Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way Americans grow food and feed themselves–the “food movement,” as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food–local and organic and pastured–are thriving, farmers’ markets are popping up like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of Agriculture’s census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to “sustainability” and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors. Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there have been more words than deeds–but some of those words are astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a reporter for Time that “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil”; he went on to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other, the healthcare crisis.

Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation, with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well and being in good health unless it also farms well.

But the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and farming really began in the 1970s, with the work of writers like Wendell Berry, Frances Moore Lappé, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow. All four of these writers are supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive science and far ahead not only in their grasp of the science of ecology but in their ability to think ecologically: to draw lines of connection between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants, animals and people eating from that soil.

I would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971, when Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue introducing Americans to the work of Sir Albert Howard, the British agronomist whose thinking had deeply influenced Berry’s own since he first came upon it in 1964. Indeed, much of Berry’s thinking about agriculture can be read as an extended elaboration of Howard’s master idea that farming should model itself on natural systems like forests and prairies, and that scientists, farmers and medical researchers need to reconceive “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” No single quotation appears more often in Berry’s writing than that one, and with good reason: it is manifestly true (as even the most reductive scientists are coming to recognize) and, as a guide to thinking through so many of our problems, it is inexhaustible. That same year, 1971, Lappé published Diet for a Small Planet, which linked modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to cattle) to the problems of world hunger and the environment. Later in the decade, Commoner implicated industrial agriculture in the energy crisis, showing us just how much oil we were eating when we ate from the industrial food chain; and Gussow explained to her nutritionist colleagues that the problem of dietary health could not be understood without reference to the problem of agriculture.

Looking back on this remarkably fertile body of work, which told us all we needed to know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good farming, is to register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more political: first, that as a young writer coming to these subjects a couple of decades later, I was rather less original than I had thought; and second, that as a society we failed to heed a warning that might have averted or at least mitigated the terrible predicament in which we now find ourselves.

For what would we give today to have back the “environmental crisis” that Berry wrote about so prophetically in the 1970s, a time still innocent of the problem of climate change? Or to have back the comparatively manageable public health problems of that period, before obesity and type 2 diabetes became “epidemic” (Most experts date the obesity epidemic to the early 1980s.)

But history will show that we failed to take up the invitation to begin thinking ecologically. As soon as oil prices subsided and Jimmy Carter was rusticated to Plains, Georgia (along with his cardigan, thermostat and solar panels), we went back to business–and agribusiness–as usual. In the mid-1980s Ronald Reagan removed Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and the issues that the early wave of ecologically conscious food writers had raised were pushed to the margins of national politics and culture.

When I began writing about agriculture in the late ’80s and ’90s, I quickly figured out that no editor in Manhattan thought the subject timely or worthy of his or her attention, and that I would be better off avoiding the word entirely and talking instead about food, something people then still had some use for and cared about, yet oddly never thought to connect to the soil or the work of farmers.

It was during this period that I began reading Berry’s work closely–avidly, in fact, because I found in it practical answers to questions I was struggling with in my garden. I had begun growing a little of my own food, not on a farm but in the backyard of a second home in the exurbs of New York, and had found myself completely ill prepared, especially when it came to the challenges posed by critters and weeds. An obedient child of Thoreau and Emerson (both of whom mistakenly regarded weeds as emblems of wildness and gardens as declensions from nature), I honored the wild and didn’t fence off my vegetables from the encroaching forest. I don’t have to tell you how well that turned out. Thoreau did plant a bean field at Walden, but he couldn’t square his love of nature with the need to defend his crop from weeds and birds, and eventually he gave up on agriculture. Thoreau went on to declare that “if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.” With that slightly obnoxious declaration, American writing about nature all but turned its back on the domestic landscape. It’s not at all surprising that we got better at conserving wilderness than at farming and gardening.

It was Wendell Berry who helped me solve my Thoreau problem, providing a sturdy bridge over the deep American divide between nature and culture. Using the farm rather than the wilderness as his text, Berry taught me I had a legitimate quarrel with nature–a lover’s quarrel–and showed me how to conduct it without reaching for the heavy artillery. He relocated wildness from the woods “out there” (beyond the fence) to a handful of garden soil or the green shoot of a germinating pea, a necessary quality that could be not just conserved but cultivated. He marked out a path that led us back into nature, no longer as spectators but as full-fledged participants.

Obviously much more is at stake here than a garden fence. My Thoreau problem is another name for the problem of American environmentalism, which historically has had much more to say about leaving nature alone than about how we might use it well. To the extent that we’re finally beginning to hear a new, more neighborly conversation between American environmentalists and American farmers, not to mention between urban eaters and rural food producers, Berry deserves much of the credit for getting it started with sentences like these:

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in…farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature. –”Conservationist and Agrarian,” 2002

That we are all implicated in farming–that, in Berry’s now-famous formulation, “eating is an agricultural act”–is perhaps his signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today. All those taking part in that conversation, whether in the White House or at the farmers’ market, are deep in his debt.

The secret of their success? In a word, deception. Though some orchids do offer conventional food rewards to the insects and birds that carry their pollen from plant to plant, roughly a third of orchid species long ago figured out, unconsciously of course, that they can save on the expense of nectar and increase the odds of reproducing by evolving a clever deceit, whether that ruse be visual, aromatic, tactile, or all three at once. Some orchids lure bees with the promise of food by mimicking the appearance of nectar-producing flowers, while others, as in the case of a Dracula orchid, attract gnats by producing an array of nasty scents, from fungus and rotten meat to cat urine and baby diaper. (Believe me, I’ve sniffed them.) Some orchids promise shelter, deploying floral forms that mimic insect burrows or brood rooms. Others mimic male bees in flight, hoping to incite territorial combat that results in pollination.

But perhaps the most clever deceit of all is offered by those orchids that hold out the promise of sex. And not exactly normal sex. Really weird sex, in fact. Hoping to observe some of this plant sex, said biped recently journeyed to Sardinia, a windswept, mountainous, and lightly populated island 120 miles off the west coast of Italy that has long been known for floral biodiversity and human kidnapping. (Deceit is evidently very much in the air.) I went in search of one of the most ingenious and diabolical of orchids: the Ophrys. (Some botanists call it the “prostitute orchid.”) I’d been eager to lay eyes on this orchid and meet its hapless pollinator ever since reading about its reproductive strategy, which involves what my field guide referred to as “sexual deception” and “pseudocopulation.” What I learned of the prostitute orchid forced me to radically revise my estimation of what a clever plant is capable of doing to a credulous animal.

In the case of this particular Ophrys, that animal is a relative of the bumblebee. The orchid offers no nectar or pollen reward; rather, it seduces male bees with the promise of bee sex and then insures its pollination by frustrating precisely the desire it has excited. The orchid accomplishes its sexual deception by mimicking the appearance, scent, and even the tactile experience of a female bee. The flower, in other words, traffics in something very much like metaphor: This stands for that. Not bad for a vegetable.

Orchid hunting can be arduous in many places, but in the mountains of Sardinia Ophrys orchids grow like roadside weeds. When they bloom in April you can spot them from a moving car. Close up, the lower lip, or labellum, of these diminutive orchids bears an uncanny resemblance to a female bee as viewed from behind. This pseudobee, which in some Ophrys species comes complete with fake fur and what appear to be elbows and folded iridescent wings, looks as though she has her head buried in a green flower formed by the actual flower’s sepals. To reinforce the deception, the orchid gives off a scent that has been shown to closely match the pheromones of the female bee.

When it comes to getting an orchid pollinated, sexual deception has an uneven success rate (more on that later), but when it does work, it works like this: The real male bee alights on the beelike labellum and attempts to mate, or in the words of one botanical reference, begins “performing movements which look like an abnormally vigorous and prolonged attempt at copulation.” In the midst of these fruitless exertions, the bee jostles the orchid’s column (a structure that houses both the male and female sexual organs), and two yellow sacs packed with pollen (called the pollinia) are stuck to his back with a quick-drying gluelike substance. Frustration mounts, until eventually it dawns on the bee that he has been had. He abruptly flies off, pollinia firmly attached, in frantic search of more authentic female companionship.

There was something poignant about the bee I spotted, flying around madly with what looked like a chubby pair of yellow oxygen tanks strapped to his back. He’d been deluded by the promise of sex—bee sex—when in fact all that was on offer was plant sex, and unbeknownst to the bee, now searching for a second, more satisfactory liaison, he was right in the middle of that act. Botanists have been known to refer to pollen-carrying bees as “flying penises,” but of course most of the world’s bees perform in that role unwittingly, with food rather than sex on the brain. Not so for the poor, deluded orchid bee.

The pollination strategy of the Ophrys is, like that of so many orchids, ingenious, intricate, wily, and seemingly improbable—so much so that proponents of intelligent design sometimes point to orchids as proof that the hand of a higher intelligence must be at work in nature. (And a rather sadistic intelligence at that.) Yet the peculiarities of orchid sex actually offer one of the great case studies of natural selection, as Charles Darwin himself under­stood. Darwin was fascinated by orchid pollination strategies, and though he was puzzled by the purpose of Ophrys’s uncanny resemblance to bees (pseudocopulation wasn’t observed until 1916), he taught us much of what we know about these plants in The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, the volume he published immediately after The Origin of Species. Indeed, some scientists believe that had he published his orchid book first, the theory of natural selection might have encountered less skepticism than it did. Why? Because in orchids Darwin identified floral structures “as perfect as the most beautiful adaptations in the animal kingdom.” He painstakingly demonstrated how even the most unlikely features of these flowers serve a reproductive function, and many of these structures are so perfectly adapted, both to the plant’s requirements and the morphology of its pollinators, that they offered Darwin elegant proofs of his outlandish theory.

In one famous case, putting the final QED on Darwin’s proof that evolution had tailored a flower to lure and exploit a specific pollinator had to wait a few decades. Attempting to explain why the star orchid of Madagascar would secrete a drop of nectar at the tail end of a foot-long floral spur, where no known pollinator could possibly get at it, Darwin hypoth­esized the existence of a moth with a 12-inch-long tongue, an unlikely creature that had never been observed. Vindication arrived a couple decades after Darwin’s death, when entomologists unfurled the tongue of a newly discovered hawk moth and found that it measured nearly a foot long.

The orchid’s baroque pollination strategies do raise challenging questions for the evolutionist, however. Since natural selection seldom rewards the unnecessary complication, why haven’t all orchids stuck with the more straightforward pollination strategies based on nectar reward? And how in the world did their sexual practices get so elaborate? As for the hoodwinked pollinators, what, if anything, do they gain? If the answer is nothing but frustration, then why wouldn’t natural selection eventually weed out insects so foolhardy as to spend their time mating with nature’s version of the inflatable love doll?

Botanists and evolutionary biologists have come up with fascinating answers to many of these questions. John Alcock, an evolutionary biologist and author of An Enthusiasm for Orchids, proposes two explanations for why some orchids would have evolved to avoid a simple nectar reward. When botanists experimented by adding a nectar reward to a normally nectarless orchid, they found that the pollinators hung around longer, happily visiting other blooms on the same and nearby plants. This does not suit the orchid’s interests, however, since inbreeding results in lower quality seeds. By comparison, outcrossing, or mixing one’s genes with distant mates, increases vigor and variation in one’s offspring, maximizing fitness. The sexual frustration of a deluded bee turns out to be an essential part of the orchid’s reproductive strategy. Determined not to make the same mistake again, the bee travels some distance and, if things work out for the orchid, ends up pseudocopulating (and leaving his package of pollen) with an orchid a ways off. That distant orchid is likely to look and smell ever so slightly different from the first, and some botanists believe these subtle variations from plant to plant are part of the orchid’s strategy to prevent bees from learning not to fall for a flower. “Imperfect floral mimicry” is the botanical term for this adaptation. Think of it: The very imperfection of the orchid’s mimicry may itself be part of the perfection of its reproductive strategy.

Another reason so many orchids have gotten out of the restaurant business may have to do with the benefits of developing a relationship with a single, highly devoted pollinator. Nectar, besides being metabolically expensive for the flower to produce, is beloved by so many different animals that it attracts all sorts of riffraff that may not deliver your pollen to the right target. But if you produce a scent that attracts only the males of one particular species of bee, you can insure that your pollen will end up precisely where you want it: on the stigma of a far-flung orchid of your own kind.

The exactitude of the perfume business may also help explain the astounding diversity of the orchid family. A mutation producing even a slight change in an orchid’s scent could, strictly by chance, turn out to be the key that unlocks the sexual attentions of a new pollinator, while at the same time completely turning off the original pollinator. In this way, variations in the chemistry of floral scent can function much as geographic isolation does in the creation of new species, by preventing new mutant flowers from being pollinated by older ones. The novel orchid might evolve in genetic isolation from its forebears—a prerequisite for creating a new species.

Orchids have excelled at spinning off new species, and yet there are remarkably few orchid plants in the world. Their relative rarity in the landscape puts a premium on highly customized pollination strategies to deploy their pollen as efficiently as possible—unlike grasses, for instance, which can simply broadcast their pollen on the wind. Yet their small numbers ensure their survival. If deceptive orchids were much more common, their ruses would no longer work, since they depend on the ubiquity of honest flowers. Orchid deception can succeed only in a world where most things in nature really are what they seem: where the smell of rotting meat signals rotting meat, where flowers really do offer nectar and don’t dress up as bugs.

It seems fair to say that when it comes to their own sex, orchids have opted for quality rather than quantity. For while sexual deception doesn’t fool all of the pollinators all of the time, it does fool some of them some of the time, and for an orchid that is quite enough. That’s because each pollinium contains a stupendous number of pollen grains, and once they’re delivered, every resulting seedpod contains an equally stupendous number of seeds. So while sex among the orchids may be a rare and intricately choreographed affair, what happens after the match is made is all about profligacy and chance. Orchid seeds are so tiny and minimalist they don’t even contain a source of food for the developing embryo. For this, the orchid must (once again) count on the kindness of strangers—in this case, that of an endophytic fungus. If all goes right (and here again, it seldom does), the tendrils of the fungus infiltrate the orchid seed and provide the nutrients that the developing embryo needs to grow. What does the fungus get out of the relationship? Don’t be so sure it gets anything—these are orchids, after all.

Gaspar Silvera is an orchid hunter and breeder in Panama given to wearing straw fedoras and married to a woman named Flor. An agronomist by training, Silvera has, since retiring from government service, devoted himself to rescuing orchids from the threat of development and to the painstaking work of propagating them. Photographer Christian Ziegler and I flew to his nursery in Chilibre after Silvera phoned us to report that one of his Coryanthes, the Central American bucket orchid, a species notoriously difficult to keep happy in captivity, had bloomed. We were hoping to witness one of nature’s most dramatic PG-rated pollination scenes.

By the time we got to the nursery, the canary yellow flower, a surprisingly ungainly Rube Goldberg contraption, was already fading, though it still gave off a powerful perfume of apricots and eucalyptus. The flower had thrown open its elaborately engineered petals just a few days before, and the spicy-sweet perfume had summoned out of the surrounding woods a band of male euglossine bees, a sleek, stingless, iridescent relative of the bumblebee. The bees competed with one another for space on the slick curves of the intricately sculpted flower, directly above a labellum that forms a deep bucket, into which the flower drips a clear, slightly viscous liquid.

Nectar it is not.

Visiting bees busy themselves scraping fragrances from the waxy surface of the flower using their front legs; they then transfer the scents to tibia sacs carried on their rear legs like little wallets. Exactly what they’re up to wasn’t understood until 1966, when a botanist named Stefan Vogel figured out that the bees were collecting the chemical building blocks needed to create a scent. Most animals that rely on scents to attract a mate produce it themselves; not the euglossine bee, which forages for a specific set of ingredients, gathering them not only from orchids but also from certain leaves and fungi, and then mixes up the perfume by “hand.” Once he’s concocted his mixture, the bee spreads it on his body and flaps his wings to release a captivating scent of camphor and flowers to summon a female.

But the bucket orchid exacts a steep price for its contribution to this perfume. As the bees jostle each other for scents, one or more of them is apt to lose his footing on the slick petal and plunge into the bucket. This wouldn’t be a problem, except the viscous liquid in the bucket renders the bee’s wings temporarily useless. So the bee struggles mightily to clamber up the slippery walls of the bucket until he stumbles upon a series of steps, which conduct him up and out of the pool through a narrow passageway leading out the back of the flower. As the dazed and sopping bee squeezes himself through the tunnel, he passes beneath a spring-loaded device that (you guessed it!) claps a pair of yellow pollinia onto his back. If all goes according to (orchid) plan, the bee dries off his wings, flies to another Coryanthes, splashes into the bucket again, and on his way out through the tunnel unwittingly snags his yellow backpack on tiny hooks adapted for precisely that purpose. Pollination accomplished, the bucket orchid closes up shop, collapsing its extravagant petals into a wad of crumpled yellow tissue. The case of the Coryanthes is a happy example of an orchid and its pollinator benefiting mutually, but such is not always the case. Although the euglossine bee escapes with his wallet full of scents, that’s more than you can say for some other orchids’ hapless dupes. If it’s starting to sound as though I don’t trust orchids, that’s because I’ve seen what they can do to some of my fellow animals. There’s a video on YouTube, a riveting snippet of interspecies porn, in which you can watch a wasp be utterly bamboozled, and then humiliated, by an Australian tongue orchid. The tongue orchid (Cryptostylis) lures its pollinator by deploying a scent closely resembling the pheromone of the female wasp (Lissopimpla excelsa). The male wasp alights on the tonguelike labellum, tail first, and commences to copulate with the flower, probing its interior with the tip of his abdomen until it bumps into the sticky pollinia, which attach themselves to the insect’s posterior like a pair of yellow tails. Having to play pin the tail on the pollinator is only the beginning of the wasp’s humiliation. For with the tongue orchid we have passed beyond pseudocopulation into a realm even more perverse: More often than not, the wasp, in the throes of his misguided sexual exertions, actually ejaculates onto the flower.

Surely this represents the height of maladaptive behavior, and natural selection could be expected to deal harshly with a creature foolish enough to squander its genes having sex with a flower. (“Costly sperm wastage,” is how the literature describes it.) That would be bad news for both the wasp and the orchid that depends on him. But as with so much else in the bizarre world of orchid sex, the matter is not quite so simple.

It appears that in some insect species, such as Lissopimpla excelsa, females can reproduce with or without sperm from a male. With it, they produce the usual ratio of male and female offspring; without sperm, they produce only male offspring. How convenient—for the tongue orchid, that is. By inducing wasps to waste their sperm on its flowers, tongue orchids are decreasing the amount of sperm available to female wasps, thereby assuring themselves an even larger population of pollinators. Not only that, but the overabundance of male wasps increases competition for females, which makes the desperate wasps less picky in their choice of mates and that much more likely to fall for a flower.

What about the poor wasp? Why hasn’t natural selection killed off an insect so dumb as to have sex with flowers? The best explanation I’ve heard is from John Alcock, who says that although the wasp may occasionally waste his genes on a plant, his “extreme sexual enthusiasm” is still a better reproductive strategy for an insect than being cautious about one’s choice of mate. On balance, having sex with anything that moves yields more offspring, even if it also leads to occasional romantic disaster.

To learn all this about orchids is to admire them more but, perhaps, love them less. And to wonder if we too have fallen prey to their deceptive charms. Like the scent-gathering euglossine bees, we use them to communicate our romantic intentions and lure mates, extracting their essence for perfumes and wearing them in corsages. Orchids have served us in this capacity since at least 1818, when William Cattley, an English plantsman, rescued a discarded orchid bulb that had been used as packing material in a shipment of tropical plants. The flowering of that specimen ignited a Victorian passion for orchids that has never really subsided.

The very name of the plant comes from the Greek word for testicle, referring not to the plant’s flowers but its bulbs, organs that have long been endowed with aphrodisiac properties. But it doesn’t take a Freudian to discern a strong sexual subtext in the passion for these flowers, especially among men, who any visit to an orchid show will tell you suffer disproportionately from “orchidelirium”—the Victorians’ term for the madness these flowers inspire. Victorians were offended by the “blatant sexuality” of orchids, according to Eric Hansen, the author of Orchid Fever; he isn’t referring to plant or insect sexuality either. “Prurient apparitions,” is how Victorian critic John Ruskin described these flowers.

Prurient? Is it possible that humans can look at an orchid and, like the deluded orchid bees or male dupe wasps, see an apparition of female anatomy? (Georgia O’Keeffe certainly did.) Could it be that plant sex and animal sex have gotten their wires crossed in human brains just as they have among the bugs? That accident of evolution has proved another happy one for the orchid, for look how much we humans now do for these flowers: the prices paid, the risks to life and limb endured, the pains taken?…

Those were my thoughts as I watched Gaspar Silvera deploy a pair of slender forceps to remove a pollinium from a bucket orchid that had failed to entrap a euglossine bee. (“I suppose you could say that I too am manipulated by orchids,” he’d explained at the end of a shaggy tale about the lengths he goes to secure choice specimens.) Working with the steady hand of a jeweler, Silvera used the forceps to grab the base of the pollinium and then pressed it to a slit in the column of another bloom. Five years from now, Silvera may find himself with a precious new flower—and the orchid will have offspring it would otherwise not have had.

Ever since the first human-hybridized orchid bloomed (the earliest in the Western world was recorded in 1856), we humans have become important orchid pollinators too—more intentional perhaps than the orchid bees, but lured into advancing the orchid’s interests just the same, assisting in its quest for world domination. Today there are some 100,000 registered hybrid orchids, most of them the offspring of improbable marriages among far-flung plants arranged by, and literally inconceivable without, us.

Not that any of this was ever in the orchid’s plan. In evolution there is no plan, of course, only blind chance. But the moment that the orchid stumbled upon one of the keys to human desire and used it to unlock our hearts, it conquered a whole new world—our world—and enlisted a vast new crew of credulous animals more than happy to do its bidding. Let’s face it: We’re all orchid dupes now.

Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in my experience has prepared me for the quality of this attention. I notice how the day’s first breezes comb the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, or nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes, my ears roam at will, returning with the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a. . .wait: what was that? Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man.

