. Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900 Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The preeminent environmental historian on the exchange of species between the Old World and New after Columbus. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The preeminent environmental historian on the exchange of species between the Old World and New after Columbus. ---. ---. Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History Germs, Seeds & Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). Haughton, Claire Shaver. Haughton, Claire Shaver. Green Immigrants: The Plants That Transformed America Green Immigrants: The Plants That Transformed America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Marranca, Bonnie, ed. Marranca, Bonnie, ed. American Garden Writing American Garden Writing (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988). (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988). Martin, Alice A. Martin, Alice A. All About Apples All About Apples (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Mintz, Sidney W. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power Sweetness and Power (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). Terry, d.i.c.kson. "The Stark Story: Stark Nurseries 150th Anniversary," special issue of the Terry, d.i.c.kson. "The Stark Story: Stark Nurseries 150th Anniversary," special issue of the Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, September 1966. September 1966. Th.o.r.eau, Henry David. "Wild Apples," in Th.o.r.eau, Henry David. "Wild Apples," in The Natural History Essays, The Natural History Essays, introduction and notes by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980). introduction and notes by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980). Weber, Bruce. Weber, Bruce. The Apple in America: The Apple in 19th Century American Art The Apple in America: The Apple in 19th Century American Art (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1993). An exhibition catalog. (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 1993). An exhibition catalog. Yepson, Roger. Yepson, Roger. Apples Apples (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

On the subjects of Dionysus and Apollo (which also figure in subsequent chapters), I've relied primarily on Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy The Birth of Tragedy (London: Penguin Books, 1993; first published 1872) and Camille Paglia's (London: Penguin Books, 1993; first published 1872) and Camille Paglia's s.e.xual Personae s.e.xual Personae (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), a book br.i.m.m.i.n.g with insight for anyone who would write or think about nature. The following books were also helpful on Dionysus: (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), a book br.i.m.m.i.n.g with insight for anyone who would write or think about nature. The following books were also helpful on Dionysus: Dodds, E. R. Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Frazer, Sir James. Frazer, Sir James. The New Golden Bough The New Golden Bough (New York: New American Library, 1959). (New York: New American Library, 1959). Harrison, Jane. Harrison, Jane. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge, Ma.s.s.: Harvard University Press, 1922). (Cambridge, Ma.s.s.: Harvard University Press, 1922). Kerenyi, Carl. Kerenyi, Carl. Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). trans. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Otto, Walter F. Otto, Walter F. Dionysus: Myth and Cult, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, trans. by Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965). trans. by Robert B. Palmer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965). Williams, C. K., trans. Williams, C. K., trans. The Bacchae of Euripides The Bacchae of Euripides (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

CHAPTER 2: THE TULIP.

On flowers in general, I consulted: Goody, Jack. Goody, Jack. The Culture of Flowers The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993). (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Huxley, Anthony. Huxley, Anthony. Plant and Planet Plant and Planet (London: Penguin Books, 1987). (London: Penguin Books, 1987). Proctor, Michael, et al. Proctor, Michael, et al. The Natural History of Pollination The Natural History of Pollination (Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 1996). (Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 1996).

On the biology and philosophy of beauty: Etcoff, Nancy. Etcoff, Nancy. Survival of the Prettiest Survival of the Prettiest (New York: Doubleday, 1999). (New York: Doubleday, 1999). Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, The Birth of Tragedy, op. cit. op. cit. Paglia, Camille. Paglia, Camille. s.e.xual Personae, s.e.xual Personae, op. cit. op. cit. Pinker, Steven. Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Ridley, Matt. Ridley, Matt. The Red Queen, The Red Queen, op. cit. op. cit. Scarry, Elaine. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Turner, Frederick. Turner, Frederick. Beauty: The Value of Values Beauty: The Value of Values (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). ---. ---. Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion, and Education Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion, and Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

On tulips and the Dutch tulipomania, my princ.i.p.al source was Anna Pavord's definitive and beautiful book, The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Made Men Mad (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Also helpful were: (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). Also helpful were: Baker, Christopher, and Willem Lemmers, Emma Sweeney, and Michael Pollan. Baker, Christopher, and Willem Lemmers, Emma Sweeney, and Michael Pollan. Tulipa: A Photographer's Botanical Tulipa: A Photographer's Botanical (New York: Artisan, 1999). (New York: Artisan, 1999). Chancellor, Edward. Chancellor, Edward. Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). Chancellor is especially good tracing the parallels between market manias and carnivals. (New York: Farrar, Straus an