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Barbara Kingsolver (1955– ) is an American novelist, essayist, poet, and writer of nonfiction who has published over a dozen books. The best-known of these is The Poisonwood Bible (1998), the story of a family of American missionaries living in the Congo. Kingsolver started college as a piano major but changed to biology and later received her master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology. She often writes about issues relating to biodiversity and the environment. Steven L. Hopp, her husband and an ornithologist, is an adjunct faculty member at Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia. These selections come from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), which Kingsolver wrote with the assistance of Hopp and her daughter, Camille Kingsolver. It details the family’s efforts during 2005–2006 to eat locally by growing all their own food or obtaining it from nearby farms. (They did permit themselves to buy items they could not grow such as olive oil and coffee.) Barbara Kingsolver wrote nearly the entire book, but short pieces by Hopp and Camille Kingsolver appear throughout and complement the book’s main argument. This selection includes an excerpt from the chapter entitled “Springing Forward,” which includes Hopp’s “The Strange Case of Percy Schmeiser.” As you read these selections, think about how each text provides a context for the other. Also consider how Kingsolver and Hopp’s perspective on genetically modified foods differs from the perspectives of Robert Paarlberg (“Attention Whole Foods Shoppers”) and David H. Freedman (“Are Engineered Foods Evil?”) and why that might be the case.

“Springing Forward” and “The Strange Case of Percy Schmeiser,” from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

BARBARA KINGSOLVER AND STEVEN L. HOPP

SPRINGING FORWARD (BARBARA KINGSOLVER)

Bronze Arrowhead lettuces, Speckled Trout romaine, red kale — this is the rainbow of my April garden, and you’ll find similar offerings then at a farmers’ market or greengrocer. It’s the reason I start our vegetables from seed, rather than planting out whatever the local nursery has to offer: variety, the splendor of vegetables. I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January. In my mind the garden grows and grows, as I affix a sticky note to every page where there’s something I need. I swoon over names like Moon and Stars watermelon, Cajun Jewel okra, Gold of Bacau pole bean, Sweet Chocolate pepper, Collective Farm Woman melon, Georgian Crystal garlic, mother-of-thyme. Steven walks by, eyes the toupee of yellow sticky notes bristling from the top of the catalog, and helpfully asks, “Why don’t you just mark the one you don’t want to order?”

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Heirloom vegetables are irresistible, not just for the poetry in their names but because these titles stand for real stories. Vegetables acquire histories when they are saved as seeds for many generations, carefully maintained and passed by hand from one gardener to another. Heirlooms are open-pollinated — as opposed to hybrids, which are the onetime product of a forced cross between dissimilar varieties of a plant. These crosses do rely on the sex organs of the plant to get pollen into ovaries, so they’re still limited to members of the same species: tall corn with early corn, for example, or prolific cucumbers with nonprickly ones, in blends that combine the ideal traits of both parents for one-time-only offspring. These whiz-kid hybrid seeds have slowly colonized and then dominated our catalogs and our croplands. Because of their unnatural parentage they offer special vigor, but the next generation from these crosses will be of an unpredictable and mostly undesirable character. Thus, hybrid seeds have to be purchased again each year from the companies that create them.

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Genetic modification (GM) takes the control even one step further from the farmer. Seed companies have made and sold hybrids since the 1920s (starting with the Hybrid Corn Company, now a subsidiary of DuPont), but GM is a newer process involving direct manipulation of genes in the laboratory. Freed from the limits of natural sex, the gene engineer may combine traits of creatures that aren’t on speaking terms in the natural world: animal or bacterial genes spliced into the chromosomes of plants, for example, and vice versa. The ultimate unnatural product of genetic engineering is a “terminator gene” that causes a crop to commit genetic suicide after one generation, just in case some maverick farmer might want to save seed from his expensive, patented crop, instead of purchasing it again from the company that makes it.