Hunting inflects a place powerfully. The ordinary prose of the ground becomes as layered and springy as verse — and as dense with meanings. Notice the freshly rototilled soil at the base of that oak tree? Look how the earth has not yet been crisped by the midday sun; this means wild boar — my quarry — have been rooting here since yesterday afternoon, either overnight or earlier this morning. See that smoothly scooped-out puddle of water? That’s a wallow, but notice how the water is perfectly clear: pigs haven’t disturbed it yet today. We could wait here for them.

Hunter and quarry maintain different but overlapping maps of the hunting ground, places of refuge and prospect, places of prior encounter. The hunter’s aim is to have his map collide with his quarry’s map, which, should it happen, will do so at a moment of no one’s choosing. For although there’s much the hunter can know, about game and about its habitat, in the end he knows nothing about what is going to happen here today, whether the longed-for and dreaded encounter will actually take place and, if it does, how it will end.

Since there’s nothing he can do to make the encounter happen, the hunter’s energy goes into readying himself for it, and trying, by the sheer force of his attention, to summon the animal into his presence. Searching for his prey, the hunter instinctively becomes more like the animal, straining to make himself less visible, less audible, more exquisitely alert. Predator and prey alike move according to their own maps of this ground, their own forms of attention and their own systems of instinct, systems that evolved expressly to hasten or avert precisely this encounter.. . .

wait a minute. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony? That’s embarrassing. Am I actually writing about the hunter’s “instinct,” suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial encounter between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter porn. And whenever I’ve read it in the past, in Hemingway and Ortega y Gasset and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll my eyes. I never could stomach the straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun and ends with a large mammal dead on the ground — a killing that we are given to believe constitutes a gesture of respect. So it is for Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, who writes in his “Meditations on Hunting” that “the greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them.. . .” Please.

And yet here I find myself slipping into the hunter’s ecstatic purple, channeling Ortega y Gasset. It may be that we have no better language in which to describe the experience of hunting, so that all of us who would try sooner or later slide into this overheated prose ignorant of irony. Or it could be that hunting is one of those experiences that appear utterly different from the inside than the outside. That this might indeed be the case was forcibly impressed on me after a second outing with my hunting companion and mentor, Angelo Garro, when, after a long and gratifying day in the woods, we stopped at a convenience store for a bottle of water. The two of us were exhausted and filthy, the fronts of our jeans stained dark with blood. We couldn’t have smelled terribly fragrant. And under the bright fluorescence of the 7-Eleven, in the mirror behind the cigarette rack behind the cashier, I caught a glimpse of this grungy pair of self-satisfied animal killers and noted the wide berth the other customers in line were only too happy to grant them. Us. It is a wonder that the cashier didn’t pre-emptively throw up his hands and offer us the contents of the cash register.

Irony — the outside perspective — easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more than I ever thought I should have.

II. A CANNABINOID MOMENT

I had never hunted before, never had the need or the desire or the right kind of dad. One of the world’s great indoorsmen, my father looked upon hunting as a human activity that stopped making sense with the invention of the steakhouse. What first got me out there, in the oak chaparral of northern Sonoma County that morning last spring, hoping to shoot a wild pig, was a conceit. I’d gotten it into my head that I wanted to prepare a meal I had hunted, gathered and grown myself. Why? To see if I could do it. I was also curious to experience the food chain — which has grown so long and complex as to no longer even feel anything like a food chain — at its shortest and most elemental. And I had long felt that, as a meat eater, I should, at least once, take responsibility for the killing that eating meat entails. I wanted, for once in my life, to pay the full karmic price of a meal.

Yet when the day arrived, part of me did not want to go. The night before, I had anxiety dreams about hunting. In one I was on a bobbing boat trying to aim a rifle at a destroyer that was firing its cannons at me; in the other, the woods were crawling with Angelo’s Sicilian relatives, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember how my gun worked, whether the safety was on when the little button popped up on the left side of the trigger or the right. I had tried out my rifle only once before taking it to the woods, at a firing range in the Oakland hills, and by the end of the morning my paper target had sustained considerably less damage than my left shoulder, which ached for a full week. I wasn’t ready to buy a gun of my own, so Angelo had borrowed a fairly basic pump-action rifle, a .270 Winchester with an old-fashioned sight that I had trouble getting used to. After my session at the range, the first-order worry that I wouldn’t have whatever it takes to fire a rifle aimed at an animal was overtaken by a second-order worry that, assuming I did manage to pull the trigger, nothing of consequence would happen to the animal.

Why boar? The animals were introduced to California by the Spanish in the early 1700′s and today are regarded as pests in many parts of the state; it seemed to me easier to justify killing an exotic pest than a native species. Though the pigs have been living wild a long time, they are not technically wild or even full-blooded boar; feral pigs would be more accurate. They are also, by reputation, vicious; one of the nicknames the California pig has earned is “dog ripper.”

When I asked Angelo why he hunted wild pig, he didn’t hesitate (or say word one about the environment); rather, he just kissed the tips of his fingers and said: “Because it is the most delicious meat. And there is nothing that tastes so good as boar prosciutto. You’ll see. You shoot a big one, and we’ll make some.”

On this, my first outing, we were joined by Richard, the property’s owner, and Angelo’s friend Jean-Pierre, a Frenchman who works as a chef in Berkeley. Jean-Pierre grew up hunting boar with his relatives in Normandy. He had on one of those green felt Alpine fedoras with the feather (a hat he managed to wear without so much as a trace of self-consciousness) and a pair of tall black riding boots. We didn’t look much the part of an American hunting party (Angelo had on a pair of flouncy Euro-style black pants), though Richard did have on the full international orange regalia, and I was wearing my brightest orange sweater. We divided into pairs, me with Angelo, and went our separate ways, with a plan to meet back at the cars for lunch around noon.

“You are going to kill your first pig today,” Angelo hollered over the roar of the A.T.V. we were riding on. Given the nature of hunting, not to mention me, I understood this as less a prediction than a prayer. After a while we parked the A.T.V. and set out on foot. Angelo gave me a route and a destination — a wallow in a grassy opening at the bottom of a ravine — and told me to find a tree with a good view of it and wait there, perfectly still, for 20 minutes until I heard him whistle. He would make his way toward the same spot from another direction, in the hope of driving some pigs into my field of vision.

When I could hear Angelo’s footsteps no longer, my ears and eyes started tuning in — everything. It was as if I’d dialed up the gain on all my senses, or quieted myself to such an extent that the world itself grew louder and brighter. I quickly learned to filter out the static of birdsong, of which there was plenty at that early hour, and to listen for the frequency of specific sounds — the crack of branches or the snuffling of animals. I found I could see farther into the woods than I ever had before, picking out the tiniest changes in my visual field at an almost inconceivable distance, just so long as those changes involved movement or blackness. The sharpness of focus and depth of field was uncanny, though, being nearsighted, I knew it well from the experience of putting on glasses with a strong new prescription for the first time. “Hunter’s eye,” Angelo said later when I described the phenomenon; he knew all about it.

I found a shaded spot overlooking the wallow and crouched down in the leaves, steadying my back against the smooth trunk of a madrone. I rested my gun across my thighs and got quiet. The whoosh of air through my nostrils suddenly sounded calamitous, so I began inhaling and exhaling through my mouth, silencing my breath. So much sensory information was coming into my head that it seemed to push out the normal buzz of consciousness. The state felt very much like meditation, though it took no mental effort or exercise to achieve that kind of head-emptying presence. The simple act of looking and listening, tuning my senses to the forest frequencies of Pig, occupied every quadrant of mental space and anchored me to the present. I must have lost track of time, because the 20 minutes flashed by. Ordinarily my body would have rebelled at being asked to hold a crouch this long, but I felt no need to change position or even to shift my weight.

Later it occurred to me that this mental state, which I quite liked, in many ways resembled the one induced by marijuana: the way your senses feel heightened and the mind seems to forget everything outside the scope of its present focus, including physical discomfort and the passing of time. One of the more interesting areas of research in the neurosciences today is the study of the brain’s “cannabinoid network,” a set of receptors in the nervous system that are activated by a group of unusual compounds called cannabinoids. THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is one, and the brain produces its own: a neurotransmitter called anandamide. Whether made by the plant or the brain, cannabinoids have the effect of intensifying sensory experience, disabling short-term memory and stimulating appetite. Scientists still aren’t certain what the evolutionary utility of such a system might be. Some researchers hypothesize that the cannabinoids, like the opiates, play a role in the brain’s pain relief and reward system; others that they help regulate appetite or emotion.

The experience of hunting suggests another explanation. Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time) and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for Man the Hunter. All at once it provides the motive, the reward and the optimal mind-set for hunting. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover that what I was feeling in the woods that morning, crouching against a tree, avidly surveying that forest grove, was a tide of anandamide washing over my brain.

But whether I was actually having a cannabinoid moment or not, in the minutes before Angelo’s whistle pierced my vigil I did feel as if I had somehow entered nature through a new door. For once I was not a spectator but a full participant in the life of the forest. Later, when I reread Ortega y Gasset’s description of the experience, I decided maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all, not even when he asserted that hunting offers us our last best chance to leave behind history and return to the state of nature, if only for a time — for what he called a “vacation from the human condition.”

Ortega believed that in hunting we returned to nature because hunting is the “generic” way of being human and because the animal we are stalking summons the animal still in us. This is atavism pure and simple — the recovery of an earlier mode of being human — and that for Ortega is the supreme, and the exclusive, value of hunting. For perhaps his most outrageous claim is that the hunt is the only such return available to us — we can’t ever, as he points out, go back to being Christian in the manner of St. Augustine, say, because once history begins, it is irreversible. So how is it we can still go back to being Paleolithic? Because our identity as hunters is literally prehistoric — is in fact inscribed by evolution in the architecture of our bodies and brains. Much that surrounds hunting is completely artificial, Ortega freely admitted, yet the experience itself, the encounter of predator and prey, is no fiction. (Just ask the animals.) Even though the hunt takes place during a brief “vacation” from modern life, what occurs in the space of this electrifying parenthesis will ever and always be, in a word Ortega never shrinks from using, “authentic.”

III. READY. OR NOT.

As I said, all this seemed much less crazy to me after I’d been in the woods that first morning with my gun, long before I even had occasion to fire it. I’m chagrined to report that the occasion never presented itself during that first hunting trip — or rather, when it did present itself I was in no position to do anything about it. I know, I’ve been talking here like Mister Big Game Hunter, comparing notes on the experience with the likes of Señor Ortega y Gasset, but I returned from the woods that day not only empty-handed, which in hunting is entirely forgivable, but also what is not, having failed as a hunter because I was not ready.

I blame this, at least partly, on lunch.

By the end of the morning, one animal had been shot, a small boar, taken by Jean-Pierre. On our way back up to the ridge in the A.T.V., Angelo and I picked it up. Not a whole lot bigger than a beagle, it had a florid blotch erupting from the side of its bristly black head. Angelo hung it by its ankles from the limb of a tree near the cars; he planned to dress it after lunch.

Being Europeans, as well as accomplished cooks, Angelo and Jean-Pierre take lunch very seriously, even when out in the woods some distance from civilization. “So I brought with me a few little things to nibble on,” Jean-Pierre mumbled. “Me, too,” chimed Angelo. And out of their packs came course after course of the most astonishing picnic, which they proceeded to lay out on the hood of Angelo’s S.U.V.: a terrine of lobster and halibut en geleé, salami and prosciutto and mortadella, Angelo’s homemade pâté of boar and home-cured olives, cornichons, chicken salad, a generous selection of cheeses and breads, fresh strawberries and pastries, silverware and napkins and, naturally, a bottle each of red and white wine.

It was a delicious lunch, but arguably it took off some of my hunter’s edge. One of the easier questions on my state hunter-education course exam went something like this: “Hunting after drinking alcohol is an acceptable practice, true or false.” Not that I was intoxicated, but I was feeling notably loquacious and relaxed when Richard and I set off to look for another pig after lunch, while Angelo dressed Jean-Pierre’s pig and Jean-Pierre enjoyed a postprandial nap in the grass. Our rifles slung over our shoulders, we strolled down a shady trail toward a spot where Richard had once had some luck, all the while getting acquainted and chatting about one thing or another.

We were thoroughly absorbed in conversation when I happened to glance up ahead and saw directly in front of us, not 30 yards away, several large black shapes swimming in the shadows. There they were, four big pigs milling beneath an oak tree, their attention fixed on the acorns littering the path that connected us. Incredibly, they gave no sign they’d spotted us or heard our yammering.

I grabbed Richard by the shoulder, put my finger to my lips and pointed ahead. He stopped. “It’s your shot,” he whispered. “Go ahead. Take it.” It is the custom when hunting with companions that the first shot belongs to the person who spotted the animal, perhaps in recognition of the fact that skill in hunting is as much about finding the game as killing it. In fact in many hunter-gatherer societies, rights to the meat go not just to the hunter who killed the animal but to the hunter who spotted it as well. These pigs were mine.

One little problem. I had neglected to pump my rifle before we set out on the trail. There was no bullet in the chamber, and to pump my gun now would almost surely alert the pigs to our presence. I could take the chance, but to do so probably meant the pigs would be on the run by the time I was ready to shoot. I explained all this in a whisper to Richard, whose own gun, a fancy new Finnish bolt-action job, could be cocked with little more than a click of the little bolt. I gave him my shot.

Richard got down on one knee and slowly raised his rifle to his shoulder. I braced for the explosion, preparing to pump my gun the moment it came; perhaps I could still get off a shot at one of the others. Richard took his time, aiming carefully, waiting for one of the animals to turn and offer its flank. The pigs had their heads down, eating acorns, utterly oblivious to our presence. Then the woods exploded. I saw a pig stagger and fall back against the embankment, then struggle drunkenly to its feet. I pumped my rifle but it was already too late: the other pigs were gone. Richard fired again at the wounded pig, and it crumpled.

The pig, a sow weighing perhaps a hundred pounds, was too heavy to carry, so we took turns dragging it by its rear leg up the path back toward the cars. Angelo trotted over to see the animal, excited and impressed and eager to hear our story. It’s curious how the hunting story takes shape in the moments after the shot, as you work through the chaotic simultaneity of that lightning, elusive moment, trying to tease out of the adrenaline fog something linear and comprehensible. Even though we’d witnessed the event together, Richard and I had taken turns carefully telling each other the story on the long march back, rehearsing our lack of readiness, reviewing the reasons Richard had taken the shot instead of me, trying to nail down the precise distance and number of pigs involved, carefully unpacking the moment and turning our shaky recollections into a consensus of fact — a hunting story. As I watched Angelo drink in our hunting story, I could see the disappointment bloom on his face. It had been my shot, my pig, but I hadn’t taken it.

“You weren’t ready,” Angelo said, levelly. “In hunting you always need to be ready. So, O.K., you learned something today. Next time you will be ready, and you will take your shot.” He was trying hard not to sound like the disappointed father; even so, I couldn’t help feeling like the disappointing son.

So what had really happened? I hadn’t been ready to shoot. But why? The practical reasons were clear; surely it had made more sense to give my shot to Richard than to risk losing the animal. It was because of my unselfish decision that we now had this pig. Yet maybe there was some deeper sense in which I hadn’t been ready; maybe my failure to have a bullet in the chamber reflected some unconscious reluctance about doing what I was asking myself to do. The fact is I’d blown it, and I wasn’t sure how deep I should go in search of an explanation. And yet I had been, and still was, determined to shoot a pig — I had a meal to cook, for one thing, but I was also genuinely hungry for the experience, to learn whatever it had to teach me. So I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting intently alone, walking the ridge, raking the shadows for signs of pig, looking and listening as hard as I could to will another pig out of the woods. When Angelo announced it was time to go home, I felt deflated.

Jean-Pierre generously offered to give me some cuts of his pig. Since I needed the meat for my meal, I was grateful for his offer, yet I understood that to accept it underscored my inferior status in our little society of hunters. To the successful hunter goes the privilege of giving away the spoils, and I’d read a lot in the anthropological literature suggesting just how important that privilege was. The sheer nutritional density of meat has always made it a precious form of social currency among hunter-gatherers. Since the successful hunter often ends up with more meat than he or his family can eat before it spoils, it makes good sense for him to, in effect, bank the surplus in the bodies of other people, trading meat for obligations and future favors. Chimps will do the same thing. Not to say that Jean-Pierre was lording it over me or demanding anything in return; he wasn’t. But that didn’t change the fact that here I stood, on the vaguely pathetic receiving end of the alpha hunter’s meat gift. I thanked Jean-Pierre for the gift.

in the days after, I wasn’t sure whether I needed to go hunting again. I had my meat. And I had been hunting: I felt as if I had a good idea what it was all about, or nearly all about — the hunter’s way of being in nature, and the way of the pigs. I’d spotted the prey and witnessed the kill. I had a pretty good story too. And yet everyone to whom I told it managed to remind me how unsatisfactory the ending was. You mean you never even fired your gun? I’d violated the Chekhovian dramatic rule: having introduced a loaded gun in Act One, the curtain can’t come down until it is fired. I might miss, but the gun had to be fired. That at least seemed to be the narrative imperative.

And then of course there was Señor Ortega y Gasset, who was not about to accept me into the fellowship of hunters until I’d actually killed an animal. Mere spectatorship, or “platonic” analogues of hunting such as photography or bird-watching, don’t cut it for him. Although Ortega says one does not hunt in order to kill, he also says that one must kill in order to have hunted. Why? For authenticity’s sake. If my venture was about taking ultimate responsibility for the animals I eat, their deaths included, well, I hadn’t done that yet, had I?

I e-mailed Angelo and asked him to let me know the next time he planned to go hunting. He wrote back saying he would give me 48 hours notice, to get ready.

IV. MY PIG

Word came about a month later, on a May Friday, that we were to meet at a gas station in Petaluma the following Monday morning, 6 a.m. sharp. This time it would be just the two of us.

We spent the first part of the morning doing the circuit of Angelo’s customary spots, patrolling first the ridge in the A.T.V. and then moving down into the lower forest on foot. The entire day, I kept a round in my chamber. We staked out a wallow deep in the woods and then a trampled clearing of ferns on the near side of the hill that abuts the road, but saw no signs of boar.

A little after 9 in the morning, we were walking together down a logging road cut into a steep hillside when we were stopped in our tracks by a grunt so loud and deep and guttural that it seemed to be coming from the bowels of the earth. A very big pig was very close by. But where? What direction to look? The sound had no address; this was the grunt of the ground itself, omnipresent, more audible to my torso than to my ears. We crouched down low, making ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, and I listened as hard as I’ve ever listened for anything before, listened the way you listen when you hear a strange sound in the night.

I needn’t have strained so, because the next sound we heard was nearly as loud as the first: the sharp, clean crack of a branch, coming from above us to our right, where the thickly oaked hillside climbed to a crest. A stream ran down the hillside and crossed the path in front of us about 30 yards ahead. With my eyes I followed the silvery line of the stream up through the woods to the crest, and that’s when I saw it: a rounded black form, a negative of sunrise, coming over the top of the hill. Then another black sun, and another, a total of five or six, I couldn’t be sure, popping over the crest in a line like a string of huge black pearls.

I touched Angelo on the shoulder and pointed toward the pigs. What should I do? This time my gun was pumped of course, and now, for the first time, I took off the safety. Should I shoot? No, you wait, Angelo said. See — they’re coming down the hill now. I followed the pigs with the barrel of my gun, trying to get one of them in my sight. My finger rested lightly on the trigger, and it took all the self-restraint I could summon not to squeeze, but I didn’t have a clear shot — too many trees stood between us. Take your time, Angelo whispered, they will come to us. And so they did, following the stream bed down to the road directly in front of us, moving toward us in an excruciatingly slow parade. I have no idea how long it took the pigs to pick their way down the steep hill, whether it was minutes or just seconds. At last the first animal, a big black one, stepped out into the clearing of the dirt road, followed by another that was just as big but much lighter in color. The second pig presented its flank. Now! Angelo whispered. This is your shot!

I could sense Angelo a step or two behind me, preparing to take his shot the second I took mine. We were both down on one knee. I braced the rifle against my shoulder and lined up my sight. I felt calmer and clearer than I expected to; at least when I looked down the barrel of the rifle it didn’t appear to be wagging uncontrollably. I took aim at the shoulder of the grayish pig, aligning the sight’s two parts — its U and I — with the top of the animal’s front leg. I held my breath, resisted a sudden urge to clamp my eyes shut and gently squeezed.

The crystal stillness of the scene and the moment in time now exploded into a thousand shards of sense. The pigs erupted in panic, moving every which way at once like black bumper cars, and then the blam! of Angelo’s shot directly behind made me jump. One pig was down; another seemed to stagger. I pumped my gun to fire again but the adrenaline was surging now and I was shaking so violently my finger accidentally pressed the trigger before I could lower my gun; the shot went wild, skying far over the heads of the rioting pigs. Something like the fog of war now descended on the scene, and I’m uncertain exactly what happened next, but I believe Angelo fired a second time. I collected myself just enough to pump and fire one more poorly aimed round before the pigs dispersed, most of them tumbling down the steep embankment to our left.

We ran forward to the downed animal, a very large grayish sow beached on her side across the dirt road; a glossy marble of blood bubbled directly beneath her ear. The pig thrashed briefly, trying to lift her head, then gave it up. Death was quickly overtaking her, and I was grateful she wouldn’t need a second shot.

Angelo clapped me on the back and congratulated me extravagantly. “Your first pig! Look at the size of it. And with a perfect shot, right in the head. You did it!” Did I do it? Was that really my shot? I thought my first shot had dropped the pig, but already that moment was blurred irretrievably, and when I saw what a clean shot it was, I suddenly had my doubts. Yet Angelo was adamant — he had fired at a different pig, a black one. “No, this is your pig, Michael, you killed it, there’s no doubt in my mind.” Our hunting story was taking form, the fluid confusion of the moment rapidly hardening into something sturdier and sharper than it really was. “What a great shot,” Angelo continued. “You got yourself a big one. That’s some very nice prosciutti!”

