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

by Michael Pollan

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.

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.

I realized that, whatever else it is, genetic engineering is also a powerful technique for transforming plants into private property, by giving every one of them what amounts to its own Universal Product Code.

I asked Forsyth to walk me through a season’s regimen, the state of the art in the control of a potato field. Typically it begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes and certain diseases in the soil, potato farmers douse their fields before planting with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Next Forsyth puts down an herbicide—Lexan, Sencor, or Eptam—to “clean” his field of all weeds. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide—such as Thimet—is applied to the soil. This will be absorbed by the young seedlings and kill any insect that eats their leaves for several weeks. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, a second herbicide is sprayed on the field to control weeds. Dryland farmers like Forsyth farm in the vast circles I’d seen from the sky; each circle, defined by the radius of the irrigation pivot, typically covers an area of 135 acres. Pesticides and fertilizer are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth’s farm draws water from (and returns it to) the nearby Snake River. Along with their ration of water, Forsyth’s potatoes receive ten weekly sprayings of chemical fertilizer. Just before the rows close—when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next—he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famine and is once again today the potato grower’s most worrisome threat. A single spore can infect a field overnight,...

Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect, yet because McDonald’s believes—with good reason—that we don’t like to see brown spots in our french fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals now in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

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.

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.