California’s Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that — to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too. Now, there is much that’s wrong with California’s notorious initiative process: it is an awkward, usually sloppy way to make law. Yet for better or worse, it has served as a last- or first-ditch way for issues that politicians aren’t yet ready to touch — whether the tax rebellion of the 1970s (Prop 13) or medical marijuana in the 1990s (Prop 215) — to win a hearing and a vote and then go on to change the political conversation across the country.

What is at stake this time around is not just the fate of genetically modified crops but the public’s confidence in the industrial food chain. That system is being challenged on a great many fronts — indeed, seemingly everywhere but in Washington. Around the country, dozens of proposals to tax and regulate soda have put the beverage industry on the defensive, forcing it to play a very expensive (and thus far successful) game of Whac-A-Mole. The meat industry is getting it from all sides: animal rights advocates seeking to expose its brutality; public-health advocates campaigning against antibiotics in animal feed; environmentalists highlighting factory farming’s contribution to climate change.

Big Food is also feeling beleaguered by its increasingly skeptical and skittish consumers. Earlier this year the industry was rocked when a blogger in Houston started an online petition to ban the use of “pink slime” in the hamburger served in the federal school-lunch program. Pink slime — so-called by a U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist — is a kind of industrial-strength hamburger helper made from a purée of slaughterhouse scraps treated with ammonia. We have apparently been ingesting this material for years in hamburger patties, but when word got out, the eating public went ballistic. Within days, the U.S.D.A. allowed schools to drop the product, and several supermarket chains stopped carrying it, shuttering several of the plants that produce it. Shortly after this episode, I received a panicky phone call from someone in the food industry, a buyer for one of the big food-service companies. After venting about the “irrationality” of the American consumer, he then demanded to know: “Who’s going to be hit next? It could be any of us.”

So it appears the loss of confidence is mutual: the food industry no longer trusts us, either, which is one reason a label on genetically modified food is so terrifying: we might react “irrationally” and decline to buy it. To win back this restive public, Big Food recently began a multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign, featuring public “food dialogues,” aimed at restoring our faith in the production methods on which industrial agriculture depends, including pharmaceuticals used to keep animals healthy and speed their growth; pesticides and genetically modified seeds; and concentrated animal feeding operations. The industry has never liked to talk about these practices — which is to say, about how the food we eat is actually produced — but it apparently came to the conclusion that it is better off telling the story itself rather than letting its critics do it.

This new transparency goes only so far, however. The industry is happy to boast about genetically engineered crops in the elite precincts of the op-ed and business pages — as a technology needed to feed the world, combat climate change, solve Africa’s problems, etc. — but still would rather not mention it to the consumers who actually eat the stuff. Presumably that silence owes to the fact that, to date, genetically modified foods don’t offer the eater any benefits whatsoever — only a potential, as yet undetermined risk. So how irrational would it be, really, to avoid them?

Surely this explains why Monsanto and its allies have fought the labeling of genetically modified food so vigorously since 1992, when the industry managed to persuade the Food and Drug Administration — over the objection of its own scientists — that the new crops were “substantially equivalent” to the old and so did not need to be labeled, much less regulated. This represented a breathtaking exercise of both political power (the F.D.A. policy was co-written by a lawyer whose former firm worked for Monsanto) and product positioning: these new crops were revolutionary enough (a “new agricultural paradigm,” Monsanto said) to deserve patent protection and government support, yet at the same time the food made from them was no different than it ever was, so did not need to be labeled. It’s worth noting that ours was one of only a very few governments ever sold on this convenient reasoning: more than 60 other countries have seen fit to label genetically modified food, including those in the European Union, Japan, Russia and China.

To prevent the United States from following suit, Monsanto and DuPont, the two leading merchants of genetically modified seed, have invested more than $12 million to defeat Prop 37. They’ve been joined in this effort by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, whose president declared at a meeting last July that defeating Prop 37 would be the group’s top priority for 2012. Answering the call, many of America’s biggest food and beverage makers — including PepsiCo, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and General Mills — have together ponied up tens of millions of dollars to, in effect, fight transparency about their products.