By contrast to both GM and hybridization, open-pollinated heirlooms are created the same way natural selection does it: by saving and reproducing specimens that show the best characteristics of their generation, thus gradually increasing those traits in the population. Once bred to a given quality, these varieties yield the same characteristics again when their seeds are saved and grown, year after year. Like sunshine, heirloom seeds are of little interest to capitalism if they can’t be patented or owned. They have, however, earned a cult following among people who grow or buy and eat them. Gardeners collect them like family jewels, and Whole Foods Market can’t refrain from poetry in its advertisement of heirlooms, claiming that the tomatoes in particular make a theatrical entrance in the summertime, “stealing the summer produce scene. Their charm is truly irresistible. Just the sound of the word ‘heirloom’ brings on a warm, snuggly, bespectacled grandmother knitting socks and baking pies kind of feeling.”

5 They’ve hired some whiz-bang writers down at Whole Foods, for sure, but the hyperbolic claims are based on a genuine difference. Even a child who dislikes tomatoes could likely tell the difference between a watery mass-market tomato and a grandmotherly (if not pie-baking) heirloom. Vegetables achieve historical status only if they deserve it. Farmers are a class of people not noted for sentimentality or piddling around. Seeds get saved down the generations for a reason, or for many, and in the case of vegetables one reason is always flavor. Heirlooms are the tangiest or sweetest tomatoes, the most fragrant melons, the eggplants without a trace of bitterness.

Most standard vegetable varieties sold in stores have been bred for uniform appearance, mechanized harvest, convenience of packing (e.g. square tomatoes), and a tolerance for hard travel. None of these can be mistaken, in practice, for actual flavor. Homegrown tomatoes are famously superior to their supermarket counterparts, but the disparity is just as great (in my experience) for melons, potatoes, asparagus, sweet corn, broccoli, carrots, certain onions, and the Japanese edible soybeans called edamame. I have looked for something to cull from my must-grow list on the basis of its being reasonably similar to the supermarket version. I have yet to find that vegetable.

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How did supermarket vegetables lose their palatability, with so many people right there watching? The Case of the Murdered Flavor was a contract killing, as it turns out, and long-distance travel lies at the heart of the plot. The odd notion of transporting fragile produce dates back to the early twentieth century when a few entrepreneurs tried shipping lettuce and artichokes, iced down in boxcars, from California eastward over the mountains as a midwinter novelty. Some wealthy folks were charmed by the idea of serving out-of-season (and absurdly expensive) produce items to their dinner guests. It remained little more than an expensive party trick until mid-century, when most fruits and vegetables consumed in North America were still being produced on nearby farms.

Then fashion and marketing got involved. The interstate highway system became a heavily subsidized national priority, long-haul trucks were equipped with refrigeration, and the cost of gasoline was nominal. The state of California aggressively marketed itself as an off-season food producer, and the American middle class opened its maw. In just a few decades the out-of-season vegetable moved from novelty status to such an ordinary item, most North Americans now don’t know what out-of season means.

While marketers worked out the logistics of moving every known vegetable from every corner of the planet to somewhere else, agribusiness learned to breed varieties that held up in a boxcar, truck, or ship’s cargo hold. Indestructible vegetables, that is to say: creations that still looked decent after a road trip. Vegetable farmers had little choice but to grow what the market demanded. In the latter half of the twentieth century they gradually dropped from their repertoire thousands of flavorful varieties traditionally grown for the table, concentrating instead on the handful of new varieties purchased by transporters, restaurant chains, and processed-food manufacturers. Modern U.S. consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales — if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.

10 The same trend holds in other countries, wherever the influence of industrial-scale agriculture holds sway. In Peru, the original home of potatoes, Andean farmers once grew some four thousand potato varieties, each with its own name, flavor, and use, ranging in size from tiny to gigantic and covering the color spectrum from indigo-purple to red, orange, yellow, and white. Now, even in the regions of Peru least affected by the modern market, only a few dozen potato varieties are widely grown. Other indigenous crops elsewhere in the world have followed the same path, with the narrowing down of corn and amaranth varieties in Central America, squashes in North America, apples in Europe, and grains in the Middle East. And it’s not just plant varieties but whole species that are being lost. As recently as ten years ago farmers in India still grew countless indigenous oil crops, including sesame, linseed, and mustards; in 1998 all the small mills that processed these oils were ordered closed, the same year a ban on imported soy oil was lifted. A million villages lost their mills, ten million farmers lost their living, and GM soy found a vast new market.

