The New York Times Sunday Magazine
October 25, 1998
"Playing God in the Garden"
by Michael Pollan
Planting
Today I planted something new in my vegetable garden -- something very
new, as a matter of fact. It's a potato called the New Leaf Superior,
which has been genetically engineered -- by Monsanto, the chemical giant
recently turned "life sciences" giant -- to produce its own insecticide.
This it can do in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root and (here's
the creepy part) spud. The scourge of potatoes has always been the
Colorado potato beetle, a handsome and voracious insect that can pick a
plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight. Any Colorado potato beetle
that takes so much as a nibble of my New Leafs will supposedly keel over
and die, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin
manufactured in the leaves of these otherwise ordinary Superiors.
(Superiors are the thin-skinned white spuds sold fresh in the
supermarket.) You're probably wondering if I plan to eat these potatoes,
or serve them to my family. That's still up in the air; it's only the
first week of May, and harvest is a few months off.
Certainly my New Leafs are aptly named. They're part of a new class of
crop plants that is rapidly changing the American food chain. This year,
the fourth year that genetically altered seed has been on the market,
some 45 million acres of American farmland have been planted with biotech
crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton and potatoes that have been
engineered to either produce their own pesticides or withstand herbicides.
Though Americans have already begun to eat genetically engineered
potatoes, corn and soybeans, industry research confirms what my own
informal surveys suggest: hardly any of us knows it. The reason is not
hard to find. The biotech industry, with the concurrence of the Food and
Drug Administration, has decided we don't need to know it, so biotech
foods carry no identifying labels. In a dazzling feat of positioning, the
industry has succeeded in depicting these plants simultaneously as the
linchpins of a biological revolution -- part of a "new agricultural
paradigm" that will make farming more sustainable, feed the world and
improve health and nutrition -- and, oddly enough, as the same old stuff,
at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should
be concerned.
This convenient version of reality has been roundly rejected by both
consumers and farmers across the Atlantic. Last summer, biotech food
emerged as the most explosive environmental issue in Europe. Protesters
have destroyed dozens of field trials of the very same "frankenplants" (as
they are sometimes called) that we Americans are already serving for
dinner, and throughout Europe the public has demanded that biotech food be
labeled in the market.
By growing my own transgenic crop -- and talking with scientists and
farmers involved with biotech -- I hoped to discover which of us was
crazy. Are the Europeans overreacting, or is it possible that we've been
underreacting to genetically engineered food?
After digging two shallow trenches in my garden and lining them with
compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes that Monsanto had
sent and opened up the Grower Guide tied around its neck. (Potatoes, you
may recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from seed but from
the eyes of other potatoes.) The guide put me in mind not so much of
planting potatoes as booting up a new software release. By "opening and
using this product," the card stated, 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 will
harvest come August are mine to eat or sell, but their genes remain the
intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under numerous United States
patents, including Nos. 5,196,525, 5,164,316, 5,322,938 and 5,352,605.
Were I to save even one of them to plant next year --something I've
routinely done with potatoes in the past -- I would be breaking Federal
law. The small print in the Grower Guide also brought the news that my
potato plants were themselves a pesticide, registered with the
Environmental Protection Agency.
If proof were needed that the intricate industrial food chain that begins
with seeds and ends on our dinner plates is in the throes of profound
change, the small print that accompanied my New Leaf will do. That food
chain has been unrivaled for its productivity -- on average, a single
American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed 100 people. But
this accomplishment has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer
cannot achieve such yields without enormous amounts of chemical
fertilizer, pesticide, machinery and fuel, a set of capital-intensive
inputs, as they're called, that saddle the farmer with debt, threaten his
health, erode his soil and destroy its fertility, pollute the ground water
and compromise the safety of the food we eat.
We've heard all this before, of course, but usually from environmentalists
and organic farmers; what is new is to hear the same critique from
conventional farmers, government officials and even many agribusiness
corporations, all of whom now acknowledge that our food chain stands in
need of reform. Sounding more like Wendell Berry than the agribusiness
giant it is, Monsanto declared in its most recent annual report that
"current agricultural technology is not sustainable."