Meat I was not yet quite ready to see. What I saw was a dead wild animal, its head lying on the dirt in a widening circle of blood. I kneeled down and pressed the palm of my hand against the pig’s belly above the nipples and felt beneath the dusty, bristly skin her warmth, but no heartbeat. My emotions were as surging and confused as the knot of panicked pigs had been on this spot just a moment before. The first to surface was this powerful upwelling of pride — that I had actually done this thing I’d set out to do, had successfully shot a pig. I felt a flood of relief too, that the deed was done, thank God, and didn’t need to be done again. And then there was this wholly unexpected wash of gratitude. But for what exactly, or to whom? For my good fortune, I guess, and to Angelo, of course, but also to this animal, for stepping unbidden over the crest of that hill, out of the wild and into my sight, to become what Angelo kept calling her: your pig. More than the product of any labor of mine (save receptiveness), the animal was a gift — from whom or what I couldn’t say, but gratitude seemed in order, and gratitude is what I felt.

The one emotion I expected to feel but did not, inexplicably, was remorse, or even ambivalence. All that would come later, but now, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, I felt absolutely terrific — unambiguously happy. Angelo wanted to take my picture, so he posed me behind my pig, one hand cradling the rifle across my chest, the other resting on the animal. I couldn’t decide whether to smile or to compose a more somber expression. I opted for the latter, but I couldn’t quite manage to untie the knot of my smile. Nor did I register, yet anyway, the slightest disgust at the creeping stain of the animal’s blood on the ground, the stain that I remembered Ortega calling a “degradation.” I was still too excited, too interested in this most improbable drama in which I had somehow found myself, playing the hero’s part.

V. MAKING MEAT

The sense of elation didn’t last. Less than an hour later, back up on the ridge, I found myself in a much less heroic position, embracing the pig’s hanging carcass from behind to steady it so Angelo could reach in and pull out its viscera. I was playing the nurse now, passing him tools and holding the patient still. Using a block and tackle and a stainless-steel hanger with two hooks, we’d managed to raise and hang the pig by its rear ankles from the limb of an oak tree. A scale attached to the rig gave the weight of the animal: 190 pounds. The pig weighed exactly as much as I did.

Angelo worked with a small cigar clamped between his teeth; the smoke discouraged the flies and yellow jackets, which had taken an avid interest in the dead animal. There were also a pair of turkey vultures circling high overhead, patiently waiting for us to finish. Whatever parts of this pig we didn’t take, the local fauna were preparing to set upon and consume, weaving this bonanza of fat and protein back into the fabric of the land. Using a short knife, Angelo made a shallow incision the length of the animal’s belly, moving very slowly so as not to pierce any internal organs.

Angelo talked while he worked, mostly, if you can believe it, about food: prosciutto, pâté, ventricina, sausages. The pig was splayed open now, all its internal organs glistening in their place like one of those cutaway anatomy dolls from biology: the bluish links of intestine coiled beneath the stout muscle of heart, beribboned with its map of veins; the spongy pink pair of lungs like outspread wings behind; and below, the sleek chocolate slab of liver. The pig’s internal organs, in their proportions and arrangement and colors, were indistinguishable from human organs.

I held the cavity open while Angelo reached in to pull out the mass of organs, saving only the liver, which had a jagged tear across it. The bullet had apparently crossed the rib cage diagonally from upper left to lower right, tearing through a lobe of the liver. But Angelo thought the liver was salvageable (“for a nice pâté”), so we dropped it into a Ziploc bag. Then he reached in and pulled gently and the rest of the organs tumbled out onto the ground in a heap, up from which rose a stench so awful it made me gag. This was not just the stink of pig wastes but those comparatively benign smells compounded by an odor so wretched and ancient that death alone could release it. I felt a wave of nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical disinterest with which I had approached the whole process of cleaning my pig collapsed all at once: this was disgusting.

Since it was my plan to serve and eat this animal, the revulsion at its sight and smell that now consumed me was discouraging, to say the least. That plan was no longer just a conceit, either, since the moment I killed this pig I felt it descend on me with the weight of a moral obligation. And yet at the moment the prospect of sitting down to a meal of this animal was unthinkable. Pâté? Prosciutto? Ventricina? Just then I could have made myself vomit simply by picturing myself putting a fork to a bite of this pig. How was I ever going to get past this? And what was this attack of revulsion all about, anyway?

Disgust, I understood, is one of the tools humans have evolved to navigate the omnivore’s dilemma — the elemental question of what we should and should not eat. The emotion alerts us to things we should not ingest, like rotten meat or feces. And surely that protective reflex figured in what I was feeling as I beheld these viscera, which no doubt did contain microbes that could sicken me. Our sense of disgust, as Steven Pinker has written, is “intuitive microbiology.”

But there had to be more to it than that, and later, when I did some reading on disgust, I acquired a better idea what else might underlie my revulsion. Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that many of the things that disgust people do come from animals — bodily fluids and secretions, decaying flesh, corpses. Beyond the sanitary reasons for avoiding certain parts and products of animals, these things disgust us, Rozin suggests, because they confront us with the reality of our own animal nature. So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts, too — animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink and decompose. Rozin tells a story about Cotton Mather, who confided to his journal the powerful revulsion he felt at finding himself urinating alongside a dog. Mather turned his self-disgust into a resolution of self-transcendence: “Yet I will be a more noble creature; at the very time when my natural necessities debase me into the condition of the beast, my spirit shall (I say at that very time!) rise and soar.. . .”

Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death figures in the answer. What we see animals do an awful lot of is die, very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no conception of death, they don’t give it nearly as much thought as we do. And one of the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own death be like this animal’s or not? The belief, or hope, that human death is somehow different from animal death is precious to us — but unprovable. Whether it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect we’re trying to answer whenever we look into the eyes of an animal.

From the moment I laid eyes on my animal straight through to the moment Angelo sawed off her head, her eyes remained tightly shut beneath her disconcerting eyelashes, yet everything else about the episode asked me to confront these kinds of questions. What disgusted me about “cleaning” the animal was just how messy — in every sense of the word — the process really was, how it forced me to look at and smell and touch and even to taste the death, at my hands, of a creature my size that, on the inside at least, had all the same parts and probably looked very much like me. The line between human and animal I could discern here, gazing into that carcass, was nowhere near sharp. Cannibalism is one of the things that most deeply disgusts us, and while this isn’t by any reasonable definition that, you could forgive the mind for being fooled into reacting as if it were — in disgust.

In this, I decided, was one of the signal virtues of hunting: it puts large questions about who we and the animals are, and the nature of our respective deaths, squarely before the hunter, and while I’m sure there are many hunters who manage to avoid their gaze, that must take some doing.

so we are left standing there in the woods with our uneasiness and our disgust, and disgust’s boon companion, shame. I did not register any such emotion in the moments after shooting my pig, but eventually it dawned, or fell on me, like a great and unexpected weight. It happened late that evening, when, back at home, I opened my e-mail and saw that Angelo had sent me some digital pictures, under the subject heading “Look the great hunter!” I was eager to open them, excited to show my family my pig, since it hadn’t come home with me but was hanging in Angelo’s walk-in cooler.

The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was kneeling on the ground behind a pig the side of whose head has erupted in blood that is spreading like a river delta toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest; clearly he is observing some hoary convention of the hunter’s trophy portrait. One proprietary hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with an expression of unbounded pride, wearing an ear-to-ear grin that might have been winning, if perhaps incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass sprawled beneath him been cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied carcass was right there, front and center, and it rendered that grin — there’s no other word for it — obscene. I felt as if I had stumbled on some stranger’s pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this.

What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling? I can’t for the life of me explain what could have inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that the man in the picture was drunk. And perhaps he was, seized in the throes of some sort of Dionysian intoxication, the bloodlust that Ortega says will sometimes overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned proud of, anyway? I’d killed a pig with a gun, big deal.

Like the image of the two filthy hunters I’d caught in the convenience-store mirror earlier that afternoon, Angelo’s digital photo had shown me the hunt, and the hunter, from the outside, subjecting it to a merciless gaze that hunting can’t withstand, at least not in the 21st century. Yet I’m not prepared to say that that gaze offers the more truthful view of the matter. Angelo’s picture resembles in certain respects the trophy photos sent home by soldiers, who shock their brides and mothers with images of themselves grinning astride the corpses of the enemy dead. They are entitled to their pride; killing is precisely what we’ve asked them to do, so why do we have so much trouble looking at the pictures?

I’ve looked at Angelo’s pictures again, trying to figure out why they should have shamed me so. I realize it isn’t the killing it records that I felt ashamed of, not exactly, but the manifest joy I seemed to be feeling about what I’d done. This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting — to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but also to take a certain pleasure in killing. It’s not as if the rest of us don’t countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion, by industrial agriculture.

Perhaps there is a more generous light in which to view the hunter’s joy. Perhaps it is the joy of a creature succeeding at something he has discovered his nature has superbly equipped him to do, an action that is less a perversion of that nature, his “creaturely character,” than a fulfillment of it. But what of the animal in the picture? Well, the animal, too, has had the chance to fulfill its wild nature, has lived, and arguably even died, in a manner consistent with its creaturely character. Hers is, by the standards of animal death, a good one. But could I really say that yet? What if it turned out I couldn’t eat this meat? Her death then will have been pointless, a waste. I realized then that the drama of the hunt doesn’t end until the animal arrives at the table.

So which view of me-the-hunter is the right one, the shame of the photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the inside one? The moralist is eager to decide this question once and for all, to join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for transcendence. The hunter — or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter — recognizes the truth disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust.

The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You certainly don’t come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I’ve learned anything about hunting and eating meat, it’s that it’s even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing the force of human will can somehow overcome it. “The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.”

“What is.” I suppose that this as much as anything else, as much as a pig or a meal, is what I was really hunting for, and what I returned from my hunt with a slightly clearer sense of. “What is” is not an answer to anything, exactly; it doesn’t tell you what to do or even what to think. Yet respect for what is does point us in a direction. That direction just happens to be the direction from which we came — that place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed, regarded them with reverence and never ate them except with gratitude.

VI. THE PERFECT MEAL

Two weeks later, I prepared my first-person feast: a meal I had hunted, gathered and grown myself. The menu featured braised leg of boar; morels I’d gathered in the Sierras; greens and fava beans from my garden; bread baked from, O.K., store-bought flour, but leavened with wild yeasts I’d gathered from the air outside my house; and a galette made from Bing cherries I’d foraged from a neighborhood tree. My guests included Angelo and Richard and a handful of other new friends who’d taught me about hunting and gathering food. The meal was, among other things, my way of saying thanks. And not just to them.

Any dinner party is a little nervous-making, and I was more nervous about this one than most. Would this rather haphazard assortment of people gel? Would the meal be edible? I’d never cooked any of these dishes; how would they taste? And, guests aside, would the hunter be able to enjoy eating the animal he’d shot? Trimming and larding the leg of boar that morning, I wasn’t so sure.

Cooking is a wondrous process, truly, and that Saturday, spent entirely in the kitchen, I appreciated its magic in a way I never quite had before. It was a day of transformations, as one after another of the raw stuffs of nature — chunks of animal; piles of wild fungi; the leaves, pods and fruits of plants; and piles of pulverized grain — took on whole new forms. Bread dough magically rose and crisped; desiccated mushrooms came back to fleshy life; the leaves of herbs from the garden inflected whatever they touched; animal flesh browned and caramelized, turning into meat. All the various techniques humans have devised for transforming the raw into the cooked — nature into culture — do a lot more for us than make food tastier and easier to digest; they interpose a welcome distance too. It might be enough for other species that their food be good to eat, but for us, as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously put it, food has to be “good to think” as well; the alchemies of the kitchen help get us there, by giving new, more human forms and flavors to the plants and fungi and animals we bring out of nature. The long, civilizing braise is a particularly effective one, rendering the meat bloodless and fork tender. It was when I pulled the leg of boar from the oven to check if it was done, and a deep, woodsy-winey aroma filled the kitchen, that I felt my appetite begin to recover.

There comes a moment in the course of a dinner party when, with any luck, you realize everything’s going to be O.K. The food and the company having sailed past the shoals of awkwardness and disaster, the host can allow himself at last to slip into the warm currents of the evening and actually begin to enjoy himself. For me that moment came just around the time that the platter of wild pig made its second circuit of the table and found many eager takers. The meat was delicious, with a nutty sweetness that tasted nothing like store-bought pork; the sauce I’d reduced from the braising liquid was almost joltingly rich and earthy, powerfully reminiscent of the forest. I was enjoying myself now, and that’s when I realized that this was, at least for me, the perfect meal, though it took me a while to figure out exactly what that meant.

Was the perfect meal the one you made all by yourself? Not necessarily; it had taken many hands to bring this one to the table. The fact that nearly all those hands were at the table was the more rare and important thing, that and the fact that every story about the food on the table could be told in the first person. I prized too the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the chain that linked it to the natural world. Scarcely an ingredient in it had ever worn a label or bar code or price tag, and yet I knew almost everything there was to know about its provenance and price. I knew and could picture the very oaks that had nourished the pig that was nourishing us. I knew the true cost of this food, the precise sacrifice of time and energy and life it had entailed.

So perhaps that’s what the perfect meal is: one that’s been fully paid for, that leaves no debts outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why, real as it was, there was nothing very realistic about this meal. Yet as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true cost of our food, and that, no matter what we eat, we eat by the grace not of industry but of nature.

This morning’s inspection tells Salatin that he’ll be able to move cattle into this pasture in a few days’ time. They’ll then get a single day to feast on its lush salad bar of grasses before being replaced by the “eggmobile,” a Salatin-designed-and-built portable chicken coop housing several hundred laying hens. They will fan out to nibble at the short grass they prefer and pick the grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats—in the process spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. (Salatin calls them his sanitation crew.) While they’re at it, the chickens will apply a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture and produce several hundred uncommonly rich and tasty eggs. A few weeks later, the sheep will take their turn here, further improving the pasture by weeding it of the nettles and nightshade the cows won’t eat.

To its 400 or so customers—an intensely loyal clientele that includes dozens of chefs from nearby Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.—Polyface Farm sells beef, chicken, pork, lamb, rabbits, turkeys, and eggs, but if you ask Salatin what he does for a living, he’ll tell you he’s a “grass farmer.” That’s because healthy grass is the key to everything that happens at Polyface, where a half-dozen animal species are raised together in a kind of concentrated ecological dance on the theme of symbiosis. Salatin is the choreographer, and these 100 acres of springy Shenandoah Valley pasture comprise his verdant stage. By the end of the year, his corps de ballet will have transformed that grass into 30,000 pounds of beef, 60,000 pounds of pork, 12,000 broilers, 50,000 dozen eggs, 1,000 rabbits, and 600 turkeys—a truly astonishing cornucopia of food from such a modest plot of land. What’s more, that land itself will be improved by the process. Who says there’s no free lunch?

“Sustainable” is a word you hear a lot from farmers these days, but it’s an ideal that’s honored mostly in the breach. Even organic farmers find themselves buying pricey inputs—cow manure, Chilean nitrate, fish emulsion, biological insect controls—to replace declining fertility of the soil or to manage pest outbreaks. Polyface Farm isn’t even technically organic, yet it is more nearly sustainable than any I’ve visited. Thanks to Salatin’s deft, inter-species management of manure, his land is wholly self-sufficient in nitrogen. Apart from the chicken feed and some mineral supplements he applies to the meadows to replace calcium, Polyface supplies its own needs, year after years.

Salatin takes the goal of sustainability so seriously, in fact, that he won’t ship his food—customers have to come to the farm and pick it up, a gorgeous adventure over a sequence of roads too obscure for my road atlas to recognize. Salatin’s no-shipping policy is what brought me here to Swoope, Virginia, a 45-minute drive over the Blue Ridge from Charlottesville. I’d heard rumors of Polyface’s succulent grass-fed beef, “chickenier” chicken, and the superrich eggs to which pastry chefs attribute quasimagical properties—but Salatin refused on principle to FedEx me a single steak. For him, “organic” is much more than a matter of avoiding chemicals: It extends to everything the farmer does, and Salatin doesn’t believe food shipped cross-country deserves to be called organic. Not that he has any use for that label now that the USDA controls its meaning. Salatin prefers to call what he grows “clean food,” and the way he farms “beyond organic.”

That it certainly is. The fact that Salatin doesn’t spray any pesticides or medicate his animals unless they are ill is, for him, not so much the goal of his farming as proof that he’s doing it right. And “doing it right” for Salatin means simulating an ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, and allowing the species in it “to fully express their physiological distinctiveness.” Which means that the cows, being herbivores, eat nothing but grass and move to fresh ground every day; and that chickens live in flocks of about 800, as they would in nature, and turkeys in groups of 100. And, as in nature, birds follow and clean up after the herbivores—for in nature there is no “waste problem,” since one species’ waste becomes another’s lunch. When a farmer observes these rules, he has no sanitation problems and none of the diseases that result from raising a single species in tight quarters and feeding it things evolution hasn’t designed it to eat. All of which means he can skip the entire menu of heavy chemicals.

You might think every organic farm does this sort of thing as a matter of course, but in recent years the movement has grown into a full-fledged industry, and along the way the bigger players have adopted industrial methods—raising chickens in factory farms, feeding grain to cattle on feedlots, and falling back on monocultures of all kinds. “Industrial organic” might sound like an oxymoron, but it is a reality, and to Joel Salatin industrial anything is the enemy. He contends that the problems of modern agriculture—from pollution to chemical dependence to foodborne illness—flow from an inherent conflict between, on one hand, an industrial mind-set based on specialization and simplification, and, on the other, the intrinsic nature of biological systems, whose health depends on diversity and complexity.

On a farm, complexity sounds an awful lot like work and some of Salatin’s neighbors think he’s out of his mind, moving his cows every day and towing chicken coops hither and yon. “When they hear “˜moving the cattle,” they picture a miserable day of hollering, pickup trucks, and cans of Skoal,” Salatin told me as we prepared to do just that. “But when I open the gat, the cows come running because they know there’s ice cream waiting for them on the other side.” Looking more like a maître d’ than a rancher, Salatin holds open a section of electric fencing, and 80 exceptionally amiable cows—they nuzzle him like big cats—saunter into the next pasture, looking for their favorite grasses: bovine ice cream.

For labor—in addition to his six-foot, square-jawed, and red-suspendered self—the farm has Salatin’s wife, Teresa (who helps run their retail shop and does the bookkeeping), children Rachel and Daniel, and a pair of interns. (Polyface has become such a mecca for aspiring farmers that the waiting list for an internship is two years long.) Salatin, whose ever-present straw hat says “I’m having fun” in a way that the standard monogrammed feed cap never could, insists, however, that “the animals do all the work around here.” So the chickens fertilize the cow pasture, the sheep weed it, the turkeys mow the grass in the orchard and eat the bugs that would otherwise molest the grapes, and the pigs—well, the pigs have the sweetest job of all.

After we moved the cows, Salatin showed me the barn, a ramshackle, open-sided structure where 100 head of cattle spend the winter, ever day consuming 25 pounds of hay and production 50 pounds of waste. Every few days, Salatin adds another layer of wood chips or straw or leaves to the bedding, building a manure layer cake that’s three feet thick by winter’s end. Each layer he lards with a little corn. All winter the cake composts, producing heat to warm the barn and fermenting the corn. Why corn? There’s nothing a pig likes more than 40-proof corn, and nothing he’s better equipped to do than root it out with his powerful snout. So as soon as the cows go out to pasture in March, the “pigaerators,” as Salatin calls them, are let loose in the barn, where they proceed systematically to turn the compost in their quest for an alcoholic morsel.

“That’s the sort of farm machinery I like—never needs its oil changed, appreciated over time, and when you’re done with it, you eat it.” Buried clear to their butts in compost, a bobbing sea of hams and corkscrew tails, these are the happiest pigs you’ll ever meet. Salatin reached down and brought a handful of compost to my nose; it smelled as sweet and warm as the forest floor in summertime, a miracle of transubstantiation. After the pigs have completed their alchemy, Salatin spreads the compost on the pastures. There, it will feed the grasses so that the grasses might again feed the cows, the cows the chickens, and so on until the snow falls, in one long, beautiful, and utterly convincing proof that, in a world where grass can eat sunlight and food animals can eat grass, there is indeed a free lunch.

Did I mention that this lunch also happens to be delicious?

This year, the idea of genetic pollution—the idea, that is, that the genes of genetically modified organisms might end up in places we didn’t want them to go—became a reality. In September the Mexican government announced that genes engineered into corn had somehow found their way into ancient maize varieties grown there—this despite the fact that genetically modified corn seed has not been approved for sale in Mexico. The country where corn was probably first domesticated, Mexico is today the source of the crop’s greatest genetic diversity. Now that diversity could well be threatened.

Companies like Monsanto have long acknowledged that their engineered genes (“transgenes”) might on rare occasions “flow” by means of cross-pollination from one of their crops into neighboring plants. But because sex in nature takes place only between closely related species, and because most crop plants don’t have close relatives in North America, the risk that new genetic traits would contaminate the genome of the world’s important crops was, the companies claimed, remote. As long as genetically modified corn seed wasn’t sold to Mexican farmers, or potato seed to Peruvians, these crucial “centers of diversity” could be protected.

So how did transgenes ever find their way into traditional Mexican corn varieties? It’s a mystery, but the leading theory is that some campesinos in remote mountainous fields outside Oaxaca bought some genetically modified corn as food—then planted the kernels as seed. No matter how it happened, Monsanto’s genes have spread widely in the region.

Why does this matter? The presence of transgenes in what some experts call “the cradle of corn” represents a threat to the crop’s biodiversity. Should the traits introduced into Mexican fields confer an evolutionary advantage (for insect resistance, say) on certain plants, their offspring could crowd out older varieties, leading to the extinction of genes we may someday need. For whenever a food crop suffers a catastrophic failure—as when blights destroyed the potato crop in Ireland in the 1840′s—breeders return to that crop’s center of diversity to find genes for resistance. Next time around, those genes may be nowhere to be found, a casualty of genetic pollution.

Greenpeace has called on the Mexican government to halt imports of genetically modified corn, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Genes released into the environment can replicate themselves ad infinitum. Indeed, some studies suggest that transgenes are particularly “sticky”—better at getting themselves around in nature than ordinary genes, possibly because of the viral and bacterial vectors used to engineer them. So far that’s just a hypothesis; we don’t really know how transgenes will behave once they’ve found their way into a crop’s center of diversity. What we do know, now, is that we’re about to find out.