Americans have been eating genetically engineered food for 18 years, and as supporters of the technology are quick to point out, we don’t seem to be dropping like flies. But they miss the point. The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.

These are precisely the issues that have given rise to the so-called food movement. Yet that movement has so far had more success in building an alternative food chain than it has in winning substantive changes from Big Food or Washington. In the last couple of decades, a new economy of farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (also known as farm shares) and sustainable farming has changed the way millions of Americans eat and think about food. From this perspective, the food movement is an economic and a social movement, and as such has made important gains. People by the millions have begun, as the slogan goes, to vote with their forks in favor of more sustainably and humanely produced food, and against agribusiness. But does that kind of vote constitute a genuine politics? Yes and no.

It’s easy to dismiss voting with your fork as merely a lifestyle choice, and an elite one at that. Yet there is a hopeful kind of soft politics at work here, as an afternoon at any of America’s 7,800-plus farmers’ markets will attest. Money-for-food is not the only transaction going on at the farmers’ markets; indeed, it may be the least of it. Neighbors are talking to neighbors. Consumers meet producers. (Confirming the obvious, one social scientist found that people have 10 times as many conversations at the farmers’ market as they do at the supermarket.) City meets country. Kids discover what food is. Activists circulate petitions. The farmers’ market has become the country’s liveliest new public square, an outlet for our communitarian impulses and a means of escaping, or at least complicating, the narrow role that capitalism usually assigns to us as “consumers.” At the farmers’ market, we are consumers, yes, but at the same time also citizens, neighbors, parents and cooks. In voting with our food dollars, we enlarge our sense of our “interests” from the usual concern with a good value to, well, a concern with values.

This is no small thing; it has revitalized local farming and urban communities and at the same time raised the bar on the food industry, which now must pay attention (or at least lip service) to things like sustainable farming and the humane treatment of animals. Yet this sort of soft politics, useful as it may be in building new markets and even new forms of civil society, has its limits. Not everyone can afford to participate in the new food economy. If the food movement doesn’t move to democratize the benefits of good food, it will be — and will deserve to be — branded as elitist.

That’s why, sooner or later, the food movement will have to engage in the hard politics of Washington — of voting with votes, not just forks. This is an arena in which it has thus far been much less successful. It has won little more than crumbs in the most recent battle over the farm bill (which every five years sets federal policy for agriculture and nutrition programs), a few improvements in school lunch and food safety and the symbol of an organic garden at the White House. The modesty of these achievements shouldn’t surprise us: the food movement is young and does not yet have its Sierra Club or National Rifle Association, large membership organizations with the clout to reward and punish legislators. Thus while Big Food may live in fear of its restive consumers, its grip on Washington has not been challenged.

Yet. Next month in California, a few million people will vote with their votes on a food issue. Already, Prop 37 has ignited precisely the kind of debate — about the risks and benefits of genetically modified food; about transparency and the consumer’s right to know — that Monsanto and its allies have managed to stifle in Washington for nearly two decades. If Prop 37 passes, and the polls suggest its chances are good, then that debate will most likely go national and a new political dynamic will be set in motion.

It’s hard to predict exactly how things will play out if Prop 37 is approved. Expect the industry to first try to stomp out the political brush fire by taking the new California law to court on the grounds that a state cannot pre-empt a federal regulation. One problem with that argument is that, thanks to the bio-tech industry’s own lobbying prowess, there is no federal regulation on labeling, only an informal ruling, and therefore nothing to pre-empt. (I believe this is what is meant by being hoist with your own petard.) To avoid having to slap the dread letters on their products, many food companies will presumably reformulate their products with non-G.M. ingredients, creating a new market for farmers and for companies selling non-G.M. seed. The solidarity of Monsanto and companies like Coca-Cola — which reaps no benefit from using G.M. corn in its corn syrup — might then quickly crumble. Rather than deal with different labeling laws in different states, food makers would probably prefer to negotiate a single national label on G.M. foods. Consumer groups like the Just Label It campaign, which has collected 1.2 million signatures on a petition to force the F.D.A. to label G.M. foods, thus far to no avail, would suddenly find themselves with a seat at the table and a strong political hand.

