EPILOGUE

Getting Our Hands Dirty

So here we are, casting our eyes across the American food landscape, and everywhere we look, we see paradoxes. There is a surging interest in small-scale, local food production, and there is a furious consolidation of the biggest food industries in the world. There are powerful popular movements trying to force companies to reveal how they make their food, and highly financed corporate efforts to resist this disclosure. There are gathering efforts to toughen federal safety laws on GMOs and pesticides, and there are outspoken calls—especially during presidential election seasons—to dismantle the EPA altogether.

There are billions of dollars at stake in the United States, and potentially billions of lives at stake in the developing world. And underneath all of these trends is the constant forward march of food technology.

Using a gene-silencing technique called RNA interference, or RNAi, researchers have recently learned to keep apples or potatoes from browning after being harvested—an exciting idea if you are a fast-food company hoping to keep billions of pounds of produce from spoiling on the way to the fryer. Even more dramatic, scientists have invented a new gene-editing technique called CRISPR to edit an organism’s genome with ever more impressive precision. DuPont says it will use CRISPR to get drought-tolerant corn and soybeans in fields within five years.

And then there are GM animals. Using cutting-edge gene-editing tools, scientists are learning to create cows without horns, pigs without testicles, and chickens that will produce only female egg-layers. In the Netherlands, researchers have discovered how to turn stem cells from cattle into lab-grown “hamburger.”

A company called Aqua Bounty just received approval from the USDA to market a GM salmon, which will grow to marketable size in eighteen months—half the time it would take in nature. Since most farm-raised salmon are fed GM corn and soybeans, we may now, for the first time, have GMOs eating GMOs.

“We’re going to see a stream of edited animals coming through because it’s so easy,” says Bruce Whitelaw, a professor of animal biotechnology at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. “It’s going to change the societal question from ‘If we could do it, would we want it?’ to ‘Next year we will have it, will we allow it?’”

These advances have excited scientists, industry, and even some animal rights activists. They argue, for example, that creating cows without horns means the animals won’t injure each other during confinement and calves won’t have to have their horns burned off with a hot iron. Pigs without testicles will produce tastier meat and will mean pigs won’t need to be castrated. The grand prize—growing meat from cell cultures rather than from actual living livestock—could mean all kinds of potentially powerful changes to industrial agriculture. We wouldn’t need pesticide-laden GM corn, industrial slaughterhouses, or gasoline, because we wouldn’t be feeding, slaughtering, or shipping animals around the country. We also wouldn’t need to deal with the mountains (or lakes) of animal waste that contaminate our water, or the clouds of methane that contribute to climate change. And we wouldn’t need to kill billions of animals to satisfy our bottomless desire for protein.

In 2008, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could make a chicken in a test tube. “If you can grow the chicken flesh from a few cells, that’s a lot of birds that won’t be suffering,” said Ingrid Newkirk, the group’s leader, noting that Americans currently eat one million chickens an hour. Ditto for the lab-grown hamburgers. “It is a real burger made of real meat,” she said. “It’s as real as real can be. The thing that is different about it is that it is not from a filthy slaughterhouse, but from a sterile laboratory.”

Outside the kitchen, genetic engineers have been making global headlines breeding everything from mosquitoes to trees. By altering the genes of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, a vector for a variety of dangerous diseases, scientists hope to stop the march of the Zika virus, which causes serious neurological damage and birth defects in babies. While the potential impact of GMO mosquitoes on broader ecological systems is still being explored, insects engineered to be sterile, for example, could eliminate the need to return to well-known dangers like aerial spraying South American swamps and jungles with DDT.

Further north, genetic engineers are hoping to restore the American chestnut, once a royal member of the Eastern forest, whose mid-century population—thanks to a fungus from Asia—was reduced by fully 4 billion trees. After nearly twenty-five years of experimenting, biologists may have finally achieved blight resistance by introducing a gene from a wheat plant. What impact GM trees will have on the American landscape remains unknown, but restoring chestnuts to their former range has long been seen as a kind of reforesting gold ring.

As with so many of the promises of genetic engineering, it’s hard to argue with some of these possibilities. Changes that could make even incremental dents in our industrial food system—or restore deep and broad damage to our ecosystem—are certainly worth exploring. On the other hand, as Wes Jackson and many others have pointed out, it’s worth remembering that most technology is designed to fix problems caused by previous technologies. We have had decades of very exciting agricultural innovation, and we have had decades of dramatically compromised environmental and human health. As inspiring as technological advances may sound, there is always the danger of developing a collective belief that—no matter how badly we screw things up—science will somehow manage to provide a safety net. Such thinking, whether it is conscious or unconscious, can serve to absolve us of taking responsibility for our own ignorance and our own behavior.

To my mind, our learned dependence on (not to say addiction to) industrial food technology has had consequences that are both ecological and philosophical, and include a growing detachment from some of the most fundamental components of life.

Like where a potato comes from.

Nancy Bentley, a friend of mine who owns an organic farm near the Delaware–Maryland line, brings potatoes to public schools to show kids something about what they eat. Very few of the kids have ever actually seen a potato before; to them, a potato is a “chip” that comes in a bag. Needless to say, when they see flecks of dirt on the potato, they recoil in disgust.