There was plenty of talk about the events in New York, though if you listened carefully you could hear two different strains. Cornwall is full of transplanted New Yorkers (not to mention weekenders) who retain close ties to the city; their talk was all about who they knew and how difficult it was to get through to anyone on the phone. In the map of their lives, New York City is still in the middle. The true locals live at a greater psychological distance from New York.

Their experience of Sept. 11 seemed more national, mediated mainly by television and newspapers, rather than by the telephone. Same town, two different maps.

In a sense, the Cornwall Agricultural Fair is all about those maps. It is one of a handful of semihokey annual rituals we have (the Memorial Day bridge dance and frog jumping contest are two others) to help people here work out exactly what sort of place we live in. My guess is, we need the fair and the cow-chip raffle that tops off the event, because exactly where we live isn’t self-evident any more.

Is Cornwall the country? To the eye it still looks pretty New England countryish, a hilly patchwork of forests and open fields in northwestern Connecticut studded with Holsteins, though over the last few years many of the farms have been bought by former city people like me. Most of us still keep the fields open, but mainly for aesthetic reasons. And if the old dairy farm I live on produces anything these days, it’s mostly books and paintings (my wife is a landscape painter).

Baird’s, the old general store, still has a creaky wooden floor, but it now sells free-range chickens. And though the big wheel of Cheddar still sits on its ancient maple chopping block, these days you can also get fresh mozzarella for $6.99 a pound.

But Cornwall isn’t an incipient suburb yet either. We’re a solid two hours from the city, too far to commute, so the suburban tide hasn’t reached our shores. So Cornwall is neither the country nor the suburbs. Where then exactly do we live? We live in a town that holds an agricultural fair each fall—something that doesn’t happen in Pelham, N.Y., say, or Menlo Park, Calif.

Curiously, Cornwall didn’t hold an agriculture fair until we no longer had much agriculture to speak of; this year’s edition was only the 10th. What competition there is is really among gardeners, not farmers.

Fortunately, there are still a couple of working farms left in town to lend the fair a bit of agricultural cred. This means the hayride wagon is pulled by an ancient John Deere, and there are also a pair of actual cows to perform, if that’s the right word, in the cow-chip raffle. A cow-chip raffle, in case you haven’t come across one, is a fund-raising event (in our case for the Volunteer Fire Department) consisting of a fenced-in field divided into 1,024 squares, two cows (in our case, Zora, a bony Holstein, and Silly, a compact Jersey) and a keenly anticipated cowpat. Think of it as a slow, rectangular form of roulette, with the vicissitudes of the bovine digestive system in the role of Lady Luck. Five dollars buys you one square, and if Zora or Silly happens to relieve herself on yours, you leave $1,000 richer. No, urination doesn’t count.

It probably sounds a lot more exciting than it is, though each fall just about everyone in Cornwall buys at least one square and turns out in the field next to the town hall to wait and wait, and wait, and wait.

Twenty minutes spent waiting for a cow to defecate is not like any other 20 minutes in your life. Watching paint dry is allegro by comparison.

Unfortunately this year the cows took their sweet time. It was more than a half hour before Zora moseyed over to a square not far from the center (No. 610) and dropped an indisputable bull’s-eye. That last fact is important, because if the cowpies overlap two or more squares, it falls to the judges to determine the winner—a process that can slow things down even further. (The rules say the material must then be divided up and weighed, a procedure the selectman who serves as one of Cornwall’s cowpie judges, Gordon Ridgway, will tell you he does not relish.) Anyway, the judges trotted out onto the field, took a few evidentiary photographs, and announced that, since no one had bought Square 610, the prize would go to the owner of the square immediately to its north, as per the official rules.

That left the rest of us to drift back to our cars, the children disappointed not to have won, again, the grown-ups feeling pretty good, again, about living in a town that holds a cow-chip raffle and a traditional agricultural fair, even if the tradition is only 10 years old.

And yet this year, I couldn’t shake the sense that our September ritual, while it may look like a pure expression of rural values, in fact is an expression of something newer. A cow-chip raffle is a ritual of exurban life. The exurb has risen up in response to the suburbs, proposing yet another marriage between country and city.

Even the motto of the event—”organic gaming at its best”—sounds to me like an urban conceit, and the raffle itself a somewhat citified idea of country whimsy.

In this corner of Connecticut, we’re drawn to the idea of the country, but not the reality of having to make a living off the land. We are inventing traditions to unite us, something that is neither country nor suburb but somehow straddles the two. You have to look carefully to see the changes taking place. But down at the end of dirt roads you can find risk arbitrageurs working in trading rooms wired to Wall Street. The roads aren’t paved, because if we obliterate the countryside we risk the sort of suburbanism we are hoping to escape.

Whether this new marriage can hold is really the big question around here. We still don’t know what this new urban-rural culture will look like; exurbia doesn’t yet have its Cheevers and Updikes. What it does have are these semihokey annual rituals by which we affirm our fealty to the idea of country and give thanks there are still cows enough, and time, for people to place their bets, and wait.

By Susanne Antonetta.

242 pp. Washington:

Counterpoint. $26.

“This is the story of a body,” Susanne Antonetta tells us near the end of her arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the shadows of the 20th century’s most sinister molecules: the DDT, tritium, chlordane, benzene and plutonium that are now part of the American landscape. Antonetta, the author of three collections of poetry, spent her childhood summers in a bungalow on Barnegat Bay in southern Ocean County, one of the relatively low-income “sacrifice communities” where the toxic wastes of postwar civilization have pooled. We know a little about these places from the news, from books and movies like “Erin Brockovich” and “A Civil Action,” but for the most part we’ve glimpsed them only from a distance, through the eyes of crusading reporters and lawyers. Susanne Antonetta’s considerable achievement in “Body Toxic” is to devise a literary voice for the people who live in such places, for the bodies that have been “charged and reformed by the landscape” of pollution. Hers is one of those bodies.

Antonetta is fully conscious of the ways American writers have traditionally drawn lines of connection between landscape and character, place and psychology. It is precisely these lines she sets out to reconfigure—or blow up. She’s writing against childhood’s summery pastoral, the afternoons spent swimming in the Toms River, crabbing in Potter’s Creek, picking berries on the Bayville Road. All such scenes are doubled here, the childhood idyll recollected in the grown-up knowledge of its poisoning. So Potter’s Creek turns out to flow near Denzer & Schafer X-Ray, a negative-stripping plant that leached lead and chromium and mercury into the water. Along the shores of the Toms River, the Ciba-Geigy Corporation left 14,000 barrels of toxic chemicals and released into the drinking water “a poison plume a mile square and dozens of feet deep.” A nuclear plant five miles from her bungalow left the waters of Oyster Creek “jazzed with radioactive particles.”

Of course there was no way to know then that the landscapes of Antonetta’s childhood harbored such secrets, though hints of the percolating evil do bubble up in her narrative now and then, eruptions of the Superfund Gothic. Her parents on their evening walks notice the growing pile of Union Carbide drums on the old Reich Farm; the tap water “had an odor like food. It tasted like H2O pumped from hell’s drinking fountain: 10 times the legal limit of iron, manganese, a reek of sulfur. We all developed an unaccountable taste for it. Uncle Eddie bottled it and drank it at home.” This is a book in which the simplest acts—washing the dishes, say, or mixing up a pitcher of Tang—take on a retrospective horror. (It is also a book that will set the image of the Garden State back to the time before Springsteen and Roth and McPhee found its romance. This is the Jersey that still smells, of “something mustardy, something corrosive.”)

Like any memoirist, Antonetta is mining her past in the hope of explaining the woman she became, but in this construction of self, chemistry largely takes the place of psychology. This is because the woman she has become is virtually the sum of her body’s betrayals. “I have or have had one spectacular multiple pregnancy, a miscarriage, a radiation-induced tumor, a double uterus, asthma, endometriosis, growths on the liver,” and so on. Elsewhere we learn she is a manic-depressive who has been treated with lithium, has a seizure disorder and is a recovered drug addict.

What Antonetta has written is something new—a postpsychological memoir. For her it is chemistry, more than childhood trauma, that embodies the power of the past to shape the self. While she is an acid (and often quite funny) observer of her dysfunctional family, which brims with nearly as many poisons and unacknowledged secrets as the landscape, the family romance counts for less here than the periodic table and base pairs of DNA. “I wondered how much else of her was in me,” Antonetta writes at one point of her icy mother, “not the what-she-said-to-me and what-I-said-to-her stuff a shrink can pry out but what comes in through the blood and the cells.” She’s thinking here not just of her genetic inheritance but of the real possibility that DDE, a metabolite of DDT that collects in mothers’ milk, is responsible for the fact she has two uteruses and can no longer conceive.

Establishing cause and effect in these matters is never simple, and this presents a problem. Are we prepared, as readers, to accept that the etiology of our narrator’s troubled brain chemistry is to be found in the South Jersey landscape? Or that, as a teenager, she poisoned herself with drugs to compensate for “the years my landscape poisoned me” Not always; the journalist in me bridled occasionally at the easy commerce between biological fact and literary conceit. This is very much a poet’s book, gravitating toward the striking image and away from the linear narrative—which by its nature might have forced the author to try to deal more explicitly with cause and effect than she does.

Instead, Antonetta’s essayistic chapters themselves pool, like migrating chemicals, around such themes as DNA or drugs or water, a familiar literary topos she manages here to completely refresh. Throughout, her approach is associative rather than explanatory, but before long the sheer force of the writing makes the reader accept the agency of her migrating molecules: the DDT moving out of the land to take up residence in her mother’s breast, the calcium-loving isotopes searching out a place to rest in a body’s bones and teeth. (Under a Geiger counter, Ocean County baby teeth “twitch with picocuries of strontium 90.”)

Whatever resistance the reader may erect, Antonetta has anticipated. “I don’t expect anyone to explain what’s wrong with me,” she writes near the end of “Body Toxic.” “No one can explain what’s wrong with anybody, I don’t think. Though I don’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude either: clusters of children with brain disorders, toxic plumes and clouds, radiation spewing in the air. Every vital system of my body disrupted: an arrhythmic heart, a seizing brain, severe allergies, useless reproductive organs. Either it’s Sodom and this is the wrath of God or it’s the wrath of man, which is thoughtless, foolish and much more lasting.”

By the end of this dark, disturbing book, you realize Antonetta has posed a challenge to our prevailing notions of science and journalism and even literary narrative. “No one can explain what’s wrong with anybody”: yet why is it we will so much more readily accept the psychological explanations of self and suffering retailed in the common run of novels and literary memoirs? In books, at least, the Oedipal complex still trumps “what comes in through the blood and the cells.” Why not construct a childhood from the influences of loosed electrons and chemicals “fretted into our DNA” rather than the stuff a shrink can pry out? Science has been moving into this territory for some time now; Antonetta’s aim in her “environmental memoir” is to take literature there, too. It is a testament to her fearlessness and talent that she has largely succeeded.

Look a little closer, though, and you begin to see cracks in the pastoral narrative. It took me more than a year to notice, but the label on that carton of Organic Cow has been rewritten recently. It doesn’t talk about happy cows and Vermont family farmers quite so much anymore, probably because the Organic Cow has been bought out by Horizon, a Colorado company (referred to here, in proper pastoral style, as “the Horizon family of companies”). Horizon is a $127 million public corporation that has become the Microsoft of organic milk, controlling 70 percent of the retail market. Notice, too, that the milk is now “ultrapasteurized,” a process the carton presents as a boon to the consumer (it pushes the freshness date into the next millennium), but which of course also allows the company to ferry its milk all over the country.

When I asked a local dairyman about this (we still have one or two in town) he said that the chief reason to ultrapasteurize—a high-heat process that “kills the milk,” destroying its enzymes and many of its vitamins—is so you can sell milk over long distances. Arguably, ultrapasteurized organic milk is less nutritious than conventionally pasteurized conventional milk. This dairyman also bent my ear about Horizon’s “factory farms” out West, where thousands of cows that never encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced dry lot, eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines three times a day. So maybe Organic Cow milk isn’t quite as legible a product as I thought.

I wasn’t sure if the farmer had his facts straight (it would turn out he did), but he made me wonder whether I really knew what organic meant anymore. I understood organic to mean—in addition to being produced without synthetic chemicals—less processed, more local, easier on the animals. So I started looking more closely at some of the other organic items in the store. One of them in the frozen-food case caught my eye: an organic TV dinner (now there are three words I never expected to string together) from Cascadian Farm called Country Herb: “rice, vegetables and grilled chicken breast strips with a savory herb sauce.”

The text-heavy box it came in told the predictable organic stories—about the chicken (raised without chemicals and allowed “to roam freely in an outdoor yard”); about the rice and vegetables (grown without synthetic chemicals); even about the carton (recycled)—but when I got to the ingredients list, I felt a small jolt of cognitive dissonance. For one thing, the list of ingredients went on forever (31 ingredients in all) and included such enigmas of modern food technology as natural chicken flavor, high-oleic safflower oil, guar and xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan and natural grill flavor, this last culinary breakthrough achieved with something called “tapioca maltodextrin.” The label assured me that most of these additives are organic, which they no doubt are, and yet they seem about as jarring to my conception of organic food as, say, a cigarette boat on Walden Pond. But then, so too is the fact (mentioned nowhere on the label) that Cascadian Farm has recently become a subsidiary of General Mills, the third biggest food conglomerate in North America.

Clearly, my notion of supermarket pastoralism has fallen hopelessly out of date. The organic movement has become a $7.7 billion business: call it Industrial Organic. Although that represents but a fraction of the $400 billion business of selling Americans food, organic is now the fastest-growing category in the supermarket. Perhaps inevitably, this sort of growth—sustained at a steady 20 percent a year for more than a decade—has attracted the attention of the very agribusiness corporations to which the organic movement once presented a radical alternative and an often scalding critique. Even today, the rapid growth of organic closely tracks consumers’ rising worries about the conventional food supply—about chemicals, about additives and, most recently, about genetically modified ingredients and mad cow disease; every food scare is followed by a spike in organic sales. And now that organic food has established itself as a viable alternative food chain, agribusiness has decided that the best way to deal with that alternative is simply to own it. The question now is, What will they do with it? Is the word “organic” being emptied of its meaning?

II. The Road to Cascadian Farm
I don’t know about you, but I never expect the bucolic scenes and slogans on my packaged food to correspond to reality (where exactly is Nature’s Valley, anyway?), but it turns out the Cascadian Farm pictured on my TV dinner is a real farm that grows real food—though not quite the same food contained in my TV dinner.

Cascadian Farm occupies a narrow, breathtaking shelf of land wedged between the Skagit River and the North Cascades in the town of Rockport, Wash., 75 miles northeast of Seattle. Originally called the New Cascadian Survival and Reclamation Project, the farm was started in 1971 by Gene Kahn with the idea of growing food for the collective of environmentally minded hippies he had hooked up with in nearby Bellingham. At the time, Kahn was a 24-year-old grad-school dropout from the South Side of Chicago who, after reading “Silent Spring” and “Diet for a Small Planet,” determined to go back to the land, there to change “the food system.” That particular dream was not so outrageous in 1971—this was the moment, after all, when the whole counterculture was taking a rural turn—but Kahn’s success in actually achieving it surely is: he went on to become a pioneer of the organic movement and did much to move organic food into the mainstream. Today, Cascadian Farm’s farm is a General Mills showcase—a “P.R. farm,” as its founder freely acknowledges—and Kahn, erstwhile hippie farmer, is a General Mills vice president and a millionaire. He has become one of the most successful figures in the organic community and also perhaps one of the most polarizing; for to many organic farmers and activists, he has come to symbolize the takeover of the movement by agribusiness.

“Organic is becoming what we hoped it would be an alternative to,” says Roger Blobaum, who played a key role as a consumer advocate in pushing Congress to establish the U.S.D.A.’s fledgling organic program. “Gene Kahn’s approach is slowly but surely taking us in that direction. He’s one of the real pioneers, but there are people now who are suspicious of him.” Kahn is apt to call such people “purists,” “Luddites,” “romantics” and “ideologues” who have failed to outgrow the “antibusiness prejudices” of the 60′s. He’ll tell you he’s still committed to changing the food system—but now from “inside.” Few in the movement doubt his sincerity or commitment, but many will tell you the food system will much sooner change Kahn, along with the whole meaning of organic.

On an overcast morning not long ago, Kahn drove me out to Rockport from his company’s offices in Sedro-Woolley, following the twists of the Skagit River east in a new forest green Lexus with vanity plates that say “ORGANIC.” Kahn is a strikingly boyish-looking 54, and after you factor in a shave and 20 pounds, it’s not hard to pick his face out from the beards-beads-and-tractor photos on display in his office. Back in the farm’s early days, when Kahn supervised and mentored the rotating band of itinerant hippies who would show up to work a day or a week or a year on the farm, he drove a red VW Beetle and an ancient, temperamental John Deere. Kahn lived in a modest clapboard farmhouse on Cascadian Farm until 1993. Now he lives in a McMansion high in the hills overlooking Puget Sound.

Like a lot of the early organic farmers, Kahn had no idea what he was doing at first and suffered his share of crop failures. In 1971, organic agriculture was in its infancy—a few hundred scattered amateurs learning by trial and error how to grow food without chemicals, an ad hoc grass-roots R. & D. effort for which there was precisely no institutional support. Though it did draw on various peasant-farming models, modern-day organic agriculture is a relatively novel and remarkably sophisticated system with deep roots in the counterculture. The theoretical roots of organic agriculture go back a bit further, principally to the work of a British scientist by the name of Sir Albert Howard. Based on his experiments in India and observations of peasant farms in Asia, Howard’s 1940 treatise “An Agricultural Testament” demonstrated the connection between the health of the soil and the ability of plants to withstand diseases and pests. Howard’s agricultural heresies were praised in the pages of “The Whole Earth Catalog” (by Wendell Berry) and popularized by J.I. Rodale in Organic Gardening and Farming magazine—which claimed 700,000 readers in 1971, one of whom was Gene Kahn.

But the word “organic” around 1970 connoted a great deal more than a technique for growing vegetables. The movement’s pioneers set out to create not just an alternative mode of production (the farms) but of distribution (the co-ops and health-food stores) and even consumption. A “countercuisine” based on whole grains and unprocessed ingredients rose up to challenge conventional industrial “white bread” food. (“Plastic food” was an epithet you heard a lot.) For a host of reasons that seem risible in retrospect, brown food of all kinds (rice, bread, wheat, sugar) was deemed morally superior to white. Much more than just lunch, organic food was “an edible dynamic” that promised to raise consciousness about the economic order, draw critical lines of connection between the personal and the political. It was also, not incidentally, precisely what your parents didn’t eat.

Such was dinner and the dinner-table conversation at Cascadian Farm and countless other counterculture tables in the early 1970′s. As for an alternative mode of distributing food, Kahn recruited a hippie capitalist named Roger Weschler to help him figure out how to sell his strawberries before they rotted in the field. Weschler had helped found something called the Cooperating Community, a network of Seattle businesses committed to ecological principles and worker self-management. A new offshoot, Community Produce, began distributing the food grown at Cascadian Farm, and Weschler and Kahn set out, in the unembarrassed words of Cascadian Farm’s official corporate history, “to change the world’s food system.” Twenty-nine years later, Weschler is still at it, operating a produce brokerage devoted to supporting family farmers. And Kahn? Weschler, who has lost neither his scraggly black beard nor his jittery intensity, told me that by going corporate, his old friend “has made a very different choice.”

If Kahn were the least bit embarrassed by the compromises he has made in his organic principles since those long-ago days, he would surely have rewritten his company’s official history by now—and never sent me to interview Weschler. But as we walked around the farm talking about “how everything eventually morphs into the way the world is,” it seemed clear that Kahn has made his peace with that fact of life, decided that the gains outweighed the losses.

In time, Kahn became quite a good farmer and, to his surprise, an even better businessman. By the late 70′s, he had discovered the virtues of adding value to his produce by processing it (freezing blueberries and strawberries, making jams), and once Cascadian Farm had begun processing, Kahn discovered he could make more money buying produce from other farmers than by growing it himself. During the 80′s, Cascadian Farm became an increasingly virtual sort of farm, processing and marketing a range of packaged foods well beyond the Seattle area.

“The whole notion of a ‘cooperative community’ we started with gradually began to mimic the system,” Kahn recalled. “We were shipping food across the country, using diesel fuel—we were industrial organic farmers. I was bit by bit becoming more of this world, and there was a lot of pressure on the business to become more privatized.”

That pressure became irresistible in 1990, when in the aftermath of the Alar scare, Kahn nearly lost everything—and control of Cascadian Farm wound up in corporate hands. In the history of the organic movement, the Alar episode is a watershed, marking the birth pangs of the modern organic industry. After a somewhat overheated “60 Minutes” exposé on apple growers’ use of Alar, a growth-regulator that the Environmental Protection Agency declared a carcinogen, middle America suddenly discovered organic. “Panic for Organic” was the cover line of one newsweekly, and, overnight, demand from the supermarket chains soared. The ragtag industry wasn’t quite ready for prime time, however. Kahn borrowed heavily to finance an ambitious expansion, contracted with farmers to grow an awful lot of organic produce—and then watched in horror as the bubble of demand subsided along with the headlines about Alar. Kahn was forced to sell a majority stake in the company—to Welch’s—and set out on what he calls his “corporate adventure.”

“We were part of the food industry now,” he told me. “But I wanted to leverage that position to redefine the way we grow food—not what people want to eat or how we distribute it. That sure as hell isn’t going to change.” Kahn sees himself as very much the grown-up, a sober realist in a community of unreconstructed idealists. He speaks of selling out to Welch’s as “the time when I lost the company” but doesn’t trouble himself with second thoughts or regrets; in fact, it was all for the best. “Welch’s was my business school,” he said. Kahn seems to have no doubt that his path is the right path, not only for him but for the organic movement as a whole: “You have a choice of getting sad about all that or moving on. We tried hard to build a cooperative community and a local food system, but at the end of the day it wasn’t successful. This is just lunch for most people. Just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it’s just lunch.”