One person in Washington who would surely take note of the California vote is President Obama. During the 2008 campaign, he voiced support for many of the goals of the food movement, including the labeling of G.M. food. (“We’ll let folks know whether their food has been genetically modified,” he declared in an Iowa speech in 2007, “because Americans should know what they’re buying.”) As president he has failed to keep that promise, but he has taken some positive steps: his U.S.D.A. has done much to nurture the local-food economy, for example. Perhaps most important, Michelle Obama began a national conversation about food and health — soft politics, yes, but these often help prepare the soil for the other kind. Yet on the hard issues, the ones that challenge agribusiness-as-usual, President Obama has so far declined to spend his political capital and on more than one occasion has taken Monsanto’s side. He has treated the food movement as a sentiment rather than a power, and who can blame him?

Until now. Over the last four years I’ve had occasion to speak to several people who have personally lobbied the president on various food issues, including G.M. labeling, and from what I can gather, Obama’s attitude toward the food movement has always been: What movement? I don’t see it. Show me. On Nov. 6, the voters of California will have the opportunity to do just that.

For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

Or perhaps a little of both. For the great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological foundation: corn. It’s not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it’s not just the source of the flour and the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed foods; it’s not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself–the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built–is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain corn. At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different items or SKUs (stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than the clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.

How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world’s greatest success stories. I say the plant world’s success story because it is no longer clear that corn’s triumph is such a boon to the rest of the world.

At its most basic, the story of life on earth is the competition among species to capture and store as much energy as possible–either directly from the sun, in the case of plants, or, in the case of animals, by eating plants and plant eaters. The energy is stored in the form of carbon molecules and measured in calories: the calories we eat, whether in an ear of corn or a steak, represent packets of energy once captured by a plant. Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn.

The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over from making explosives to making chemical fertilizer. After World War II, the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America’s forests with the surplus chemical, to help the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on the poison gases developed for war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.”

F1 hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop. Though F1 hybrids were introduced in the 1930s, it wasn’t until they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that corn yields exploded. The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything–not just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food system, but also for the way life on earth is conducted.

All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins and nucleic acid; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink. But the supply of usable nitrogen on earth is limited. Although earth’s atmosphere is about 80 percent nitrogen, all those atoms are tightly paired, nonreactive and therefore useless; the 19th-century chemist Justus von Liebig spoke of atmospheric nitrogen’s “indifference to all other substances.” To be of any value to plants and animals, these self-involved nitrogen atoms must be split and then joined to atoms of hydrogen.

Chemists call this process of taking atoms from the atmosphere and combining them into molecules useful to living things “fixing” that element. Until a German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in 1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning, which can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility.

In his book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, Vaclav Smil pointed out that “there is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen.” Before Haber’s invention, the sheer amount of life earth could support–the size of crops and therefore the number of human bodies–was limited by the amount of nitrogen that bacteria and lightning could fix. By 1900, European scientists had recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China’s opening to the West: after Nixon’s 1972 trip, the first major order the Chinese government placed was for 13 massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have starved.

This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen (Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber’s idea) is the most important invention of the 20th century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber’s invention. We can easily imagine a world without computers or electricity, Smil points out, but without synthetic fertilizer billions of people would never have been born. Though, as these numbers suggest, humans may have struck a Faustian bargain with nature when Fritz Haber gave us the power to fix nitrogen.

Fritz Haber? No, I’d never heard of him either, even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for “improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind.” But the reason for his obscurity has less to do with the importance of his work than an ugly twist of his biography, which recalls the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture: during World War I, Haber threw himself into the German war effort, and his chemistry kept alive Germany’s hopes for victory, by allowing it to make bombs from synthetic nitrate. Later, Haber put his genius for chemistry to work developing poison gases–ammonia, then chlorine. (He subsequently developed Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler’s concentration camps.) His wife, a chemist sickened by her husband’s contribution to the war effort, used his army pistol to kill herself; Haber died, broken and in flight from Nazi Germany, in a Basel hotel room in 1934.

His story has been all but written out of the 20th century. But it embodies the paradoxes of science, the double edge to our manipulations of nature, the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but from the same knowledge. Even Haber’s agricultural benefaction has proved to be a decidedly mixed blessing.