What is supposed to rescue the American food chain is biotechnology -- the
replacement of expensive and toxic chemical inputs with expensive but
apparently benign genetic information: crops that, like my New Leafs, can
protect themselves from insects and disease without being sprayed with
pesticides. With the advent of biotechnology, agriculture is entering the
information age, and more than any other company, Monsanto is positioning
itself to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary "operating
systems" -- the metaphor is theirs -- to run this new generation of plants.
There is, of course, a second food chain in America: organic agriculture.
And while it is still only a fraction of the size of the conventional food
chain, it has been growing in leaps and bounds -- in large part because of
concerns over the safety of conventional agriculture. Organic farmers have
been among biotechnology's fiercest critics, regarding crops like my New
Leafs as inimical to their principles and, potentially, a threat to their
survival. That's because Bt, the bacterial toxin produced in my New Leafs
(and in many other biotech plants) happens to be the same insecticide
organic growers have relied on for decades. Instead of being flattered by
the imitation, however, organic farmers are up in arms: the widespread use
of Bt in biotech crops is likely to lead to insect resistance, thus
robbing organic growers of one of their most critical tools; that is,
Monsanto's version of sustainable agriculture may threaten precisely those
farmers who pioneered sustainable farming.
Sprouting
After several days of drenching rain, the sun appeared on May 15, and so
did my New Leafs. A dozen deep-green shoots pushed up out of the soil and
commenced to grow -- faster and more robustly than any of the other
potatoes in my garden. Apart from their vigor, though, my New Leafs looked
perfectly normal. And yet as I watched them multiply their lustrous
dark-green leaves those first few days, eagerly awaiting the arrival of
the first doomed 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 we in some sense "design."
A given type of potato reflects the values we've bred into it -- one that
has been selected to yield long, handsome french fries or unblemished
round potato chips is the expression of a national food chain that likes
its potatoes highly processed. At the same time, some of the more
delicate European fingerlings I'm growing alongside my New Leafs imply an
economy of small market growers and a taste for eating potatoes fresh.
Yet all these qualities already existed in the potato, somewhere within
the range of genetic possibilities presented by Solanum tuberosum. Since
distant 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. Nature, in effect, has exercised a kind of veto on what culture can
do with a potato.
My New Leafs are different. Although Monsanto likes to depict
biotechnology as just another in an ancient line of human modifications of
nature going back to fermentation, in fact genetic engineering overthrows
the old rules governing the relationship of nature and culture in a plant.
For the first time, breeders can bring qualities from anywhere in nature
into the genome of a plant -- from flounders (frost tolerance), from
viruses (disease resistance) and, in the case of my potatoes, from
Bacillus thuringiensis, the soil bacterium that produces the organic
insecticide known as Bt. The introduction into a plant of genes
transported not only across species but whole phyla means that the wall of
that plant's essential identity -- its irreducible wildness, you might say
-- has been breached.
But what is perhaps most astonishing about the New Leafs coming up in my
garden is the human intelligence that the inclusion of the Bt gene
represents. In the past, that intelligence resided outside the plant, in
the mind of the organic farmers who deployed Bt (in the form of a spray)
to manipulate the ecological relationship of certain insects and a certain
bacterium as a way to foil those insects. The irony about the New Leafs is
that the cultural information they encode happens to be knowledge that
resides in the heads of the very sort of people -- that is, organic
growers -- who most distrust high technology.
One way to look at biotechnology is that it allows a larger portion of
human intelligence to be incorporated into the plant itself. In this
sense, my New Leafs 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 New Leafs, knowing what I know about bugs and
Bt, will take care of themselves. So while my biotech plants might seem
like alien beings, that's not quite right. They're more like us than like
other plants because there's more of us in them.
Growing
To find out how my potatoes got that way, I traveled to suburban St. Louis
in early June. My New Leafs are clones of clones of plants that were first
engineered seven years ago in Monsanto's $150 million research facility, a
long, low-slung brick building on the banks of the Missouri that would
look like any other corporate complex were it not for the 26 greenhouses
that crown its roof like shimmering crenellations of glass.