In the years after the Alar bubble burst in 1990, the organic industry recovered, embarking on a period of double-digit annual growth and rapid consolidation, as mainstream food companies began to take organic—or at least, the organic market—seriously. Gerber’s, Heinz, Dole, ConAgra and A.D.M. all created or acquired organic brands. Cascadian Farm itself became a miniconglomerate, acquiring Muir Glen, the California organic tomato processors, and the combined company changed its name to Small Planet Foods. Nineteen-ninety also marked the beginning of federal recognition for organic agriculture: that year, Congress passed the Organic Food Production Act. The legislation instructed the Department of Agriculture—which historically had treated organic farming with undisguised contempt—to establish uniform national standards for organic food and farming, fixing the definition of a word that had always meant different things to different people.

Settling on that definition turned out to be a grueling decadelong process, as various forces both within and outside the movement battled for control of a word that had developed a certain magic in the marketplace. Agribusiness fought to define the word as broadly as possible, in part to make it easier for mainstream companies to get into organic but also out of fear that anything deemed not organic would henceforth carry an official stigma. At first, the U.S.D.A., acting out of longstanding habit, obliged its agribusiness clients, issuing a watery set of standards in 1997 that, incredibly, allowed for the use of genetic modification, irradiation and sewage sludge in organic food production. But an unprecedented flood of public comment from outraged organic farmers and consumers forced the U.S.D.A. back to the drawing board, in what was widely viewed as a victory for the movement’s principles.

Yet while the struggle with agribusiness over the meaning of the word “organic” was making headlines, another, equally important struggle was under way at the U.S.D.A. between Big and Little Organic, and this time the outcome was decidedly more ambiguous. Could a factory farm be organic? Was an organic cow entitled to dine on pasture? Did food additives and synthetic chemicals have a place in organic processed food? If the answers to these seem like no-brainers, then you, too, are stuck in an outdated pastoral view of organic. Big Organic won all three arguments. The final standards, which will take effect next year, are widely seen as favoring the industry’s big players. The standards do an admirable job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible kind of farming, but as perhaps was inevitable, many of the philosophical values embedded in the word “organic” did not survive the federal rule-making process.

Gene Kahn served on the U.S.D.A.’s National Organic Standards Board from 1992 to 1997, playing a key role in making the standards safe for the organic TV dinner and a great many other processed organic foods. This was no small feat, for Kahn and his allies had to work around the 1990 legislation establishing organic standards, which prohibited synthetic food additives. Kahn argued that you couldn’t have organic processed foods without synthetics. Several of the consumer representatives on the standards board contended that this was precisely the point, and if no synthetics meant no organic TV dinners, then TV dinners were something organic simply shouldn’t do.

Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and an outspoken standards-board member, made the case against synthetics in a 1996 article that was much debated, “Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified?” She questioned whether organic should simply mirror the existing food supply, with its highly processed, salted and sugary junk food, or whether it should aspire to something better—a countercuisine. Kahn responded with market populism: if the consumer wants an organic Twinkie, then we should give it to him. As he put it to me on the drive back from Cascadian Farm, “Organic is not your mother.” In the end, it came down to an argument between the old movement and the new industry, and the new industry won: the final standards simply ignored the 1990 law, drawing up a “national list” of permissible additives and synthetics, from ascorbic acid to xanthan gum.

“If we had lost on synthetics,” Kahn told me, “we’d be out of business.”

Kahn’s victory cleared the way for the development of a parallel organic food supply: organic Heinz ketchup (already on the shelves in England), organic Hamburger Helper, organic Miracle Whip and, sooner or later, organic Twinkies. This is not a prospect everyone relishes. Even Kahn says: “I’m not looking forward to the organic Twinkie. But I will defend to the death anyone’s right to create one!” Eliot Coleman, a Maine farmer and writer whose organic techniques have influenced two generations of farmers, is repulsed by the whole idea: “I don’t care if the Wheaties are organic—I wouldn’t use them for compost. Processed organic food is as bad as any other processed food.”

III. The Soul of a New TV Dinner
Small Planet Foods’s headquarters in Sedro-Woolley occupies a downtown block of 19th-century brick storefronts in this faded and decidedly funky logging town. The storefronts have been converted into loftlike offices designed in the alternative-capitalist style: brick walls, air ducts and I-beams all in plain sight—no facades here. Since every day is dress-down day at Small Planet Foods, Friday is the day everybody takes his or her dog to work. I spent a Friday in Woolley, learning the ins and outs of formulating, manufacturing and selling an organic TV dinner.

Steve Harper, Small Planet’s chief food scientist, described the challenge of keeping a frozen herb sauce from separating unappetizingly (instead of modified food starch, organic food scientists rely on things like carrageenan, a seaweed derivative, to enhance “freeze-thaw stability”) and explained the algorithm governing the relative size and population of chicken chunks (fewer bigger chunks give a better “quality perception” than a larger number of dice-size cubes). He also explained how they get that salty processed-food taste right inside a chicken chunk: marinade-injecting hypodermic needles.

If Harper is responsible for the “recipe” of a Cascadian Farm TV dinner, it falls to Marv Shelby, the company’s vice president for operations, to get the meal “cooked.” Shelby, who came to Small Planet after a career in operations at Birds Eye, handles the considerable logistics involved in moving three dozen ingredients on time to the co-packing plant in Alberta, Canada, where they are combined in a microwaveable bowl. He described an elaborate (and energy-intensive) choreography of ingredients, packaging and processes that takes place over a half-dozen states and two countries. Fresh broccoli, for instance, travels from a farm in the Central Valley to a plant in Sanger, Calif., where it is cut into florets, blanched and frozen. From California, the broccoli is trucked to Edmonton, Alberta, there to meet up with pieces of organic chicken that have traveled from a farm in Petaluma, Calif., with a stop at a processing plant in Salem, Ore., where they were defrosted, injected with marinade, cubed, cooked and refrozen. They don’t call it processed food for nothing.

Most everyone I met at Small Planet Foods expressed a fervently held belief in the value of organic farming. There was a politics to their work, and if they had had to compromise certain ideals in order to adapt their products to the mainstream food system, all this was in service to a greater good they seemed never to lose sight of: converting the greatest number of acres of American farmland to organic agriculture. The solitary exception to this outlook was a vice president for marketing, the man most responsible for developing Cascadian’s new slogan, “Taste You Can Believe In.” R. Brooks Gekler is a marketing star at General Mills who was installed at Small Planet Foods immediately after the acquisition. A year later, Gekler, a handsome, well-spoken New York University M.B.A., was still something of an outsider at Small Planet Foods. “There are people here who regard me as the Antichrist,” he joked. I think it was around the time he explained to me, apropos of his colleagues, that “some principles can be an obstacle to success” that I understood why this might be so.

“I came here to help the company identify its consumer target,” Gekler explained crisply, “which is different from what they believed.” In marketing parlance, Small Planet (like the rest of the organic industry) had traditionally directed its products toward someone called “the true natural”—a committed, activist consumer. True naturals are the people on whom the organic food industry has been built, the outwardly directed, socially conscious consumers devoted to the proposition of “better food for a better planet.” But while their numbers are growing—true naturals now represent about 10 percent of the U.S. food market, as a large proportion of Gen X’ers join their ranks—the future of organic, General Mills says, lies with a considerably larger group of even more affluent consumers called the “health seekers.” It is to this group that Cascadian Farm is targeting its new TV dinners.

Health seekers, who today represent about a quarter of the market, are less “extrinsic”—that is, more interested in their own health than that of the planet. They buy supplements, work out, drink wine, drive imported cars. They aren’t interested in a countercuisine, which is why Cascadian’s new line of frozen entrees eschews whole grains and embraces a decidedly middle-of-the road “flavor profile.”

The chief reason the health seeker will buy organic is for the perceived health benefits. This poses a certain marketing challenge, however, since it has always been easier to make the environmental case for organic food than the health case. Although General Mills has put its new organic division under the umbrella of its “health initiatives” group, “organic” is not, at least officially, a health, nutrition or food-safety claim, a point that Dan Glickman, then secretary of agriculture, took pains to emphasize when he unveiled the U.S.D.A.’s new label in December: organic, he stressed, is simply “a production standard.”

“At first, I thought the inability to make hard-hitting health claims”—for organic—was a hurdle,” Gekler said when I asked him about this glitch. “But the reality is, all you have to say is ‘organic’—you don’t need to provide any more information.” These particular consumers—who pay attention to the media, to food scares and to articles like this one—take their own health claims to the word.

Suddenly the genius of Cascadian Farm’s new slogan dawned on me. “Taste You Can Believe In”: meaningless in and of itself, the slogan “allows the consumer to bring his or her personal beliefs to it,” Gekler explained. While the true natural hears social values in the phrase “Believe In,” the health seeker hears a promise of health and flavor. The slogan is an empty signifier, as the literary theorists would say, and what a good thing that is for a company like General Mills. How much better to let the consumers fill in the marketing message—healthier, more nutritious, no pesticides, more wholesome, sustainable, safer, purer—because these are controversial comparative claims that, as Gekler acknowledged, “make the conventional food industry very uncomfortable.”

Before I left his office, I asked Gekler about his own beliefs—whether or not he believed that organic food was better food. He paused for a long time, no doubt assessing the cost of either answer, and deftly punted.

“I don’t know yet.”

IV. Down on the Industrial Organic Farm
No farm I have ever visited before prepared me for the industrial organic farms I saw in California. When I think about organic farming, I think family farm, I think small scale, I think hedgerows and compost piles and battered pickup trucks. I don’t think migrant laborers, combines, thousands of acres of broccoli reaching clear to the horizon. To the eye, these farms look exactly like any other industrial farm in California—and in fact the biggest organic operations in the state today are owned and operated by conventional mega-farms. The same farmer who is applying toxic fumigants to sterilize the soil in one field is in the next field applying compost to nurture the soil’s natural fertility.

Is there something wrong with this picture? It all depends on where you stand. Gene Kahn makes the case that the scale of a farm has no bearing on its fidelity to organic principles and that unless organic “scales up” it will “never be anything more than yuppie food.” To prove his point, Kahn sent me to visit large-scale farms whose organic practices were in many ways quite impressive, including the Central Valley operation that grows vegetables for his frozen dinners and tomatoes for Muir Glen.

Greenways Organic is a successful 2,000-acre organic-produce operation tucked into a 24,000-acre conventional farm outside Fresno; the crops, the machines, the crews, the rotations and the fields were indistinguishable, and yet two very different kinds of industrial agriculture are being practiced here side by side.

In place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways’s organic fields are nourished by compost made by the ton at a horse farm nearby. Insects are controlled with biological agents and beneficial insects like lacewings. Frequent and carefully timed tilling, as well as propane torches, keeps down the weeds, perhaps the industrial organic farmer’s single stiffest challenge. This approach is at best a compromise: running tillers through the soil so frequently is destructive to its tilth, yet weeding a 160-acre block of broccoli by hand is unrealistic.

Since Greenways grows the same crops conventionally and organically, I was interested to hear John Diener, one of the farm’s three partners, say he knew for a fact that his organic crops were “better,” and not only because they hadn’t been doused with pesticide. When Diener takes his tomatoes to the cannery, the organic crop reliably receives higher Brix scores—a measure of the sugars in fruits and vegetables. It seems that crops grown on nitrogen fertilizer take up considerably more water, thereby diluting their nutrients, sugars and flavors. The same biochemical process could explain why many people—including the many chefs who swear by organic ingredients—believe organic produce simply tastes better. With less water in it, the flavor and the nutrients of a floret of organic broccoli will be more concentrated than one grown with chemical fertilizers.

It’s too simple to say that smaller organic farms are automatically truer to the organic ideal than big ones. In fact, the organic ideal is so exacting—a sustainable system that requires not only no synthetic chemicals but also few purchased inputs of any kind and that returns as much to the soil as it removes—that it is most often honored in the breach. Yet the farmers who come closest to achieving this ideal do tend to be smaller in scale. These are the farmers who plant dozens of different crops in fields that resemble quilts and practice long and elaborate rotations, thereby achieving the rich biodiversity in space and time that is the key to making a farm sustainable.

For better or worse, these are not the kinds of farms Small Planet Foods does business with today. It’s simply more efficient to buy from one 1,000-acre farm than 10 100-acre farms. Indeed, Cascadian Farm the corporation can’t even afford to use produce from Cascadian Farm the farm: it’s too small. So the berries grown there are sold at a roadside stand, while the company buys berries for freezing from as far away as Chile.

The big question is whether the logic of an industrial food chain can be reconciled to the logic of the natural systems on which organic agriculture has tried to model itself. Put another way, Is “industrial organic” a contradiction in terms?

Kahn is convinced it is not, but others both inside and outside his company see a tension. Sarah Huntington is one of Cascadian’s oldest employees. She worked alongside Kahn on the farm and at one time or another has held just about every job in the company. “The maw of that processing plant beast eats 10 acres of cornfield an hour,” she told me. “And you’re locked into planting a particular variety like Jubilee that ripens all at once and holds up in processing. So you see how the system is constantly pushing you back toward monoculture, which is anathema in organic. But that’s the challenge—to change the system more than it changes you.”

One of the most striking ways Small Planet Foods is changing the system is by helping conventional farms convert a portion of their acreage to organic. Several thousand acres of American farmland are now organic as a result of the company’s efforts, which go well beyond offering contracts to providing instruction and even management. Kahn has helped to prove to the skeptical that organic—dismissed as “hippie farming” not very long ago—can work on a large scale. The environmental benefits of this educational process shouldn’t be underestimated. And yet the industrialization of organic comes at a price. The most obvious is consolidation: today five giant farms control fully one-half of the $400 million organic produce market in California. Partly as a result, the price premium for organic crops is shrinking. This is all to the good for expanding organic’s market beyond yuppies, but it is crushing many of the small farmers for whom organic has represented a profitable niche, a way out of the cheap-food economics that has ravaged American farming over the last few decades. Indeed, many of the small farmers present at the creation of organic agriculture today find themselves struggling to compete against the larger players, as the familiar, dismal history of American agriculture begins to repeat itself in the organic sector.

This has opened up a gulf in the movement between Big and Little Organic and convinced many of the movement’s founders that the time has come to move “beyond organic”—to raise the bar on American agriculture yet again. Some of these innovating farmers want to stress fair labor standards, others quality or growing exclusively for local markets. In Maine, Eliot Coleman has pioneered a sophisticated market garden entirely under plastic, to supply his “food shed” with local produce all winter long; even in January his solar-heated farm beats California on freshness and quality, if not price. In Virginia, Joel Salatin has developed an ingenious self-sufficient rotation of grass-fed livestock: cattle, chickens and rabbits that take turns eating, and feeding, the same small pasture. There are hundreds of these “beyond organic” farmers springing up now around the country. The fact is, however, that the word “organic”—having entered the vocabulary of both agribusiness and government—is no longer these farmers’ to redefine. Coleman and Salatin, both of whom reject the U.S.D.A. organic label, are searching for new words to describe what it is they’re doing. Michael Ableman, a “beyond organic” farmer near Santa Barbara, Calif., says: “We may have to give up on the word ‘organic,’ leave it to the Gene Kahns of the world. To be honest, I’m not sure I want the association, because what I’m doing on my farm is not just substituting materials.”

Not long ago at a conference on organic agriculture, a corporate organic farmer suggested to a family farmer struggling to survive in the competitive world of industrial organic agriculture that he “should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market.” The small farmer replied: “I believe I developed that niche 20 years ago. It’s called ‘organic.’ And now you’re sitting on it.”

V. Gene Kahn Visits the Mothership
In March, I accompanied Gene Kahn on one of his monthly visits to the General Mills headquarters, a grassy corporate campus strewn with modern sculptures in the suburbs outside Minneapolis. In deference to Fortune 500 etiquette, I put on a suit and tie but quickly realized I was overdressed: Kahn had on his usual khakis and a denim work shirt embroidered with a bright red Muir Glen tomato. When I said something, Kahn told me he makes a point of not changing his clothes when he goes to Minneapolis. I get it: an organic farmer in an embroidered work shirt is part of what General Mills was acquiring when it acquired Small Planet Foods. Yet this particular organic farmer is presumably a far sight wealthier than most of his new corporate colleagues: when General Mills bought Small Planet Foods for an estimated $70 million, Kahn still owned 10 percent of the company.

Together, Kahn and I toured General Mills’s Bell Technical Center, a sprawling research-and-development facility where some 900 food scientists, chemists, industrial designers and nutritionists dream up and design both the near- and long-term future of American food. This was Kahn’s first visit to the facility, and as we moved from lab to lab, I could see his boyish enthusiasm mounting as he collected new ideas and business cards.

In the packaging-design lab, even before Arne Brauner could finish explaining how he engineered the boxes, bowls and cups in which General Mills sells its products, Kahn asked him, “Has there ever been a completely edible packaging for food?” Brauner rubbed his chin for a moment.

“The sausage. That was probably the first.”

Kahn now told him about the bowl in which Cascadian Farm sold its frozen entrees. Plastic would have turned off the organic consumer, he explained, so they were using coated paperboard, which isn’t readily recyclable. Would it be possible, Kahn wondered, to make a microwaveable bowl out of biodegradable food starch? Brauner said he had heard about a cornstarch clamshell for fast-food burgers and offered to look into it. Kahn took his card.

Kahn had another, more off-the-wall request for Perry May, the man in charge of General Mills’s machine shop. This is where engineers and machinists make the machines that make the food. Kahn asked Perry if his shop could help develop a prototype for a new weeding machine he had dreamed up for organic farmers. “It would be an optical weeder with a steam generator on board,” Kahn explained. “The scanner would distinguish between a weed and a corn plant, say, and then zap the weed with a jet of hot steam.” May thought it might be doable; they exchanged cards.

“I feel like a kid in a candy store,” Kahn told me afterward. “Organic has never had these kinds of resources at its disposal.”

On the drive back from Bell, Kahn grew positively effervescent about the “organic synergies” that could come from General Mills’s acquisition of Pillsbury, a $10.5 billion deal now awaiting F.T.C. approval. Pillsbury owns Green Giant, and the prospect of being able to draw on that company’s scientists (and patents) has planted agronomic fantasies in the fevered brain of the former farmer: broccoli specifically bred for organic production (“We’ve never had anything like that!”); an organic version of Niblets, Green Giant’s popular proprietary corn; carrots bred for extra vitamin content. In fact, Kahn got so worked up spinning his vision of the industrial organic future that he got us lost.

So this was how Kahn proposed to change the American food system from within: by leveraging its capital and know-how on behalf of his dream. Which prompts the question, Just how does the American food system feel about all this? As Kahn and I made the rounds of General Mills’s senior management, he in his work shirt, I in my suit, I tried to find out how these tribunes of agribusiness regarded their new vice president’s organic dream, exactly how it fit into their vision of the future of food.

The future of food, I learned, is toward ever more health and convenience—the two most important food trends today—at no sacrifice of taste. “Our corporate philosophy,” as one senior vice president, Danny Strickland, put it, “is to give consumers what they want with no trade-offs.” Organic fits into this philosophy in so far as the company’s market research shows that consumers increasingly want it and believe it’s healthier.

The acquisition of a leading organic food company is part of a company-wide “health initiative”—along with adding calcium to various product lines and developing “functional foods” like Harmony, a soy-and-calcium-fortified cereal aimed at menopausal women. When I asked Ian Friendly, the sharp, young executive in charge of the company’s health-initiative group, if this meant that General Mills believed organic was more healthful than conventional food, he deftly shifted vocabulary, suggesting that “wellness’ is perhaps a better word.” Wellness is more of a whole gestalt or lifestyle, which includes things like yoga, massage and working out. It quickly became clear that in the eyes of General Mills, organic is not a revolution so much as a market niche, like menopausal women or “ethnics,” and that health is really a matter of consumer perception. You did not have to buy into the organic “belief system” to sell it. When I asked Strickland if he believed that organic food was in any way better, he said: “Better? It depends. Food is subjective. Perceptions depend on circumstances.”

I got much the same response from other General Mills executives. The words “better food,” uttered so unselfconsciously in Sedro-Woolley, rang in their offices like a phrase from a dead language. Steve Sanger, the company’s chairman, said: “I’m certain it’s better for some people. It depends on their particular beliefs.” Sheri Schellhaas, vice president for research and development, said, “The question is, Do consumers believe organic is healthier?” Marc Belton, a senior vice president for cereals and the executive most responsible for the Small Planet acquisition, put it this way: “Is it better food? . . . You know, so much of life is what you make of it. If it’s right for you, it’s better—if you feel it’s better, it is.”

At General Mills, it would seem, the whole notion of objective truth has been replaced by a kind of value-neutral consumer constructivism, in which each sovereign shopper constructs his own reality: “Taste You Can Believe In.” Kahn understands that there is no percentage in signing onto the organic belief system, not when you also have Trix and Go-Gurt and Cinnamon Toast Milk and Cereal Bars to sell, yet, as he acknowledged later, contemporary corporate relativism drives him a little nuts.

Old-fashioned objective truth did make a brief reappearance when Kahn and I visited the quality-assurance lab deep in the bowels of the Bell center. This is where technicians grind up Trix and Cheerios and run them through a mass spectrometer to make sure pesticide residues don’t exceed F.D.A. “tolerances.” Pesticide residues are omnipresent in the American food supply: the F.D.A. finds them in 30 to 40 percent of the food it samples. Many of them are known carcinogens, neurotoxins and endocrine disrupters—dangerous at some level of exposure. The government has established acceptable levels for these residues in crops, though whether that means they’re safe to consume is debatable: in setting these tolerances the government has historically weighed the risk to our health against the benefit—to agriculture, that is. The tolerances also haven’t taken into account that children’s narrow diets make them especially susceptible or that the complex mixtures of chemicals to which we’re exposed heighten the dangers.

Harry Leichtweis, a senior research analytical chemist at General Mills, tests for hundreds of different chemical compounds, not only the 400 pesticides currently approved by the E.P.A. but also the dozens of others that have been banned over the years as their dangers became known. Decades later, many of these toxins remain in the soil and continue to show up in our food. “We still find background levels of DDT and chlordane,” he explained. Now the lab tests Small Planet Foods’s products too. So I asked Leichtweis, who is a pale, rail-thin scientist with Coke-bottle specs and no discernible affect, if organic foods, as seen from the perspective of a mass spectrometer, are any different.

