Chapter 65
“I am puzzled to understand the final impression left on the average mind . . . to the inward meaning of this dream of beauty,” historian Henry Adams wrote in a private letter about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. “Of course, I don’t understand it,” he humble-bragged, “but then I don’t understand anything . . .”
To the average mind among the twenty-seven million fairgoers, the fair meant manna, and gobs of it, without the wait for it from heaven.
When Adams also defined the exposition as “the first expression of American thought as a unity,” he might have meant the convergence of industry and technology, beginning in the late nineteenth century, that mass-produced and mass-marketed food through transporting, packaging (e.g., cans, glass bottles, jars, and machine-made foldable cardboard boxes), refrigerating, and freezing. It was a system that pieced together a horn of plenty of such magnitude that by the 1920s, Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters could publish the first diet best seller, “Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories,” prescribing a lean regimen of 1,200 calories a day. For Americans, the memories of starvation were becoming as ancient as Babylon, as mythical as Paul Bunyan.
A little more than 120 years after the 1893 fair, Expo Milano 2015’s theme of “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” underscored Pope Francis’s warning. Speaking at the fair’s opening ceremony, the pontiff cautioned about the “paradox of abundance” where “the Expo itself . . . obeys the culture of waste and does not contribute to a model of equitable and sustainable development.” It was a salient point, especially if one considers at Expo 2010, five years before in Shanghai, visitors consumed an estimated 547 tons of food a day.
One of the solutions touted at Expo Milano 2015 was vertical farms, where crops, stacked in rows often several stories high, are grown hydroponically, fed by a recycled water solution. (In one variant, the water solution is misted onto the plants’ roots.) The farms slurp down 70 to 95 percent less water than traditional areas of the same size, and, if placed in cities, can reduce food’s average journey from farm to plate from 1,500 miles or more to a few feet. Even better, most vertical farms rely on no pesticides whatsoever, contrasting sharply with the 5.2 billion pounds of insect repellents used worldwide.
Their emergence was highlighted through the Israel and United States pavilions. Israel’s history of invention in agriculture includes the cherry tomato, a breed of super-wheat, and a variety of strawberry that can grow year-round, making it a perfect fit for land where the bar for miracles is high. The Middle Eastern country’s resourcefulness continued at Expo 2015 with a vertical garden that promised to turn farming not so much on its ear, but on its side. Built of 100 percent recycled materials, the gigantic green wall, measured roughly 230 by 40 feet, was alive with neatly cropped rectangles of thriving wheat, rice, and corn. Besides offering an abundance of nourishment, the green wall buffered the building from the ambient noise of thousands of attendees and scrubbed the air of pollutants and greenhouse gases. Fed by a drip-irrigation technology that consumes 98 percent less water than traditional farming, the wall suggested a way to stave off the drought and desertification that’s withering nearly 30 million acres of land every year.
Outside the U.S. pavilion, a giant stylized American flag promised “American Food 2.0” and instantly delivered on that nourishing pledge with the 7,200-square-foot Vertical Farm. Figuratively inspired by the “amber waves of grain” exalted in “America the Beautiful,” the world’s then-largest vertical farm lined the pavilion’s east facade, running nearly the length of a football field. Planted in the partition, which resembled a farmer’s field tilted 90 degrees, were forty-two types of vegetables, grains, herbs, and fruits, ranging from familiar staples such as wheat, mint, and strawberries to more exotic produce, including Vulcan chard, Merlot lettuce, and Genovese Red Freddy basil.
The harvestable plants were rooted in 1,494 automated ZipGrow hydroponic modules made of recycled plastic, which moved outward during the day to supply the plants with the maximum amount of sunshine, while simultaneously tempering the amount of light that passed into the building behind them. Running 4.3 feet high, the ZipGrow modules were hung on a series of movable frames and watered via a drip-irrigation system.
These skyscraper farms have now been built across the globe, in Canada, China, Japan, and the Netherlands. In the United States, these towers of plenty have ascended in Chicago, and Jackson, Wyoming, with Newark, New Jersey’s AeroFarms LLC’s headquarters now one of the world’s largest. Set in a defunct steel mill, its 70,000-square-foot farm is producing up to 2 million pounds of lettuce and other greens annually—a yield up to 70 times as great as traditional farms of similar size, and all without fertilizers or pesticides.
Even with other compelling U.S. pavilion attractions, such as a 300-foot-long deck promenade made of wood salvaged from Coney Island’s iconic boardwalk in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the agrarian structure served as the pavilion’s centerpiece. With its mobile modules chasing solar nourishment holding the crowds rapt, the Vertical Farm demonstrated to Expo 2015’s 20 million attendees that the country that invented the cotton gin, the McCormick reaper, and the first weed- and insect-resistant biotech crops was revolutionizing agriculture again.