If a child thinks a potato is a fried, golden, symmetrical chip in a vacuum-sealed bag, then learns that a potato is actually a dirty brown malignancy that comes from underground, naturally they would prefer the former and reject the latter. And if they can eat the chip without ever having to confront the dirty malignancy, so much the better.

And so it has become for most of us. Our food is now so uniform, so packaged, that if a potato—or a carrot, or a hamburger—looks even slightly different from the last one we tried, we either won’t buy it or we will throw it away. In the United States, misshapen vegetables are thrown out in unimaginable numbers by consumers, line cooks, and supermarkets alike. Farmers discard potatoes too small to harvest mechanically. Supermarkets toss cases of hummus or chocolate one day past their expiration date. Kids throw away 40 percent of their school lunches. A recent story in National Geographic reported in the United States alone, retailers and consumers throw away 133 billion pounds of food every year. That’s “billion” with a b.

Such waste may not, in itself, be a “GMO problem,” but it is symptomatic of a food system that GMOs have dramatically amplified. In just a few short decades, as we have turned over the growing of our food to a handful of companies, and a handful of crops, we have chosen to be fed according to strictures of efficiency and marketing, not of taste, nutrition, or personal (or environmental) health.

Pesticides and herbicides are not (technically) “GMO problems” either, any more than food waste is, but these compounds are similarly symptomatic of industrial food and scaled up by GMOs. A new study reports that in the United States, the use of glyphosate—sprayed on millions upon millions of agricultural crops—has risen 300-fold since the advent of GMOs; Americans sprayed more than 2.4 billion pounds of the herbicide in the last decade alone. Glyphosate is now sprayed on crops closer and closer to the time of harvest, which means it is showing up in more food and in greater quantities. Rather than crack down on glyphosate, the EPA has approved a doubling of “tolerable” herbicide residues on soybeans, a 49-fold increase on tolerable residues on corn grain, and a 2,000-fold increase in residues on alfalfa grown for animal feed. Glyphosate routinely shows up in everything from soy sauce to breast milk, and new studies are finding links between the compound and cancer, as well as problems with liver, kidney, and metabolic function. Glyphosate has also, it’s worth repeating, recently been declared a “probable human carcinogen” by the World Health Organization.

It seems plain that food technology like genetic engineering holds both great promise and great peril. But especially for a culture that has so completely taken its eyes off of farming and food production generally, there is another side to this equation, a side that more directly involves shifting our own role as food consumers.

Perhaps, beyond advances in science and engineering, we need to remember our own traditions of growing and eating food. There was a time—from 10,000 years ago until just a couple of generations ago—when we managed to feed ourselves from a wide variety of plants and animals without the aid of huge companies, and without laying waste to our land or our communities. No matter what else you say about the way we eat today, one thing is clear: we eat differently from how any other people in the history of the world have eaten. Even if we accept the potential benefits of advanced technology—and there are many—we ought also to reintroduce ourselves to the simple act of making a meal.

In my own small way, I’ve been trying. For the last couple of years, I have required my students to spend time every week working on Fairweather Farm, an organic operation run by my friend Nancy Bentley. My students are mostly humanities majors, not food science majors; mostly future teachers, not future farmers. Admittedly, for my university, the project has been a bit eccentric. I’m not sure I can remember the last time an English professor asked for and received grant money to buy shovels, hoes, and rakes.

My students and I first showed up in Nancy’s greenhouses in February 2015. We started by sifting soil and planting broccoli and cabbage and Swiss chard in dozens of plastic trays. March had us preparing beds outside and planting beets and carrots and peas. In April, we harvested asparagus and planted potatoes, and started moving seedlings from the greenhouse to the outside beds. By May, we were transplanting tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and tomatillos and summer squash.

By August and September, when a new crop of students returned to school, we were harvesting crates of vegetables, but we were also pulling up wagonloads of thistle, feeding the sheep, and tending the chickens. In October, we were baling hay, and in November, we were preparing beds for winter.

Week after week, my students wrote journals about their experiences. They talked about what it felt like to do manual labor, some of them for the first time in their lives. They talked about what it felt like to get thistle thorns in their hands, or hay in their eyes, or manure on their shoes. But mostly they wrote about the joy they experienced working outside, in the sun or the rain, talking to their friends and their farmer, and getting to know the sheep, and the chickens, and Waldo the goat. They learned about compost, and mushroom soil, and cover crops. They got to see what potatoes look like when they come out of the ground—dirty!—and how good green salsa tastes if you make it from tomatillos you grew yourself.

“The feeling that I got every time I went to the farm is unexplainable,” a student named Danielle wrote. “The satisfaction that I now have when I take a bite out of an organic tomato is something that I would have never experienced if I didn’t take this class. This semester changed me as a person. I now think about everything I do, everything I see, and everything I eat in a completely new perspective.”

A student named Hannah wrote that before taking the class she was “a huge foodie. I loved cooking, finding recipes, and even had a job at home where I got to do both of these things with relative freedom. I never once gave thought to where my food came from, and frankly I never even thought to care about it.”