“Well, they don’t contain pesticide.”

Leichtweis had struck a blow for old-fashioned empiricism. Whatever else you might say about an organic TV dinner, it almost certainly contains less pesticide than a conventional one. Gene Kahn was beaming.

VI. Local Farm
My journey through the changing world of organic food has cured me of my naive supermarket pastoralism, but it hasn’t put me off my organic feed. I still fill my cart with the stuff. The science might still be sketchy, but common sense tells me organic is better food—better, anyway, than the kind grown with organophosphates, with antibiotics and growth hormones, with cadmium and lead and arsenic (the E.P.A. permits the use of toxic waste in fertilizers), with sewage sludge and animal feed made from ground-up bits of other animals as well as their own manure. Very likely it’s better for me and my family, and unquestionably it is better for the environment. For even if only 1 percent of the chemical pesticides sprayed by American farmers end up as residue in our food, the other 99 percent are going into the environment—which is to say, into our drinking water, into our rivers, into the air that farmers and their neighbors breathe. By now it makes little sense to distinguish the health of the individual from that of the environment.

Still, while it surely represents real progress for agribusiness to be selling organic food rather than fighting it, I’m not sure I want to see industrialized organic become the only kind in the market. Organic is nothing if not a set of values (this is better than that), and to the extent that the future of those values is in the hands of companies that are finally indifferent to them, that future will be precarious.

Also, there are values that the new corporate—and government—construction of “organic” leaves out, values that once were part and parcel of the word but that have since been abandoned as impractical or unprofitable. I’m thinking of things like locally grown, like the humane treatment of animals, like the value of a shorter and more legible food chain, the preservation of family farms, even the promise of a countercuisine. To believe that the U.S.D.A. label on a product ensures any of these things is, as I discovered, naive.

Yet if the word “organic” means anything, it means that all these things are ultimately connected: that the way we grow food is inseparable from the way we distribute food, which is inseparable from the way we eat food. The original premise, remember, the idea that got Kahn started in 1971, was that the whole industrial food system—and not just chemical agriculture—was in some fundamental way unsustainable. It’s impossible to read the papers these days without beginning to wonder if this insight wasn’t prophetic. I’m thinking, of course, of mad cow disease, of the 76 million cases of food poisoning every year (a rate higher than in 1948), of StarLink corn contamination, of the 20-year-old farm crisis, of hoof-and-mouth disease and groundwater pollution, not to mention industrial food’s dubious “solutions” to these problems: genetic engineering and antibiotics and irradiation. Buying food labeled organic protects me from some of these things, but not all; industrial organic may well be necessary to fix this system, but it won’t be sufficient.

Many of the values that industrial organic has jettisoned in recent years I find compelling, so I’ve started to shop with them in mind. I happen to believe, for example, that farms produce more than food; they also produce a kind of landscape, and if I buy my organic milk from halfway across the country, the farms I like to drive by every day will eventually grow nothing but raised ranch houses. So instead of long-haul ultrapasteurized milk from Horizon, I’ve started buying my milk, unpasteurized, from a dairy right here in town, Local Farm. Debra Tyler is organic, but she doesn’t bother mentioning the fact on her label. Why? “My customers can see for themselves what I’m doing here,” she says. What she’s doing is milking nine pastured Jersey cows whose milk changes taste and hue with the seasons.

“Eat Your View!” is a save-the-farms bumper sticker you see in Europe now. I guess that’s part of what I’m trying to do. But I’m also trying to get away from the transcontinental strawberry (5 calories of food energy, I’ve read, that it takes 435 calories of fossil-fuel energy to deliver to my door) and the organic “home meal replacement” sold in a package that will take 500 years to decompose. (Does that make me a True Natural?) So I’ve tracked down a local source for grass-fed beef (Chris Hopkins), eggs (Debra Tyler again) and maple syrup (Phil Hart), and on Saturday mornings I buy produce at a farmer’s market in a neighboring town. I also have a line on a C.S.A. (“community supported agriculture”), or “subscription farm,” a new marketing scheme from Europe that seems to be catching on here. You put up a couple of hundred dollars every spring and then receive a weekly box of produce through the summer. Not all of the farmers I’m buying from are certified organic. But I talk to them, see what they’re up to, learn how they define the term. Sure, it’s more trouble than buying organic food at the supermarket, but I’m resolved to do it anyway. Because organic is not the last word, and it’s not just lunch.

We humans like to think we call all the shots in our gardens; like local forces of natural selection, we decide which species survive and which disappear. Even our grammar makes the terms of the relationship perfectly clear: I choose the plants; I harvest the crops. It’s a world of subjects and objects, and here in the garden, as in nature generally, we are the sovereign subjects.

But the longer I garden, and watch the bees at work beside me, the more I think that that grammar is completely wrong. No doubt the bee, too, thinks he’s got the better of the blossom, but the truth is that the flower has cleverly manipulated him into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom. This is the classic example of what scientists call coevolution. In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bees and the flowers, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors: food for the bee, gene-transport for the plants.

Matters between me and the potatoes I’m planting really aren’t any different. We, too, are partners in a coevolutionary relationship, as we have been since the birth of agriculture. Like the flower, whose form and scent and color have been selected by bees over countless generations, the size and taste of the potato have been selected over generations by us—by Incas and Irishmen and McDonald’s customers. Bees and humans alike have their criteria for selection: symmetry and sweetness for the bee, heft and nutritional value for the human.

The fact that one of us has evolved to become intermittently aware of these desires makes no difference whatsoever to the flower or the potato. All the plants care about is what every organism cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error, these plant species have discovered that the best way to accomplish that is to induce animals—bees, people—to spread their genes far and wide. How? By playing on those animals’ desires, conscious and otherwise. The flowers and spuds that do this most effectively are the ones that get to be fruitful and multiply.

So did I choose to plant “my” potatoes or did the spuds make me do it? Both. I can remember the exact moment the fingerlings seduced me, showing off their knobby charms in the pages of a seed catalog. The tasty-sounding “buttery yellow flesh” sealed it. A trivial, semiconscious event, it never occurred to me that our catalog encounter had any evolutionary consequence whatsoever. But evolution consists of countless trivial, unconscious events, and in the continuing evolution of the potato, my perusal of that catalog is one of them.

As soon as you start looking at things this way, the garden appears before you in a whole new light, the manifold delights it offers to the eye and nose and tongue no longer quite so innocent or passive. All these foods and flowers, which we’re accustomed to regarding as merely the objects of our desire, are also, you realize, acting on us, getting us to do things for them they can’t do for themselves. So who’s really domesticating whom?

I find something heartening in this upside-down perspective. For centuries now, we humans have overestimated our power over nature, with the result that we’ve lost the knack of imagining ourselves in nature, as one species existing in a web of other species—which is, of course, what we still are and will always be. Even the “invention of agriculture”—perhaps the most far-reaching change to this planet we’ve wrought—is something we could never have pulled off without the active participation of other species, the ones that seized the new evolutionary opportunity when it presented itself. So the grasses and cows, the apples and the poppies began to evolve in the direction of our desires—for nutrition, for sweetness, even for intoxication. And we in turn remade the earth (and ourselves) to accommodate them, plowing the soil, chopping down trees and turning into farmers.

The wonder is that we don’t look upon domesticated species—the grasses, the cows, the apples, the dogs—with more respect for their evolutionary cleverness. Why is it the wolf wins our admiration, when it is the dog at our feet that’s natural history’s big winner? So this afternoon when you’re out mowing the lawn, blithely assuming you’ve got all those crew-cut blades marching crisply to your orders, consider all that the grasses have achieved. I’d always assumed that the weekly mowing does the grasses no favor, is strictly for our benefit, but of course mowing’s ecological point is to keep the forest at bay. Along with the fields of wheat and the meadows, lawns are something the grasses have done to us, a most ingenious strategy for conquering the trees.

Claude Hope, known in horticultural circles as “the father of the impatiens,” was a legendary flower breeder and seedsman. A Texan by birth, he died last July, at the age of 93, at Linda Vista, his flower farm in Dulce Nombre de Jesus, Costa Rica. It was there in the 1950′s that Hope founded a seed company that became a pioneer in the mass production of hybrid flower seed, which has proved a boon not only to homeowners looking to colorize their yards on the cheap but, even more so, to the plant species involved.

Consider the impatiens, a species virtually unheard of before it made Claude Hope’s acquaintance. The natural history of this plant can be divided into two eras: Before Claude (B.C.), and After (A.C.). In less than a quarter century A.C., the impatiens has insinuated itself into the American landscape like no other flower before or since, conquering not only its shadier suburban yards but also its strip-mall window boxes and the tire planters in front of America’s nicer filling stations.

B.C., Impatiens wallerana whiled away the eons living the obscure life of a tropical weed native to the stretch of east Africa between Mozambique and Tanganyika. The plant, a denizen of riverbanks and the shady jungle understory, looked nothing like the way it does now: growing to a height of three feet, Impatiens was a gangly upright annual that bore only a few inconspicuous blooms on top, typically in orange. Early on the plant did show some Darwinian talent for getting itself around: it evolved an ingenious, spring-loaded seedpod that, when touched or otherwise stimulated, would—impatiently—fling its seeds halfway across a river. It also somehow managed to get itself transported to Central America, where it took up residence in the shade of fence rows, and where, one day in the 1940′s, it caught the eye of Hope, who would later recall being “immediately enchanted.”

That enchantment would prove to be the impatiens’ big break, its ticket to world horticultural domination. We think of domestication as something people do to certain pliant plants and animals, but it makes just as much sense to view the process as something the more clever plants and animals do to us—a sophisticated evolutionary strategy for increasing their number and range. By evolving in such a way as to gratify human desires, a handful of adaptable plant species have induced certain visionary humans—humans like Luther Burbank and Johnny Appleseed and Claude Hope—to spread their species’ genes far and wide.

We say that Hope “bred” the impatiens, crossing the spindly orange weed over and over again until the plant had evolved into a compact, branching, floriferous mound that blooms its head off in no fewer than eight colors. But of course it was the impatiens that proposed all those chance mutations and genetic combinations in the first place; what Hope did was create a great many interesting sexual opportunities for the plant, and then select the offspring that would survive and prosper.

And survive and prosper they did. Hope introduced the Elfin series in 1969, followed soon thereafter by Super Elfin and the Dazzlers, and within a decade or so the impatiens had acquired a vast new habitat, becoming the most popular bedding plant in America. As is usually the case in such evolutionary success stories, the impatiens had the good fortune to find itself in a wide-open ecological niche, called the Postwar American Suburb. By the early 70′s, the trees and shrubs that the first generation of suburbanites had planted around their new split levels and Capes had matured, and a flower that could thrive in their deepening shade had it made. Before long, Hope’s shade-loving hybrids had won the Darwinian competition to spread their leaves and flowers around the ankles of America’s maples, beneath the poised hindquarters of her dogs and above her decks and patios, spilling out from white polyethylene hanging baskets. Today Americans plant more than 800 million impatiens every year, the equivalent of about 29 square miles. Virtually all those plants can trace their genes to plants grown by Claude Hope at Linda Vista.

A success of such magnitude is bound to inspire derision, and certainly the impatiens has found its ungrateful carpers. (Hello.) Except for the white ones, which have their place in the shade garden, I confess I share the plant snob’s active disdain for the flower. There’s something synthetic about the flat, Day-Glo hues they come in; also, the sheer relentlessness of an impatiens in bloom seems somehow suspect, and very quickly wearies. Planting a bed of impatiens is a step up from putting out plastic plants, I’ll grant you, but it seems to me the two acts exist on the same aesthetic continuum.

We humans tend to be hard on evolution’s winners—the crows and the pigeons, the weeds and the grasses and all the other cosmopolitans in nature who’ve gone far by hitching their wagons to our own. These species never seem to get the respect we shower on the wild, the rare and the vanishing. But the impatiens has prospered by giving us exactly what Claude Hope understood we were looking for in a flower, and if that has turned out to be a plant with the durability and bright relentlessness of plastic, this is not the impatiens’ failing so much as it is its genius.

A lot more of the same, it’s true: since I left Long Island in the 70′s, resolving henceforth to live somewhere more in the middle of things, more real, the suburbs have quietly and steadily expanded. And then the day came, a few years ago, when I read in the paper that for the first time in history a majority of Americans now lived in the suburbs. America had officially become “a suburban nation”—which sounded to me like one of those utterly weightless demographic truths, empirically verifiable, but without any real echo in experience. For wasn’t this really just a change in quantity, not kind? The relative size of middle and fringe may have shifted, but surely not their relative weight.

At least this is what I assumed. It’s only recently that I’ve felt any compulsion to go back to Woodbury to test my assumptions, and that was mostly because I needed a place to set this essay. What I found when I got there was a good bit more than that. What I found looks a lot like a whole new country—or at least a place for which “suburb” is no longer quite the right word.

From the time I was 5 until I got out of high school I lived in the Gates near the corner of Juneau and Fairbanks Boulevards. In all that time, I never really noticed just how goofily dissonant those names are, with their improbable conjunction of Yukon pluck and Old World prissiness. Yet these place names, and the conflicting dreams they embody, tell you just about all you need to know about the place and the time.

The development went in on the site of an old North Shore estate that had been subdivided into acre lots during the Suburban Revolution; the developer decided to preserve the wrought-iron entrance gates to give a bit of aristocratic tone to his shiny middle-class development. As for the whole Yukon theme, ground was broken in 1960, soon after Alaska had become a state, and the Gates fashioned itself a forward-looking, even pioneerish kind of place. At the time Woodbury was on the suburban frontier, still mostly farm fields and forest, and the Gates aimed to distinguish itself from the cookie-cutter subdivisions then spreading out across Long Island.

In the same way the suburbs began as a reaction against city life, each new incarnation of suburbia has defined itself in opposition to some earlier, superseded ideal: middle-class utopias keeping one step ahead of history. In the beginning the suburban frontier stood in places like Brooklyn Heights, first made accessible by steam ferry in 1814, but the city quickly followed, folding Brooklyn’s row houses into its expanding grid. To prevent that kind of thing from happening again, the next new place (epitomized by Llewellyn Park, built in New Jersey in 1853, and Riverside, built near Chicago in 1868) was carefully planned to keep the city permanently at bay. It would be an ungridded community of free-standing houses in a park, linked to the distant city by trolley or train. Then, beginning in the 1920′s, the 19th-century railroad suburb was superseded by more far-flung subdivisions organized around the automobile and, after the war, the mass-production house pioneered by the Levitts.

By 1960, when my parents went house hunting on Long Island, Levittown was passe, and the next new place—the un-Levittown—promised to be the Gates of Woodbury, where the lots were generally a sprawling acre. Instead of identical houses lined up like sparrows on a wire, the developer offered three up-to-date models (ranch, split-level, and colonial), laid out his roads in sweeping, pointless curves and sited the houses so far back on their wooded acres that each appeared lost in a reverie of being a mansion. (Sometimes I think this is what is really meant by a “dream house”: the recumbent ranches dreaming of California, the colonnaded white colonials dreaming of Tara.) But if the Alaska angle implied the pastless potential of the next great American place, what was with those prissy “boulevards” and “drives,” all those “ways” and “terraces” and, for the cul-de- sacs, “courts” Understand that in the suburbs a developer will go to heroic lengths not to call a street a street. Street says city, and city is precisely the last thing you want to say. Whereas boulevard said fancy, said sophisticated, and if this effeteness jangled alongside muscular Alaska, that evidently didn’t bother the developer or his buyers.

Finding your way back to your suburban childhood home is harder than you might think. I didn’t know anyone who still lived in the Gates—my folks moved out in 1972, and most of their neighbors had headed down to Florida the minute the kids left for college, there to recreate a grayer, warmer Gates in Boca Raton. (One thing the burbs have done to America is to recast its geography along purely demographic lines.) To find out who lived in my old house, I had to send it a letter, addressed to “current resident.” (In quotes, to make sure it didn’t get tossed.) “Current resident” turned out to be Stephen and Jena Hall, and they graciously invited me to visit. Since I didn’t know anybody to stay with, “going home” to Woodbury meant spending the night in a $79 room in the Executive Inn on Jericho Turnpike, the main commercial strip.

My first impression of Woodbury, after rolling off the expressway onto Jericho Turnpike, was disorientation. Every landmark on my mental map of the area had been stripped and replaced by a big-box retailer, such that it took me the better part of two days to locate my junior high school, its unmarked turn off Jericho having been swallowed up by superstores. I noticed that the brands were all high-end, the kind my mother had had to drive all the way to Manhattan for.

Actually the brands should have been my tip-off that this was not the same place I left, that it had a completely different relationship to Manhattan. But I didn’t put that together until I turned onto Woodbury Road, passed a bunch of newer developments (including the Woodbury Estates and the almost completely flat Rolling Hills) and made the left onto Froehlich Farm Boulevard. Whenever “farm” (or “forest,” or “fairground” or anything venerably rural) is honored in a suburban place name, you can bet the thing is history, and such was emphatically the case with the old Froehlich farm.

The pumpkin field to which Charlie DeSalvo and I used to drag our wagons each fall for the purpose of committing petty larceny had sprouted a half-dozen smoked-glass office buildings, blocky islands in a glittering sea of really nice cars. Gateways Executive Mall, the sign said (I half-expected to see “of Froehlich Farm”), and it listed a phalanx of law firms, insurance companies, medical practices, banks and high-tech firms. Each of those really nice cars represented at least one really good white-collar job, and there must have been a thousand of them right here, smack in the middle of the pumpkin field that backed up against Fairbanks Boulevard.

“The city”: we led centripetal lives in those days, our heads bent toward Manhattan as if it were the sun. Which in some sense it was, the city being the source not only of all money but also of entertainment and information and—what was especially important to us as teenagers—authenticity. The suburbs, we believed, were fake; after all, we had watched them rise like stage sets on the farm fields, seen the instantaneous lawns rolled out over the raw dirt like new linoleum. This creation of a new life ex nihilo was of course exactly what our parents liked about the place, but what was to them a blank canvas was to us an existential void. Nothing was original except, well, except us and these childhoods we were having—a thought disturbing enough to make us wonder if those were somehow fake, too, “sub” to something realer.

Like lots of other dads in the Gates, mine commuted to a job in the real world every day, leaving the house before I woke up and rarely getting home before the dinner dishes had been cleared. Only a few of the moms had jobs, but they’d dress up and drive in a couple of times a month, to shop, catch a matinee, meet the dads for a fancy dinner and a “first run” movie.

Even before kids were old enough to solo on the L.I.R.R., we looked to the city as the source of our styles and shows and news, an all-powerful broadcast antenna to whose frequency we always tried to stay tuned. Tuesday nights Cousin Brucie handed down the Top 40 from Midtown Manhattan, and by Wednesday morning the Sam Goody at the Walt Whitman Mall would have rearranged its shelves accordingly. Later on, the more time you spent in the city, the cooler you were, because you had personally bathed in coolness’s headwaters, at the Fillmore East, say, or the Thalia, or the Eighth Street Bookshop.

It doesn’t seem as though Long Island’s cultural and economic antennas point west in quite the same way anymore. Oh, sure, the Long Island Expressway still creeps every morning, but often now it’s creeping in both directions, and a lot of those cars are heading to places like the Gateways Executive Mall (Exit 45), rather than to Manhattan. The retail, which once helped light up the city in suburban eyes, is no longer any different: the Walt Whitman shopping area is now basically Lexington Avenue and 59th Street—Gap, Banana Republic, Nine West, Barnes & Noble, J. Crew and Tower Records, all anchored by a Bloomingdale’s. But whether this represents the colonization of the suburbs by the city or the opposite is a question.

Radio and network TV still originate in Manhattan, but the newer media have traded broadcasting’s radiating waves for centerless webs of wire. Who can say where in the world cable TV comes from? (A lot of it from Long Island, actually: Cablevision’s headquarters happen to be in Bethpage.) And the Internet? America Online, perhaps the first great suburban medium, originates somewhere in suburban Virginia, though like the rest of the Web it might as well be anywhere.

One way to tell the story of the American suburbs is as a story of new technologies recasting the relationship of city and countryside. Electric power, trains, automobiles and broadcast television propelled successive waves of decentralization, each along slightly different lines. Until now, however, the pattern those lines formed always resembled the spokes of a wheel, with the city firmly in the center. Radiating highways and radio waves used to reinforce the gravitational pull of cities. But cable and computer networks are forming different patterns now, ones that mirror and speed the emergence of the burbs as free-floating entities with their own overlapping gravitational fields.

Time has been kind to many of the suburbs, and Juneau Boulevard is much prettier than I remember it. The conehead evergreens and midget rhododendrons, the paper birches and forsythia—all that dinky nursery stock plunked into backfill by landscapers—have put down roots and grown up to reclaim half-forgotten woodland identities, picturesquely blurring the new developments’ blunter edges. By now many of the trees have grown tall enough to cast interesting shadows. The American suburb was conceived in the 19th century by visionary designers like Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux and Andrew Jackson Downing to offer Americans a kind of democratically subdivided park, and the nicer ones are actually beginning to look that way.

Modest by comparison to what’s built today, the 60′s ranches and split-levels in the Gates have mellowed into period pieces: this is the architecture of postwar dreams that, at least from the vantage of a new century, no longer seem grasping or pretentious so much as sweet, even poignant. For this they probably have the newer houses to thank: the fat, bombastic three-story mini-mansions that now dot the Gates, many of them rising from the foundations of tear-downs.

Happily, the ranch on Juneau Boulevard hasn’t been a tear-down—though I was astonished to find at the far end of the driveway a hulking two-story post-modern building, a design studio perched atop a three-car garage. Jena Hall is a successful home-furnishings designer, and she has employed as many as eight people at a time here. On the exact spot where Binker, my problematic English bulldog, snored her days away in a chain-link dog run, people now come to work.

Jena Hall’s home business helped me see that the suburbs have proved to be rather more adaptable to changing lives and times than people once thought. The whole idea behind the suburbs was to draw bright lines and make separations: between city and country, obviously, but also between work and home, public and private. But it turns out we overestimated the power of architectural determinism. The suburbs have proved flexible enough to accommodate working mothers (though not without difficulty: Jena Hall’s studio was usually crawling with toddlers, hers and her employees’) as well as a great many different kinds of families and lifestyles. Since I left the Gates, its white nuclear families have been joined by singles and gays, Asians and African-Americans, people operating home businesses and empty-nesters. The houses themselves—light, wood-frame—turned out to be as easy to remodel as they had been to build. The world that built the postwar suburbs has passed away, and yet those suburbs still stand, remodeled by the press of history. What they haven’t been is reimagined or renamed, at least not yet.