When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel. That’s because the Haber-Bosch process works by combining nitrogen and hydrogen gases under immense heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst. The heat and pressure are supplied by prodigious amounts of electricity, and the hydrogen is supplied by oil, coal or, most commonly today, natural gas. True, these fossil fuels were created by the sun, billions of years ago, but they are not renewable in the same way that the fertility created by a legume nourished by sunlight is. (That nitrogen is fixed by a bacterium living on the roots of the legume, which trades a tiny drip of sugar for the nitrogen the plant needs.)

Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw material–chemical fertilizer–into outputs of corn. And corn adapted brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn.

From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink petroleum directly, because there’s a lot less energy in a bushel of corn (measured in calories) than there is in the half-gallon of oil required to produce it. Ecologically, this is a fabulously expensive way to produce food–but “ecologically” is no longer the operative standard. In the factory, time is money, and yield is everything.

One problem with factories, as opposed to biological systems, is that they tend to pollute. Hungry for fossil fuel as hybrid corn is, farmers still feed it far more than it can possibly eat, wasting most of the fertilizer they buy. And what happens to that synthetic nitrogen the plants don’t take up? Some of it evaporates into the air, where it acidifies the rain and contributes to global warming. Some seeps down to the water table, whence it may come out of the tap. The nitrates in water bind to hemoglobin, compromising the blood’s ability to carry oxygen to the brain. (I guess I was wrong to suggest we don’t sip fossil fuels directly; sometimes we do.)

It has been less than a century since Fritz Haber’s invention, yet already it has changed earth’s ecology. More than half of the world’s supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made. (Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.) “We have perturbed the global nitrogen cycle,” Smil wrote, “more than any other, even carbon.” The effects may be harder to predict than the effects of the global warming caused by our disturbance of the carbon cycle, but they are no less momentous.

The flood of synthetic nitrogen has fertilized not just the farm fields but the forests and oceans, too, to the benefit of some species (corn and algae being two of the biggest beneficiaries) and to the detriment of countless others. The ultimate fate of the nitrates spread in Iowa or Indiana is to flow down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where their deadly fertility poisons the marine ecosystem. The nitrogen tide stimulates the wild growth of algae, and the algae smother the fish, creating a “hypoxic,” or dead, zone as big as New Jersey–and still growing. By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet’s composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.

And yet, as organic farmers (who don’t use synthetic fertilizer) prove every day, the sun still shines, plants and their bacterial associates still fix nitrogen, and farm animals still produce vast quantities of nitrogen in their “waste,” so-called. It may take more work, but it’s entirely possible to nourish the soil, and ourselves, without dumping so much nitrogen into the environment. The key to reducing our dependence on synthetic nitrogen is to build a more diversified agriculture–rotating crops and using animals to recycle nutrients on farms–and give up our vast, nitrogen-guzzling monocultures of corn. Especially as the price of fossil fuels climbs, even the world’s most industrialized farmers will need to take a second look at how nature, and those who imitate her, go about creating fertility without diminishing our world.

Like the tulip, the apple and the potato, zea mays (the botanical name for both sweet and feed corn) has evolved with humans over the past 10,000 years in the great dance of species we call domestication. The plant gratifies human needs, in exchange for which humans expand the plant’s habitat, moving its genes all over the world and remaking the land (clearing trees, plowing the ground, protecting it from its enemies) so it might thrive.

Corn, by making itself tasty and nutritious, got itself noticed by Christopher Columbus, who helped expand its range from the New World to Europe and beyond. Today corn is the world’s most widely planted cereal crop. But nowhere have humans done quite as much to advance the interests of this plant as in North America, where zea mays has insinuated itself into our landscape, our food system—and our federal budget.

One need look no further than the $190 billion farm bill President Bush signed last month to wonder whose interests are really being served here. Under the 10-year program, taxpayers will pay farmers $4 billion a year to grow ever more corn, this despite the fact that we struggle to get rid of the surplus the plant already produces. The average bushel of corn (56 pounds) sells for about $2 today; it costs farmers more than $3 to grow it. But rather than design a program that would encourage farmers to plant less corn—which would have the benefit of lifting the price farmers receive for it—Congress has decided instead to subsidize corn by the bushel, thereby insuring that zea mays dominion over its 125,000-square-mile American habitat will go unchallenged.