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According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten commoners. We’re losing them as fast as we’re losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God’s gifts to humanity or whatever the arrangement was previously felt to be, for all of prior history. God lost that one in 1970, with the Plant Variety Protection Act. Anything owned by humans, of course, can be taken away from others; the removal of crop control from farmers to agribusiness has been powerful and swift. Six companies — Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow — now control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales. These companies invest heavily in research whose purpose is to increase food production capacity only in ways that can be controlled strictly. Terminator technology is only one (extreme) example. The most common genetic modifications now contained in most U.S. corn, soy, cotton, and canola do one of two things: (1) put a bacterial gene into the plant that kills caterpillars, or (2) alter the crop’s physiology so it withstands the herbicide Roundup, so that chemicals can be sprayed over the crop. (The crop stays alive, the weeds die.) If you guessed Monsanto controls sales of both the resistant seed and the Roundup, give yourself a star. If you think you’d never eat such stuff, you’re probably wrong. GM plants are virtually everywhere in the U.S. food chain, but don’t have to be labeled, and aren’t. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way.

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Monsanto sells many package deals of codependent seeds and chemicals, including so-called traitor technologies in which a crop’s disease resistance relies on many engineered genes resting in its tissues — genes that can only be turned on, as each disease arises, by the right chemical purchased from Monsanto.

It’s hardly possible to exaggerate the cynicism of this industry. In internal reports, Monsanto notes “growers who save seed from one year to the next” as significant competitors, and allocates a $10 million budget for investigating and prosecuting seed savers. Agribusinesses can patent plant varieties for the purpose of removing them from production (Seminis dropped 25 percent of its total product line in one recent year, as a “cost-cutting measure”), leaving farmers with fewer options each year. The same is true for home gardeners, who rarely suspect when placing seed orders from Johnny’s, Territorial, Nichols, Stokes, and dozens of other catalogs that they’re likely buying from Monsanto. In its 2005 annual report, Monsanto describes its creation of American Seeds Inc. as a licensing channel that “allows us to marry our technology with the high-touch, local face of regional seed companies.” The marriage got a whopping dowry that year when Monsanto acquired Seminis, a company that already controlled about 40 percent of the U.S. vegetable seed market. Garden seed inventories show that while about 5,000 nonhybrid vegetable varieties were available from catalogs in 1981, the number in 1998 was down to 600.

Jack Harlan, a twentieth-century plant geneticist and author of the classic Crops and Man, wrote about the loss of genetic diversity in no uncertain terms: “These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine. . . . The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner.”

15 The “resources” Harlan refers to are old varieties, heirlooms and land races — the thousands of locally adapted varieties of every crop plant important to humans (mainly but not limited to wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes), which historically have been cultivated in the region where each crop was domesticated from its wild progenitor. Peru had its multitude of potatoes, Mexico its countless kinds of corn, in the Middle East an infinity of wheats, each subtly different from the others, finely adapted to its region’s various microclimates, pests and diseases, and the needs of the humans who grew it. These land races contain a broad genetic heritage that prepares them to coevolve with the challenges of their environments.

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Disease pathogens and their crop hosts, like all other predators and prey, are in a constant evolutionary dance with each other, changing and improving without cease as one evolves a slight edge over its opponent, only to have the opponent respond to this challenge by developing its own edge. Evolutionary ecologists call this the Red Queen principle (named in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen), after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who observed to Alice: “In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” Both predator and prey must continually change or go extinct. Thus the rabbit and fox both get faster over the generations, as their most successful offspring pass on more genes for speediness. Humans develop new and stronger medicines against our bacterial predators, while the bacteria continue to evolve antibiotic-resistant strains of themselves. (The people who don’t believe in evolution, incidentally, are just as susceptible as the rest of us to this observable occurrence of evolution. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.)