When I was growing up in the Gates, suburban legend had it that one of the big white colonials on Bering Court had served as the model for Ward and June Cleaver’s house on TV. They showed the facade at the beginning of every episode, and it certainly looked right. Whether this was true or not (for all I know, every suburb in America nursed the same legend), we all wanted to believe it. Sometimes we regarded Hollywood’s notice as flattery, since being on TV made the Gates seem more real and substantial (fiction will do that); other times the fame seemed like the grimmest of jokes, weekly proof of the empty pretensions of the place.

Cleaverism—the sitcom image of suburbia—loomed large in our suburban lives, though its meanings were always complex and unstable. The Cleavers, Ozzie and Harriet, Donna Reed and all the rest proposed a ideal of suburban life that everyone knew was unrealistic and silly; and yet even as we made fun of it, we allowed the stereotype to exert a kind of normative hold on us. Your own family might be hopelessly dysfunctional, but maybe the Grables next door were getting it right. TV was happy to promote the Cleaver ideal because TV (alone among the arts) loved the burbs, and was eager to flatter what was, naturally, its ideal audience. Here were people marooned at home for much of the day, affluent and consumerist by inclination (having already purchased a new lifestyle), and at least at the start, insecure enough about the conduct of their new lifestyles to welcome the guidance of advertisers.

But what’s remarkable is how Cleaverism continues to organize so much of our thinking about suburbia. Now, though, it’s the lie of Cleaverism—call it Cheeverism—that dominates the popular image, offering writers and moviemakers a cheap way to construct a gothic version of suburbia, to throw its dark side into sharp relief. Now behind every smiling lawn is a dysfunctional family: Donna Reed’s sleeping with the woman next door and Eddie Haskell’s got a gun.

Yet the facade remains the organizing principle; in defiance of everything we know, we can’t seem to see the suburbs without it. Without the ghosts of the Cleavers hovering over them, the families in “American Beauty,” say, or of any number of recent suburban-gothic productions, just don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Before I left the Gates I drove into Bering Court to see if I could find the Beav’s old place. If I had the right one, the house has had a complete face lift since the 60′s. The stately white faux-colonial now has diagonal siding painted an unfortunate shade of puce, lots of opaque glass bricks and, out front, a berm thickly planted with shrubs to hide the facade. Very 80′s, it seemed, but for the life of me I could not name the dream behind this house.

It’s hard to spend time driving around Long Island today without a gathering sense of cognitive dissonance. So many of our generalizations about the burbs no longer stick, which almost seems a shame, since generalization was one of the things that we liked best about them. Is it even right to call a place like Woodbury—no longer “sub” to any “urb”—a “suburb” any more? “Urban sprawl” might be a better term. Certainly “sprawl” hints at the centerlessness of it, “urban” at the fact there’s nothing in the city you can’t find here. And maybe, as some have suggested, that is what I’m looking at but can’t quite yet see: a new kind of city, one we still don’t have the words or name for. “Edge City” is one proposal, though that still implies a center. “Technoburb,” another, hints at the role technology has played in freeing these place from their urban orbits, but it’s awfully cold. How about something more floppy-effervescent, like “burbopolis”

Whatever it ultimately gets called, the horizontal city that is now Nassau County, Long Island, is fast acquiring a city’s jangly diversity, though, being horizontal, it takes a car to really see it. Freeport has its African-American neighborhoods and Great Neck a community of Persians, and even in my very white elementary school you see Indian and Asian faces now. Street culture, of all things, has come to certain suburban lanes: in Glen Cove, Central American immigrants collect on corners and in front yards, talking and playing music as if they were still in Guatemala City. (The village issued a flier gently instructing them in suburban custom.) The new city has city problems too: housing shortages, crime waves, pollution; dilapidated “first ring” suburbs are said to be in the throes of a full-fledged “urban crisis.”

Though even here the generalizations don’t hold. Before I left Long Island I took a long walk through Levittown, where the suburban history of Long Island got its start half a century ago. A first-ring suburb built fast and on the cheap, Levittown by all rights should be crumbling by now. Yet the place I visited appeared to be doing just fine, in defiance of every stereotype that has been thrown at it. Held up as an example of conformity and monotony, Levittown’s 17,000 identical capes have mutated into an exuberant architectural Babel: the sparrows on a wire have each grown their own distinctive plumage.

Yet this free-for-all of Home Depot fantasy is held together nicely by the steady setback line of the houses and the mature shade trees marching down the gridded streets. Even more surprising, though, was the sidewalk scene, which even in late winter was about as lively as a New Urbanist could wish for, the young mothers out with their strollers, the kids biking home from school, the gray-haired joggers doing the loop in slo-mo. By the time I got back in my car, I felt completely confused about where, exactly, it was I’d been.

The monolith that was supposed to be suburban America—middle class, homogenous, white—has become just one of a great many neighborhoods in a larger and more complicated mosaic. So why is this new suburbia so hard to see plain, without the filter of suburban cliche? Maybe it’s because we’ve lost our old vantage point.

When my parents moved to the Gates in 1960, one-third of America was suburb, one-third city, one-third rural. Even those of us who lived in the first third tended to look at it from the perspective of the second. The city still held what amounted to a monopoly on descriptions and, for obvious reasons, the city didn’t much like what it saw rising up around it.

Forty years later, the suburbs—or whatever they are—have grown up and taken over: more people now live in suburban American than rural and urban America combined. Suburbia is America, and not just demographically. Today our politics are ruled by the suburbs; suburbia’s agenda—that is, issues bearing on the well-being of families with children, around which the suburbs still revolve—is now America’s. (Even the erstwhile party of the city has moved to the burbs, with Bill Clinton doing the driving.) Suburbia’s cultural power is harder to see, but that may be because it’s everywhere, indistinguishable from the air we breathe.

On the drive back to the country, where I live now, or where at least I think I live, I thought about the various ways suburban qualities have seeped beyond the burbs themselves. I thought about the suburbanization of the city, manifest in freshly themed neighborhoods and malled retailing, and I thought about Silicon Valley, which in some ways represents the apotheosis of suburbia: the first time in history an important economic, technological and cultural revolution has its roots in a suburb.

I also thought about manners. Ever since Levittown was built America has become a progressively more informal place, one where social distinctions get played down, where even the rich and famous feel compelled at least to act like normal suburbanites, and where hierarchical distinctions like high and low-brow—which are fundamentally urban distinctions—come to seem quaint. Suburbia’s too horizontal a place for all that.

I thought about clothes too. I usually wear a tie and sport jacket when I’m reporting, but not on this trip. Suburbanites dress up only to go to the city, a place where the presentation of self is far more serious business. That’s probably because all you really have to present in the city is yourself in public, dressed this way or that. In the burbs you’ve got the house and the car and the lawn all working overtime to tell the world who you are, and this leaves you free to dress down. Nowadays everybody dresses down; on Fridays, even the starchiest urban offices go suburban.

I wondered too if what we used to think of as the fakeness of the suburbs hasn’t also left its mark on the broader culture. To grow up on a “boulevard” conjured in a field is to be at home with the facade and the themed environment, with the quick-change and the quotation marks, not to mention the willing suspension of disbelief. It may be that ironic detachment is a mental habit we children of the burbs have come by naturally.

Anyway, these were my desultory highway thoughts, entertained on the long drive home from suburbia. The funny thing is, the closer to home I got, the more omnipresent the place I’d been began to feel. Suburbia, I realized, is no longer somewhere you go, or leave. Wherever we live now, it’s where we live.

I saw apples with the hue and heft of olives or cherries, next to glowing yellow Ping-Pong balls and dusky purple berries. I saw a whole assortment of baseballs, oblate and conic, some of them bright as infield grass, others dull as dirt. And I picked big, shiny red fruits that look just like apples, of all things, and seduce you into hazarding a bite.

Hazard is, unfortunately, the word for it: imagine sinking your teeth into a tart potato, or a mushy Brazil nut sheathed in leather (“spitters” is the pomological term of art here), and then tasting one that starts out with high promise on the tongue—now here’s an apple!—only to veer off into a bitterness so profound that it makes the stomach rise even in recollection.

Wild apples, indeed: all of these trees were grown from seeds gathered in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, the wild apple’s Eden, where botanists now believe the domestic apple has its ancient roots in a species called Malus sieversii. The orchard where I made the acquaintance of M. sieversii is the United States Agriculture Department’s apple collection in Geneva, probably the world’s most comprehensive collection of apple trees.

Here, some 2,500 different varieties have been gathered from all over the world and set out in pairs, as if on a beached botanical ark. The card catalogue to this arboreal archive, on 50 acres, runs the gamut, from Adam’s Pearmain, an antique English variety, to the Zuccalmaglio, a German apple. A browser will find everything from the first named American variety (the 17th-century Roxbury Russet) to experimental crosses that bear only numbers. In this single orchard one can behold the apple’s past and also possibly glimpse its future, for the wild apples I tasted represent the latest accessions to the collection. And if the curator, Philip Forsline, is right, this new germ plasm—the genetic material contained in seeds—will alter the course of apple history.

The discovery in the last decade of the apple’s wild ancestors is big news in the apple world. Problematic as these apples might be on the palate, to breeders they represent unprecedented opportunity. Roger Way, Cornell University’s legendary apple breeder (the father of the Empire and the Jonagold, among many others), says that he expects the genes of these oddballs to yield new cultivars that will be “more disease and insect resistant, more winter hardy, and higher in eating quality” than the apples of today. Breeders are particularly hopeful that in M. sieversii they’ve found the genes that will help apples better withstand their numerous afflictions.

Anyone with an apple in his yard knows how pathetic these trees can be. By September, my own unsprayed apples are grossly deformed by cankers, rusts, pimples, scales, harelips and the exit wounds of coddling moths. No other crop requires quite as much pesticide as commercial apples, which receive upward of a dozen chemical showers a season. Asked how it is that apples seem so poorly adapted to life outdoors, Mr. Forsline said that it hasn’t always been the case, that a century of growing vast orchards populated by a small handful of varieties has rendered the apple less fit than it once was.

“Commercial apples represent only a fraction of the Malus gene pool,” he said, “and it’s been shrinking. A century ago there were several thousand different varieties of apples being grown; now, most of the apples we grow have the same five or six parents: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, McIntosh and Cox’s Orange Pippin.”

That genetic uniformity makes the apple a sitting duck for its enemies. In the wild, a plant and its pests are continuously coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution freezes in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical. The problem is that the apples no longer get to have sex, which is nature’s way of testing out fresh genetic combinations. The viruses, bacteria and fungi keep at it, however, continuing to evolve until they’ve overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed.

Suddenly, total victory is in the pest’s sight, unless people come to the tree’s rescue with the heavy hand of modern chemistry.

THE solution is for us to help the apple evolve artificially,” Mr. Forsline explained, by bringing in fresh genes through breeding. Which is precisely why it is so important to preserve as wide a range of apple genes as possible. Since it takes decades to develop a new apple variety, it will be some time before we know for sure whether the Kazakh trees hold the key to a better apple. Already, though, plant pathologists at Cornell have determined that some of the wild trees are resistant to fire blight. The challenge now is to breed that trait into an edible apple.

“It’s a question of biodiversity,” Mr. Forsline said, as we walked down rows of antique trees, tasting apples as we talked. Every time an old apple variety drops out of cultivation, or a wild apple forest succumbs to development (as is happening today in Kazakhstan), a set of genes vanishes from the earth. There would be no Fuji today if apple fanciers hadn’t preserved the Ralls Janet, an antique apple (grown by Thomas Jefferson) that happens to contain a gene for late blooming that Japanese breeders were looking for. (The Fuji’s other parent is the Red Delicious.)

We’re accustomed to thinking of biodiversity in connection with wild species, but the biodiversity of the crop species on which we depend is no less important. The greatest biodiversity of any crop is apt to be found in the place where it first evolved, where nature first experimented with what an apple, or potato or peach, could be.

The recent discovery of the apple’s “center of diversity,” as botanists call such a place, was actually a rediscovery: in 1929, Nikolai I. Vavilov, the great Russian botanist, had identified the wild apple’s Eden in the forests near what was then Alma-Ata (now known as Almaty), in Kazakhstan. “All around the city one could see a vast expanse of wild apples covering the foothills,” he wrote. “One could see with his own eyes that this beautiful site was the origin of the cultivated apple.”

Vavilov fell victim to Stalinism’s wholesale repudiation of genetics (he died in prison in 1943), and his discovery was lost to science until the fall of Communism. In 1989, one of his last surviving students, Aimak Djangaliev, invited American plant scientists to Kazakhstan to see the wild apples that he had been studying during the years of Soviet rule. Mr. Djangaliev was 80 at the time, and wanted their help in saving the great stands of M. sieversii.

The American scientists were astonished to find 300-year-old trees 50 feet tall with the girth of oaks, some of them bearing apples as big and red as modern cultivars. “In the towns, apple trees were coming up in the cracks of the sidewalks,” Mr. Forsline said. “You see some of these apples and feel sure that you’re looking at the ancestor of the Golden Delicious, or the McIntosh.”

Mr. Forsline and his colleagues made several trips to the area, each time returning with cuttings and seeds. The Silk Route passed through Kazakhstan, and botanists now speculate that centuries ago nomads and traders took wild apples with them on their journeys west. Along the way, M. sieversii probably hybridized with at least two species of tiny, green sour apples, M. orientalis and M. sylvestris; the result is the apple domesticated by the Romans and eventually carried to America.

American settlers played a crucial part in the apple’s progress. Since their chief interest was hard cider, they didn’t bother much with grafts, planting apples instead from seed. Because of the vagaries of apple genetics, most seedling trees produce inedible fruit, good for little but cider. Yet if you plant enough of them, as Johnny Appleseed set about doing, you’re bound to get a few exceptional ones. And that Americans did.

Most of the great American varieties—the Newtown Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Jonathan, Baldwin and Red Delicious—were chance seedlings found in cider orchards in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Geneva orchard is, among other things, a museum of the apple’s golden age in America; to wander along its leafy corridors is to set off on a multisensory voyage of the historical imagination.

I spent the better part of a recent morning browsing the rows of trees, tasting all the famous old apples I’d read about, fruits that, you quickly appreciate, are as much cultural as natural artifacts. One bite of an Esopus Spitzenberg disclosed Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the perfect apple: spicy and hard. I discovered that the original Delicious, called the Hawkeye by its discoverer, was crisper, paler and not nearly so saccharine as its flashier offspring. The aromatic Golden Russet, considered one of the great cider apples of all time, has the coarse flesh of a pear, running with juice as rich (and sticky) as honey. Much was lost when civilization decided that russeting—a matte brownish mottling of the skin—was a fatal flaw in an apple.

So, were the old apples better? It’s not quite that simple. Many of the ones I tasted were unqualified spitters, and only a few of the oldies could hold a candle to, say, the Macoun or the Jonagold. Yet the old apples offer a striking catalogue of flavors (apples tinged with nutmeg and riesling, mango and nuts) and colors, intriguing qualities that have been trampled in the rush to breed apples brimming with sugar and red pigment.

Tasting these relics, you realize just how much else an apple can do besides being sweet and red. You also realize what a high cultural achievement it is to transform a tart potato into a delight of the human eye and tongue. The Geneva orchard is a testament to domestication, our knack for marrying the fruits of nature to the desires of culture. Yet the story of the modern apple, which has become utterly dependent on us to keep its natural enemies at bay, suggests that domestication can be overdone.

When we rely on too few genes for too long, a plant loses some of its aptitude for getting along on its own. As Mr. Way, the Cornell apple breeder, put it, the modern apple’s “vulnerability to a surprise attack is tremendous.” A surprise attack is precisely what got the potato in Ireland in the 1840′s; what saved it from that particular blight were genes for resistance found in wild Peruvian potatoes.

But what happens when all the wild potatoes and wild apples are gone? All the biotechnology in the world can’t create a new gene. Which is why Mr. Forsline is bent on saving all manner of apples, good, bad, indifferent and, above all, wild.

In the best of all possible worlds, we’d be preserving the wild apples’ habitat in the Kazakh wilderness. In the next best world, though, we’d preserve the quality of wildness itself, something on which it turns out even domestication depends.

Luckily for us, wildness can be cultivated, can thrive even in the straight lines and right angles of an apple orchard.

HEADLINE: Going Resource-Picking

IF you are interested in growing antique varieties of apples, you can order trees from the Southmeadow Fruit Garden in Baroda, Mich., (616) 422-2411, or from the Sonoma Antique Apple Nursery in Healdsburg, Calif., (707) 433-6420.

To taste antique or otherwise unusual apples, you can call Applesource in Chapin, Ill., at (800) 588-3854. You can choose from a catalogue offering more than 100 varieties, each scrupulously characterized, or let Applesource put together a sampler. The company will ship apples now through January.

An excellent account of the history of the apple, from Kazakhstan to the Red Delicious and beyond, is “Apples: An Engaging Look at the World’s Most Popular Fruit,” by Frank Browning, just published by North Point Press ($24).

That’s right, there are no private lawns in Seaside. The town’s strict design guidelines prohibit them. So the set designers for “The Truman Show” had to rip out the garden of native plants surrounding Truman Burbank’s perfect little house on Natchez Street in order to roll out the carpet of Kentucky bluegrass his cliched existence demanded. For how was this perfectly ordinary American going to spend his Saturday mornings if he had no lawn to mow?

In the last few years a million or so words have been written pointing up the environmental and philosophical folly of the Great American lawn. Lawns consume unconscionable amounts of energy and chemicals, while producing little more than landscape conformity and social anxiety. People complain—but people continue to mow, as if it were their solemn civic duty.

Except, that is, in Seaside.

By permitting only native species in front yards, and by outlawing sod, Seaside has seceded from the great green river of lawn that joins Americans, yard by unfenced yard, from Maine to California. In March, I spent a couple of days at Seaside, and though it would be foolish to proclaim I’ve seen the future, I had a vision of what post-lawn America might look like.

Much about Seaside was revolutionary when it was founded 17 years ago, but perhaps nothing about it remains as radical as its landscape: the exuberant thickets of native plants (live oak, Southern magnolia, beach rosemary and a host of others) that threaten to burst their tidy picket enclosures. By now the town’s neotraditional houses look downright familiar, for the simple reason that Seaside helped bring back such traditional elements as the front porch.

At the same time the town-planning concepts that Robert Davis, Seaside’s developer, and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, its designers, pioneered here—houses on tiny lots pulled up close to walkable streets leading to public spaces—have gone on to inspire a national movement.

But if the reach of Seaside’s influence has blunted the novelty of its architecture and layout, the town’s gardens—just now coming into their own—have lost none of their power to astonish. Seaside’s landscaping may well be the most revolutionary thing about the place. It’s one thing to challenge the architecture and planning of the American subdivision, but it’s quite another to abolish something as fundamental as the American front lawn.

When I asked Mr. Davis why a real estate developer hoping to sell houses to Americans would challenge their inalienable right to mow, he smiled. “I suppose I didn’t know enough to know how crazy it was,” he said.

Besides being a developer, Mr. Davis was a child of the 60′s, an ardent environmentalist who happened to inherit 80 acres of scrubby Gulf Coast beachfront and decided to experiment with them. When Douglas Duany, Seaside’s landscape architect (and Andres Duany’s younger brother), first met with Mr. Davis to discuss the town’s landscape style, Mr. Davis simply pointed out the window at the low, windswept scrub clinging to the sugary white sand and said, “I sort of like what’s out there now.”

This was 1982, years before nurseries in the area began carrying the sand live oak, woody goldenrod and wild lupins that make up the local scrub forest. Yet, growing turf on a barrier island would have been, in Mr. Davis’s words, “dumber than dirt.” For one thing, there was no dirt, only sand.

So Douglas Duany drew up a list of the plants Seaside would allow, and turf grass was not among them. To preserve as much of the existing vegetation as possible, builders were told they could disturb no more than a four-foot zone surrounding the house. “One contractor almost took my head off when I told him he couldn’t simply scrape the lot with a bulldozer and fix it later with grass and shrubs,” Mr. Duany told me.

Initially, Seaside’s sales force encountered some resistance, too, though they soon learned the “grass question” was a good way to identify serious buyers. “Prospects who gagged on the ‘no lawn’ rule usually had trouble with the rest of the concept, too,” one broker explained. Which makes sense: Seaside posed a challenge to the whole suburban regime of private castles surrounded by vast moats of lawn; those home buyers who welcomed the idea of shrinking their private realms were the ones least wedded to their Toros.

The fact that only a tenth of Seaside’s 300-plus families live here year round also helped, since the landscape rules promised homeowners almost complete freedom from yard chores.

AT first, I didn’t get it when Mr. Davis described Seaside’s garden style as “Gertrude Jekyll gone native.” Walking down one of Seaside’s older streets for the first time, I wasn’t sure these yards even qualified as gardens—many of them looked untended and disorganized, as if the “gardener” had merely thrown a fence around a patch of the scrub forest to keep it from escaping. Yet, the more I walked, the more these yards came into focus as exquisitely subtle gardens.

Actually, it wasn’t until I went for a jog through the scrub forest just beyond Seaside’s town line that I understood the Seaside yard wasn’t simply a restoration of the native plant community but a carefully edited representation of it. It was, like all gardens, a metaphor of nature.

Where the real scrub formed a low, impenetrable thicket, Seaside’s trees, protected from the salt spray by the architecture, have by now risen well above head height, creating an agreeably shady canopy that shelters walkers. The contorted branches of the live oaks throw webs of spooky shadows against the freshly painted houses. Since much of Seaside’s architecture tends to err on the side of sweetness and light, this unexpectedly Gothic inflection renders the houses more interesting, less wholesome.