Hannah’s sense, vividly confirmed by virtually all of her classmates, is that the gap that exists between people and their food is not just nutritional. It is existential. College students, like the rest of us, feel profoundly disconnected from some of the most fundamental components of their lives. Ask a roomful of twenty-year-olds how many of them can tell you precisely how or where their last meal was grown, and you will get a roomful of blank stares. Ditto if you ask them where the heat—or the light—in their classroom came from, or the water in their shower, or the wood in their homes.

Ask them how many generations of human beings have been so ignorant about these things—food, light, heat, water, and shelter—and you will begin to have a real conversation. Nancy’s farm, for these students, offers a chance to unplug from their electronic lives, to feel the warmth of the soil, to go home deeply tired and deeply renewed.

Wes Jackson calls this work—physical, communitarian, and ancient—“walking the beans.” Tally up all the labor that human beings have done in all our history—building roads, constructing cities, fighting wars—and you’ll find that we have spent more time doing one thing than anything else:

Pulling weeds.

Strange, given that most of us never do it anymore. We have no need, since we don’t grow our own food. We live in an era when physical labor is broadly devalued: we hire other people to do our work for us. Indeed, it may seem counterintuitive for Wes Jackson to recommend that we spend more time doing something as (literally) mundane as pulling weeds from vegetable beds. Isn’t manual work what technology was invented to replace?

But for Jackson, persuading people to relearn the value of manual work is on a par with replacing 50 million acres of annual wheat with 50 million acres of perennial Kernza: it would be a paradigm shift, a game changer. Growing more of our own food would stitch us back to our land, reintroduce us to our physical bodies—maybe even help repair decades of alienation from the most fundamental things in our lives.

“Nobody likes to walk the beans anymore,” Jackson told me. “Instead they use Roundup so—what?—they can go to the gym and jog on a treadmill? Walking the treadmill is okay, hoeing the beans is not? What we need is more eyes per acre.”

Getting “more eyes per acre” is precisely the goal of my Literature of the Land class. There is a whole lot more to learning than you can find in a book or in a classroom. Indeed, every small farmer I spoke to during the course of my research—whether they supported GMOs or rejected them—agreed that closing the gap between people and their food is very long overdue, both for our land and for ourselves.

“In our time, our consciousness has to keep evolving,” Steffen Schneider, the farmer at Hawthorne Valley, told me. “Unless we learn to work with this inner landscape, I think we will continue to have this huge gap. It’s something that’s bubbling up everywhere. People working on the land—on the one hand, I know how difficult it is to do every single day, but I think if you work with living nature, there is tremendous inspiration to be gotten from reading and discovering natural phenomena. Once one starts looking at things that way, your work becomes very fruitful. It gives your work a whole different context and purpose.

“That’s where we have to start. When I see this amazing enthusiasm to get back to the land—there’s this yearning that drives it. If you look at agriculture as a purely economic industry, then one of the primary parameters is efficiency. But this is clearly not complete thinking, because you are dealing with nature, with a living planet, and if you’re trying to grow living food, with healthy qualities, it’s different than making a shoe or a car. It’s a qualitatively different environment. It would be therapeutic for both people and the land if more people did this sort of work.”

Certainly this has proved true for my students.

“I, as I imagine many of my peers did, found solace in the farm,” a student named Kelsey wrote. “This was where I found peace, where the only material goods I ever required were the occasional shovel or hoe. It was great to go home feeling sore because you had just spent the last two hours pulling weeds, leaving behind a clean bed ready for planting. It was here that I learned so practically the significance of food that you grow yourself. I learned the true meaning of patience and its reward. The joy of eating something picked just moments beforehand, planted perhaps weeks or months beforehand, is indescribable: only understood through experiencing it yourself.”

In my class, the idea is not to turn students into farmers, though in recent years a surprising number of them have gone on to work on farms after they graduate. This was not happening five years ago. Now it is. The reason, as far as I can tell, is that students are hungry—literally, hungry—to know more about where their food comes from. They see their generation’s relationship with food as emblematic of their engagement with the world generally. Eating microwaved chicken nuggets from the nearest fast-food joint seems considerably less appealing once you have spent dozens of hours tending an organic garden plot—not to mention the friendships you may have developed with a flock of charismatic hens, who trail alongside you as you weed a bed of potatoes.

“Before this semester, I had never worked on a farm, just the occasional community garden or nature preserve,” a student named Meghan wrote. “Now, after these past fourteen weeks, it will feel bizarre to go even a week or two without spending a few hours in that environment. For the first time, my understanding of environmental issues is not based only on articles I’ve read from newspapers and vague notions I have about sustainability, but also personal experience and several incredible works of literature.

“On a more interior level, my growth this semester can be harder to see. For me, it happened more slowly. But as I think about it, maybe it shows in the simple fact that feeding cows cabbage at eight-thirty a.m. was the highlight of my entire week, as was kneeling in a greenhouse pulling weeds, talking with Tanya, Rodger, and others about the philosophical things that always seem to come up when your hands are in the dirt.”