Dave Stark, a molecular biologist and co-director of Naturemark,
Monsanto's potato subsidiary, escorted me through the clean rooms where
potatoes are genetically engineered. Technicians sat at lab benches before
petri dishes in which fingernail-size sections of potato stem had been
placed in a nutrient mixture. To this the technicians added a solution of
agrobacterium, a disease bacterium whose modus operandi is to break into a
plant cell's nucleus and insert some of its own DNA. Essentially,
scientists smuggle the Bt gene into the agrobacterium's payload, and then
the bacterium splices it into the potato's DNA. The technicians also add a
"marker" gene, a kind of universal product code that allows Monsanto to
identify its plants after they leave the lab.
A few days later, once the slips of potato stem have put down roots,
they're moved to the potato greenhouse up on the roof. Here, Glenda
DeBrecht, a horticulturist, invited me to don latex gloves and help her
transplant pinky-size plantlets from their petri dish to small pots. The
whole operation is performed thousands of times, largely because there is
so much uncertainty about the outcome. There's no way of telling where in
the genome the new DNA will land, and if it winds up in the wrong place,
the new gene won't be expressed (or it will be poorly expressed) or the
plant may be a freak. I was struck by how the technology could at once be
astoundingly sophisticated and yet also a shot in the genetic dark.
"There's still a lot we don't understand about gene expression," Stark
acknowledged. A great many factors influence whether, or to what extent, a
new gene will do what it's supposed to, including the environment. In one
early German experiment, scientists succeeded in splicing the gene for
redness into petunias. All went as planned until the weather turned hot
and an entire field of red petunias suddenly and inexplicably lost their
pigment. The process didn't seem nearly as simple as Monsanto's cherished
software metaphor would suggest.
When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard
geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. "From an
intellectual-property standpoint, it's exactly right," he said. "But it's
a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a
machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my
computer made as many mistakes as an organism does" -- in interpreting its
DNA, he meant -- "I'd throw it out."
I asked him for a better metaphor. "An ecosystem," he offered. "You can
always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing
what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the
environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the
organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get
one rude shock after another."
Flowering
My own crop was thriving when I got home from St. Louis; the New Leafs
were as big as bushes, crowned with slender flower stalks. Potato flowers
are actually quite pretty, at least by vegetable standards -- five-petaled
pink stars with yellow centers that give off a faint rose perfume. One
sultry afternoon I watched the bumblebees making their lazy rounds of my
potato blossoms, thoughtlessly powdering their thighs with yellow pollen
grains before lumbering off to appointments with other blossoms, others
species.
Uncertainty is the theme that unifies much of the criticism leveled
against biotech agriculture by scientists and environmentalists. By
planting millions of acres of genetically altered plants, we have
introduced something novel into the environment and the food chain, the
consequences of which are not -- and at this point, cannot be --
completely understood. One of the uncertainties has to do with those
grains of pollen bumblebees are carting off from my potatoes. That pollen
contains Bt genes that may wind up in some other, related plant, possibly
conferring a new evolutionary advantage on that species. "Gene flow," the
scientific term for this phenomenon, occurs only between closely related
species, and since the potato evolved in South America, the chances are
slim that my Bt potato genes will escape into the wilds of Connecticut.
(It's interesting to note that while biotechnology depends for its power
on the ability to move genes freely among species and even phyla, its
environmental safety depends on the very opposite phenomenon: on the
integrity of species in nature and their rejection of foreign genetic
material.)
Yet what happens if and when Peruvian farmers plant Bt potatoes? Or when I
plant a biotech crop that does have local relatives? A study reported in
Nature last month found that plant traits introduced by genetic
engineering were more likely to escape into the wild than the same traits
introduced conventionally.
Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Technology Assessment in
Washington, told me he believes such escapes are inevitable. "Biological
pollution will be the environmental nightmare of the 21st century," he
said when I reached him by phone. "This is not like chemical pollution --
an oil spill -- that eventually disperses. Biological pollution is an
entirely different model, more like a disease. Is Monsanto going to be
held legally responsible when one of its transgenes creates a superweed or
resistant insect?"
Kimbrell maintains that because our pollution laws were written before the
advent of biotechnology, the new industry is being regulated under an
ill-fitting regime designed for the chemical age. Congress has so far
passed no environmental law dealing specifically with biotech. Monsanto,
for its part, claims that it has thoroughly examined all the potential
environmental and health risks of its biotech plants, and points out that