The typical Seaside garden is layered vertically. Beneath the canopy of oak and magnolia leaves is a relatively open space at eye level that affords a welcome sense of prospect; then, around waist level, the density resumes, with informal plantings of beach rosemary, woody goldenrod, lupins, gopher apple and bluestem grass. A few small areas have been carved out for barbecues, benches or paths, but for the most part, human life is meant to take place on porches and decks—realms of Culture set within patches of seemingly unreconstructed Nature.

“Gardening by subtraction” is how Randy Harelson explained the method. A garden designer by training, Mr. Harelson moved from New England to Seaside six years ago. Nowadays he consults with the Town Council on horticultural issues, designs private gardens for homeowners and runs the Gourd Garden, a native-plant nursery two miles east of Seaside.

“The landscape here gets very little credit for putting Seaside on the map,” he told me. “But if you try looking at the architecture by itself, mentally removing the scrub and replacing it with lawn and foundation plantings, it gets boring very quickly.”

The point is proven by Truman Burbank’s intentionally trite yard, as well as by most of the new houses rising on the west side, where trees have yet to subdue the noisy parliament of Architectural Expression.

It’s the rub between the neat white picket fences and the luxuriant, heedless plantings that gives Seaside’s best gardens their power. Remove the tidy enclosures and the plantings would immediately look slovenly or go slack—the fate of all too many wild or native gardens.

Gertrude Jekyll understood it wasn’t enough to bring England’s native plants into the garden; they needed the frame of architecture if they hoped to make the leap from meadow to garden. The tight, controlling picket fences set off Seaside’s raucous planting much the same way that Sir Edwin Lutyens’s formal walls and paths set off Gertrude Jekyll’s relaxed perennial borders. At Seaside the juxtapositions reach an almost violent pitch that I suspect would have popped Miss Jekyll’s spectacles. But the underlying principle is the same.

MR. HARELSON says Seaside residents have taken the town’s landscape to heart, especially now that the tree canopy has matured. “The challenge was getting people to prune from below to create an understory, rather than from above, which is what most of us are accustomed to,” he said.

Definitive proof that Seaside’s landscape has set deep roots in the community came a few years back when the town planners decided that the scrub crowding the median strip of Seaside Avenue, a main axis, should be replaced with grass. Residents on the avenue rebelled, defending their corridor of wilderness in a battle that some say marked the moment when Seaside—residents and plants alike—slipped from the control of developers and designers.

Mr. Davis, for one, regards this as healthy, part of the town’s inevitable passing from idea into history. He described a recent conference at which a visiting English architect criticized Seaside’s landscaping. “He told us it was time to cut everything back—hard—since the foliage was now obscuring the architecture,” Mr. Davis said. “We had to explain that that’s exactly what people like about it. There are so many tourists passing by that our porches would be fishbowls if not for the trees.”

Thanks to the town’s celebrity, sure to increase with the release of “The Truman Show,” a porch wreathed in a tangle of oak and magnolia is a blessing. The sheer wildness of Seaside’s gardens is thus an inadvertent byproduct of the town’s success.

As I walked Seaside’s streets, I wondered why Seaside’s many imitators have so far failed to imitate it. Other New Urbanist communities have managed to shrink the front lawn and fence it in, but I don’t know of another town in America that has dared to do away with it entirely. In fact, at Disney’s town of Celebration—where Truman Burbank would have fit in without changing a thing—the rules actually require homeowners to maintain a minimum amount of lawn.

Seaside’s landscape is a special case, one that may not lend itself to imitation. It has taken everything from the abundance of gawkers to the paucity of humus to the conviction of its slightly naive developer to make lawns untenable here. It is also true that landscape styles, rooted as they are in the particularities of place, never traveled as easily as architectural styles. Even so, Seaside points a way, one way, and if we Americans ever do declare our independence from the tyranny of lawns, we will look back at Seaside as our exuberantly overgrown…

This notion that the garden is a path out into the larger world is a peculiarly American idea. For most of history, and in most of the rest of civilization, gardens have been conceived as walled-off refuges from the world, places of escape rather than engagement. Maybe that’s why Americans never went for the hortus conclusus, preferring to bring down the traditional walls and fences so that our gardens might, in every sense, connect. Our lawns and even our compost piles have a politics, and moral considerations color our choice of plants (useful or ornamental? native or exotic?) and horticultural practice (chemical or organic?). True, it can get to be a little much—and occasionally it does, as in a couple of this season’s more ideologically minded garden books. But when a writer is as deft as Allen Lacy, the connections traced between a cramped yard in southern New Jersey and such far-flung concerns as species extinction, the symbolism of the American front yard, the migration of plants, the act of naming and the rub of seasonal and biographical time in a garden can be thrilling to follow.

The best of this season’s garden books all share this inclination to find a world of meaning in even the most modest garden, though Lacy takes the prize for finding the greatest variety of meanings. Only when you get to the very end of “The Inviting Garden,” which unfolds as unhurriedly as a Saturday morning schmooze over the back fence with a particularly amiable neighbor, does the ambition of Lacy’s project emerge. He has written nothing less than a defense of gardening, in the classical sense of that word, the one that we associate with Philip Sidney. Lacy’s method is to show us the beauty of gardening’s three faces in turn: its ability to delight the senses (with a chapter each on the Big Five), instruct the intellect (taking up plant hunting, naming and symbolism, as well as American landscape design) and elevate the spirit (chiefly by planting us in time and place). Cynthia Woodyard’s ungushy photographs effectively underscore Lacy’s ideas.

But although “The Inviting Garden” is a genuinely philosophical book (Lacy was in fact a professor of philosophy long before he established himself as the dean of American garden writers), it doesn’t have a didactic, pushy or theoretical sentence in it. Lacy’s writing is a model of clarity and modesty, and all of his insights are rooted in the soil of his long experience growing specific plants in a specific place. (Whatever the horticultural equivalent of being well read is—well planted?—Lacy surely is that.) Both the new and the old gardener will find much to think about here, and to savor.

Laura Simon makes a different set of connections in DEAR MR. JEFFERSON: Letters From a Nantucket Gardener (Crown, $23). As the title suggests, her interest is historical, and her method epistolary: the book takes the form of a half-dozen letters to Thomas Jefferson, the secular patron saint of American gardeners. (“No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,” he wrote in a letter most of us can recite by heart, “and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”) The conceit, which for the most part she manages to pull off quite nicely, allows Simon to write casually about doings in her own Nantucket garden (her passion, like Jefferson’s, is for vegetables) and to wander down some of the byways of American garden history. Simon follows in the tradition of Eleanor Perenyi and Katharine S. White, writers who departed from their accustomed lines of work to offer a single book about gardening, an avid testament by a confirmed yet highly knowledgeable amateur.

In Simon’s case, the garden book is a break from the writing of historical novels, and this background serves her well: the historical passages are swift, sure-footed and fascinating.

Those that work best are the ones in which Jefferson himself plays a role, like the history of the tomato (which he helped introduce to America—or, really, reintroduce, since its roots are Mexican); the development of mail-order seeds (Bernard M’Mahon, father of the seed catalogue, was T.J.’s Burpee) and the fate of the vegetable varieties that Jefferson grew at Monticello, some of which are still grown as heirlooms, while many others—like the Ravensworth pea he used to rave about—have been lost forever. Here planting and then tasting a tomato Jefferson cherished becomes an exercise of the historical imagination.

The conceit starts to creak only when Simon needs to impart information about Monticello her correspondent well knows, such as the length of the kitchen garden (1,000 feet) or the “interminable procession of friends, relatives and rubberneckers who would appear on your Palladian doorsteps.” At first her efforts to describe the modern world—McDonald’s, environmentalism, health fads—to someone living 200 years ago seemed a stretch, but after a while you get used to it, and start to appreciate how writing to Jefferson allows Simon to sneak up on our own times, see them afresh. Her account of the contemporary American kitchen garden, brimming with the food plants of a dozen different cultures and historical periods, not only would have wowed Thomas Jefferson, whose garden and table were as radically cosmopolitan as he was, but also succeeds in convincing the reader that we are indeed in the throes of “yet another gardening resurgence.”

STALKING THE WILD AMARANTH: Gardening in the Age of Extinction (Holt, $25) is, as the subtitle gives fair warning, a book with an agenda. Janet Marinelli, director of publishing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, bids us to see the connections between our yards, teeming with exotic plants and smothered in lawn, and the worldwide decline of biological diversity. Our yards are part of the problem, having obliterated native habitats and contributed to the homogenization of the world’s flora, yet, reconceived, they might also become part of the solution. This is a tendentious premise, yet Marinelli is so reasonable, and such a breezy writer, that the reader is happy to follow her deep into the thickets of horticultural politics.

As the Communist Party was to the 30′s or the Vietnam War was to the 60′s, so native plants are the defining political issue to contemporary gardening. Do you believe it is morally responsible to plant a tea rose or burning bush in your yard at a time when so much of our native flora is threatened by the proliferation of such alien species? You might have thought those particular horses are already out of the barn and well down the road, as indeed they have been since 1492: perhaps a third of the plants one encounters in the landscape of the eastern United States, from the roadside day lilies and Queen Anne’s lace to the lawn grasses and the apple trees, are alien species. (Virtually everything still green in October is European in origin, having evolved under milder autumn circumstances.) Even so, the advocates of native-plant gardening contend that we’re obliged to undo the damage, and our yards are a good place to start. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Marinelli and the author of the next book here take me to task for a 1994 article in The Times Magazine in which I criticized native plantmania and drew a connection between nativism in horticulture and politics.)

In the most persuasive part of Marinelli’s gentle polemic, she argues that garden design has always reflected a civilization’s understanding of nature, yet our own esthetics have so far failed to keep pace with the lessons of ecology. (Garden practice is another matter: organic methods have become increasingly well established.) Most contemporary garden design can still be classified as either classical, expressing in its formal geometry a rationalist view of nature’s essential order, or romantic, modeled on our subjective experience of nature. What’s needed now is an ecological garden, one that “won’t try to imitate, like classical gardens, what nature is, or, like romantic gardens, what it looks like,” she writes. Rather it must “act like nature, must do what nature does.”

That this is easier said than done is amply demonstrated in PARADISE BY DESIGN: Native Plants and the New American Landscape (North Point/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25), by Kathryn Phillips. Phillips, a journalist (she is the author of “Tracking the Vanished Frogs: An Ecological Mystery”) rather than a garden writer, has written a book that aims to be to landscape design what Tracy Kidder’s “House” was to carpentry. Her unobtrusive narrator trails Joni Janecki, a young California landscape architect, as she designs gardens for the Sands family in Montecito, the Hewlett-Packard Company’s corporate offices in Palo Alto and a public park in Salinas. Janecki is deeply committed to using native plants in her work, though the story of the Sands job suggests what an uphill struggle it is to persuade clients to give up on the Old World plants, lawns and all the other trappings of landscape tidiness that still dominate American dreams of paradise. The reader is surprised at the end of “Paradise by Design” when the Sands actually ditch most of Joni’s ecologically sensitive design in favor of a big old lawn with a sprinkler system.

Luckily for Phillips, Hewlett-Packard and the city of Salinas keep the environmental faith, and we get to look on as a series of habitat gardens take shape. (Though because there are no illustrations, we can only guess what they look like.) Phillips is a very good journalist, and she’s done her homework, not only on the habits of native and invasive plants but on the history and practice of landscape architecture and the workings of the American nursery industry (there’s a fascinating section on the marketing of the new carpet rose). The book makes you realize just how little legwork goes into most writing on gardening in this country, and it’s refreshing to read some genuine reporting on the subject instead of the usual first-person philosophizing. Phillips has been unfortunate in her choice of a hero, however, because much as we come to root for plucky Joni Janecki as she battles the forces of horticultural reaction, she doesn’t have what it takes to carry this book on her shoulders. Maybe it has something to do with being such a visual person, but Janecki is virtually inarticulate, both about the value of native plants and the process of design. “I can see it and I can see what it looks like,” she explains (if that is the right word) in the heat of designing the Sands’ garden, “but I don’t really know what it is. It would help to know that, I think, especially as I go along.” Agreed. Fortunately for us, Phillips keeps Joni’s lines to a wincing minimum and fills the second half of her book with rich, well-reported digressions on the tensions between the business and ecology of the American landscape.

Lest you conclude all gardeners have forsaken human pleasure for the sake of planetary health, I heartily recommend spending some time in A TUSCAN PARADISE (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35), a dazzling photographic essay that takes the coffeetable gardening book to a new level. Irresistible though they may be, picture books on gardens are seldom more than skin deep, the horticultural equivalent of fashion photography, if not pornography. Marina Schinz, whom readers, or lookers, may remember from her stunning work in “Visions of Paradise” (1985), has opted this time around for depth over breadth, choosing to train her lens on a single not-famous garden—Valle Pinciole, near Tuscany’s border with Umbria—over a period of three years. The result is a remarkably intimate portrait of a place that captures not only its considerable beauty, but also the rhythms of its seasons, as well as the everyday life and backstage labor that ordinarily don’t make it into published gardens. (What a novelty it is to see the gardener, Gian Paolo, pruning the boxwood hedges, clippings scattered beneath his plumb line.)

Valle Pinciole, which is the creation and weekend retreat of two Roman friends of Schinz, is a virtual encyclopedia of garden styles, a densely layered landscape of hedged outdoor rooms, pergolas, mazes, orchards, rosewalks (395 roses are in residence), olive groves, an orangerie, a white garden, an herb garden, a Japanese cherry garden and an English Jekyll garden—indeed, just about everything but a native plant garden. Think of it as a habitat garden for classically educated humans.

It would be easy to dismiss “A Tuscan Paradise” as yet another volume of Mediterranean fantasy for the Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes crowd. But Schinz’s accomplishment has been to make her subject seem romantic and completely real at the same time, to render a Pierre de Ronsard rose in such a way that it recalls the sumptuousness of all roses and yet is never anything less than its heartbreakingly specific, timebound self. Her scrupulous eye reminds us how a garden is a real place before it is a representation, which suggests another sort of connection our gardens encourage us to make, the one between the here-and-now of a place and the there-and-then of what Mirabel Osler once called the infinity of gardens.

Which reminds me that Osler’s 1989 book, A GENTLE PLEA FOR CHAOS (Arcade, $19.95), is one of two out-of-print classics of modern English garden writing that we’re fortunate to have back on the shelf this season. Not especially gentle, Osler’s volume of essays sent a blast of fresh air through the stuffy rooms of the English gardening world when it was first published. This is less a handbook of advice (though what there is of that is excellent) than a miscellany of “thoughts” that have “sprouted while I have been deadheading roses, visiting gardens or buying a pair of socks.” Starting out from the garden Osler made with her late husband, Michael, in Shropshire, the narrative comes and goes as freely a cat, touching down on everything from garden design to weather, the quirks of particular plants and gardeners, botanical illustration, laziness, the compulsion of water, garden visiting and even television westerns. This is a smart, spirited, gorgeously written and above all funny book, so open-minded (her outlook is refreshingly international), personal and passionate as to make one wonder if Mirabel Osler is really an English gardener after all.

By contrast, Graham Stuart Thomas’s TREES IN THE LANDSCAPE (Sagapress, $35) is English to its roots, an authoritative treatise on “how tree planting makes landscapes happen,” written in the great tradition of Humphry Repton and Capability Brown. Thomas, who has spent the better part of 30 years supervising the restoration of gardens for the National Trust, looks at big trees as if they were so many tubes of paint in the hands of the picturesque master, focusing on how the particular form, texture and color of the various species contribute to the look and mood of a landscape. This is gardening in broad strokes for the long haul, and while “Trees in the Landscape” reads as if it has been written for gardeners with lots of land and money and help, even the gardener planting a sapling would do well to consult this wise and handsomely illustrated volume about the trees that connect our gardens to the future.

At various times over the last several years, developers have threatened to slice up the valley’s picturesque views and sell them to weekenders from New York. Thanks largely to the efforts of the nine-year-old Kent Land Trust, a considerable chunk of the landscape has been saved from the overdevelopment that has already spoiled much of Route 7. These days, however, the threat to an agricultural landscape in New England comes from a new quarter: the second-growth forest, which is steadily marching down from the wooded hilltops to reclaim the fields for itself.

Kent’s little valley is an epitome of America’s middle landscape, poised between nature and civilization, and it is precisely this “middleness” that the Kent Land Trust is fighting to preserve. As Harmon Smith, the president of the trust, explained it: “To protect the rural character of a town like this, we realized it wasn’t enough to stop development. You also have to keep the farmland open.” The problem is, how do you keep farmland open when there are no longer enough farmers left to mow the fields and thin the hedgerows?

Like many conservation organizations around the country, the Kent Land Trust has discovered that it is no longer adequate to lock up a precious piece of land and throw away the key. To preserve America’s dwindling landscape of family farms it is often necessary to help out struggling farmers and, when that fails, to take up arms against the advancing forest. “You can’t go away and simply forget about these places,” Mr. Smith said, “because they won’t stay the same.”

Even wilderness preservation often requires human intervention—to reintroduce predators or weed out exotic species. Increasingly, people interested in saving the land find themselves not only defending it but actively “gardening” it—an approach that can get them into hot water with environmentalists who would just as soon let nature take its course. Who would think that touching up a hedgerow would be cause for controversy?

The Kent Land Trust’s latest venture into what might be called interventionist preservation is its Adopt-a-View program, whose kickoff brought a dozen or so of us out to the hedgerows lining Route 7 last month. Our purpose was to thin a forbidding tangle of grapevine, multiflora rose, sumac and maple saplings that had grown up between the roadside trees, blinding a picturesque vista of cornfields backed by the broad hump of Cobble Mountain. This particular view had been adopted by the Kent Greenhouse, a local garden center, which had contributed the services of a landscaping crew and equipment for the day. Thanks to the help, we had the hedgerow nicely edited, and the view of the fields restored, by the time we broke for lunch.

Claire Murphy, a retired public relations executive who dreamed up the Adopt-a-View program and stopped by to supervise, was delighted. She had instructed our team to “open up the hedgerows, but please, let’s not make it look like Scarsdale.” Ms. Murphy used to live in Scarsdale, and she has some of the bearing of a Westchester matron; I was reminded of an Irish Barbara Bush. “It should be tidy, I told them, but not too tidy,” she said.

In times past no one would have needed to “adopt” such a view or to make choices regarding its esthetics. It would simply have persisted, as it has for half a millennium, by dint of farmers going about their chores. The challenge today is to preserve the character of such countryside at a time when the farmers who maintained that character are mostly a memory. Suddenly, people find that they have no choice but to make choices and that they need chain saws and pruning shears to save the land from . . . well, from nature itself.

This particular irony has not escaped the critics of the Kent Land Trust. A recent editorial in The Litchfield County Times, a local weekly, took the Adopt-a-View program to task for, of all things, “endeavoring to subvert the natural order.” The editorial suggested there was something presumptuous, if not anthropocentric, about adopting and restoring views that nature had seen fit to reconquer. “Should blackberry briars be cut, for example, but not Queen Anne’s lace?” the editorial asked. “Who gets to decide which plants have merit and which don’t?”

Considering that The Litchfield County Times is as stout a champion of the environment as the Land Trust, its criticism came as something of a surprise. But like many environmentalists, the newspaper seems to regard what happens to any piece of land as a kind of zero-sum contest between Us and Nature, in which the gain of one party can come only at the expense of the other. Following this line of reasoning to its logical—and, to me, lunatic—conclusion, the editorial likened the Land Trust’s position “to that of a developer claiming a shopping plaza is more widely appreciated than a swamp.” In other words, if you’re going to introduce human preference you might as well go whole hog and put up a shopping mall.

When the issue is as clear-cut as a development that threatens a wilderness, the zero-sum model might fit the facts. But what happens when the alternatives are a little less stark, when the choice is between a 500-year-old working landscape and a second-growth forest?

I suppose that when you don’t trust yourself to make wise decisions about the land, letting nature decide the matter is an appealingly straightforward approach. And yet, while I was struggling to yank grapevines out of the trees, I wondered if it would really have been more “natural” for us to do nothing here, to instead let the forest have its way.

You see, I’d noticed that the hedgerow I was working on was teeming with nonnative species—Japanese honeysuckle, Russian olive, multiflora rose, even a vagrant euonymus vine—all brought by Europeans. These were the species that would triumph if we did nothing here. Yet, a landscape dominated by these exotics would be no less a cultural artifact—a product of human intervention—than a hedgerow or meadow.

In time, a century or longer, this field of exotic brush would be succeeded by second-growth forest—a kind of landscape that would be far more novel here than a patchwork of fields and hedgerows. For this particular landscape has been under continual cultivation for hundreds and possibly thousands of years. According to the English settlers who first laid eyes on it in 1730 it was “charming and picturesque” farmland even then. Human beings have been actively shaping this land for so long that to start excluding them now would be unnatural.

I’ve heard people in town say that preserving farmland just because it’s pretty is an exercise in nostalgia for a world that is not coming back. Certainly it’s easy to make light of city folk fighting to preserve farmland that their very presence has put in jeopardy—since it is partly the run-up in property values that has made farming unviable. The farmers who stick it out often find themselves working to keep other people’s land open expressly to gratify an urban taste for looking at farmland.

Dave Arno, who told me he is the last full-time farmer in Kent, farms several of the Land Trust’s fields; he also mows fields for Anne Bass, who owns several hundred acres of Kent farmland. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Mr. Arno is now as much in the business of producing picturesque views as he is in producing milk.

The paradox is not lost on Mr. Arno; he understands full well that he has himself stepped into the picturesque view. “Cars will slow down on Route 7 when I’m cutting hay,” he told me, smiling. “People like to see a farmer.”

Part of what people like to see, I think, is a middle landscape where humans and nature long ago reached some sort of accommodation. There are sociobiologists who contend that the attraction of such land, which more closely resembles the open, tree-studded savannas on which humans evolved than the shadowy forests they have usually feared, is hard-wired into their nature. But even if the preference is purely cultural, it seems to me worth honoring. The very existence of a working landscape that has persisted quite this long is something to marvel at, and preserve, if only as a lesson or reminder. All this time, people have managed to keep this land in good health, taking care not to tip it too far in the direction of either wildness or civilization.

That balancing act is beautiful to behold. The farmers who performed it are disappearing from this picture, it’s true. But perhaps the gardeners, with their chain saws and loppers and bush hogs, can take over, keeping the memory, and the model, of the middle landscape alive.