Plant diseases can attack their host plants in slightly new ways each season, encouraged by changes in prevailing conditions of climate. This is where genetic variability becomes important. Genetic engineering cannot predict or address such broad-spectrum challenges. Under highly varied environmental conditions, the resilience of open-pollinated land races can be compared approximately with the robust health of a mixed-breed dog versus the finicky condition of a pooch with a highly inbred pedigree. The mongrel may not perform as predictably under perfectly controlled conditions, but it has the combined smarts and longevity of all the sires that ever jumped over the fence. Some of its many different genes are likely to come in handy, in a pinch.

The loss of that mongrel vigor puts food systems at risk. Crop failure is a possibility all farmers understand, and one reason why the traditional farmstead raised many products, both animal and vegetable, unlike the monocultures now blanketing our continent’s midsection. History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.

THE STRANGE CASE OF PERCY SCHMEISER (STEVEN L. HOPP)

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In 1999, a quiet middle-aged farmer from Bruno, Saskatchewan, was sued by the largest biotech seed producer in the world. Monsanto Inc. claimed that Percy Schmeiser had damaged them, to the tune of $145,000, by having their patented gene in some of the canola plants on his 1,030 acres. The assertion was not that Percy had actually planted the seed, or even that he obtained the seed illegally. Rather, the argument was that the plants on Percy’s land contained genes that belonged to Monsanto. The gene, patented in Canada in the early 1990s, gives genetically modified (GM) canola plants the fortitude to withstand spraying by glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup, sold by Monsanto.

20 Canola, a cultivated variety of rapeseed, is one of over three thousand species in the mustard family. Pollen from mustards is transferred either by insects, or by wind, up to one-third of a mile. Does the patented gene travel in the pollen? Yes. Are the seeds viable? Yes, and can remain dormant up to ten years. If seeds remain in the soil from previous years, it’s illegal to harvest them. Further, if any of the seeds from a field contain the patented genes, it is illegal to save them for use. Percy had been saving his canola seeds for fifty years. Monsanto was suing for possession of intellectual property that had drifted onto his plants. The laws protect possession of the gene itself, irrespective of its conveyance. Because of pollen drift and seed contamination, the Monsanto genes are ubiquitous in Canadian canola.

Percy lost his court battles: he was found guilty in the Federal Court of Canada, the conviction upheld in the court of appeals. The Canadian Supreme Court narrowly upheld the decision (5-4), but with no compensation to Monsanto. This stunning case has drawn substantial attention to the problems associated with letting GM genies out of their bottle. Organic canola farmers in Saskatchewan have now sued Monsanto and another company, Aventis, for making it impossible for Canadian farmers to grow organic canola. The National Farmers Union of Canada has called for a moratorium on all GM foods. The issue has spilled over the borders as well. Fifteen countries have banned import of GM canola, and Australia has banned all Canadian canola due to the unavoidable contamination made obvious by Monsanto’s lawsuit. Farmers are concerned about liability, and consumers are concerned about choice. Twenty-four U.S. states have proposed or passed various legislation to block or limit particular GM products, attach responsibility for GM drift to seed producers, defend a farmer’s right to save seeds, and require seed and food product labels to indicate GM ingredients (or allow “GM-free” labeling).

The U.S. federal government (corporate-friendly as ever) has stepped in to circumvent these proconsumer measures. In 2006 the House of Representatives passed the National Uniformity for Food Act, which would eliminate more than two hundred state-initiated food safety and labeling laws that differ from federal ones. Thus, the weakest consumer protections would prevail (but they’re uniformly weak!). Here’s a clue about who really benefits from this bill: it’s endorsed by the American Frozen Food Institute, ConAgra, Cargill, Dean Foods, Hormel, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. It’s opposed by the Consumers Union, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Center for Food Safety, and thirty-nine state attorneys general. Keeping GM’s “intellectual” paws out of our bodies, and our fields, is up to consumers who demand full disclosure on what’s in our food.

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For more information, visit http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or www.organicconsumers.org.

RESPOND •

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