At first blush this subsidy might look like a handout for farmers, but really it’s a form of welfare for the plant itself—and for all those economic interests that profit from its overproduction: the processors, factory farms, and the soft drink and snack makers that rely on cheap corn. For zea mays has triumphed by making itself indispensable not to farmers (whom it is swiftly and surely bankrupting) but to the Archer Daniels Midlands, Tysons and Coca-Colas of the world.

Our entire food supply has undergone a process of “cornification” in recent years, without our even noticing it. That’s because, unlike in Mexico, where a corn-based diet has been the norm for centuries, in the United States most of the corn we consume is invisible, having been heavily processed or passed through food animals before it reaches us. Most of the animals we eat (chickens, pigs and cows) today subsist on a diet of corn, regardless of whether it is good for them. In the case of beef cattle, which evolved to eat grass, a corn diet wreaks havoc on their digestive system, making it necessary to feed them antibiotics to stave off illness and infection. Even farm-raised salmon are being bred to tolerate corn—not a food their evolution has prepared them for. Why feed fish corn? Because it’s the cheapest thing you can feed any animal, thanks to federal subsidies. But even with more than half of the 10 billion bushels of corn produced annually being fed to animals, there is plenty left over. So companies like A.D.M., Cargill and ConAgra have figured ingenious new ways to dispose of it, turning it into everything from ethanol to Vitamin C and biodegradable plastics.

By far the best strategy for keeping zea mays in business has been the development of high-fructose corn syrup, which has all but pushed sugar aside. Since the 1980′s, most soft drink manufacturers have switched from sugar to corn sweeteners, as have most snack makers. Nearly 10 percent of the calories Americans consume now come from corn sweeteners; the figure is 20 percent for many children. Add to that all the corn-based animal protein (corn-fed beef, chicken and pork) and the corn qua corn (chips, muffins, sweet corn) and you have a plant that has become one of nature’s greatest success stories, by turning us (along with several other equally unwitting species) into an expanding race of corn eaters.

So why begrudge corn its phenomenal success? Isn’t this the way domestication is supposed to work?

The problem in corn’s case is that we’re sacrificing the health of both our bodies and the environment by growing and eating so much of it. Though we’re only beginning to understand what our cornified food system is doing to our health, there’s cause for concern. It’s probably no coincidence that the wholesale switch to corn sweeteners in the 1980′s marks the beginning of the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in this country. Sweetness became so cheap that soft drink makers, rather than lower their prices, super-sized their serving portions and marketing budgets. Thousands of new sweetened snack foods hit the market, and the amount of fructose in our diets soared.

This would be bad enough for the American waistline, but there’s also preliminary research suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup is metabolized differently than other sugars, making it potentially more harmful. A recent study at the University of Minnesota found that a diet high in fructose (as compared to glucose) elevates triglyceride levels in men shortly after eating, a phenomenon that has been linked to an increased risk of obesity and heart disease. Little is known about the health effects of eating animals that have themselves eaten so much corn, but in the case of cattle, researchers have found that corn-fed beef is higher in saturated fats than grass-fed beef.

We know a lot more about what 80 million acres of corn is doing to the health of our environment: serious and lasting damage. Modern corn hybrids are the greediest of plants, demanding more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. Corn requires more pesticide than any other food crop. Runoff from these chemicals finds its way into the groundwater and, in the Midwestern corn belt, into the Mississippi River, which carries it to the Gulf of Mexico, where it has already killed off marine life in a 12,000-square-mile area.

To produce the chemicals we apply to our cornfields takes vast amounts of oil and natural gas. (Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, pesticides from oil.) America’s corn crop might look like a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food, but it is actually a huge, inefficient, polluting machine that guzzles fossil fuel—a half a gallon of it for every bushel.

So it seems corn has indeed become king. We have given it more of our land than any other plant, an area more than twice the size of New York State. To keep it well fed and safe from predators we douse it with chemicals that poison our water and deepen our dependence on foreign oil. And then in order to dispose of all the corn this cracked system has produced, we eat it as fast as we can in as many ways as we can—turning the fat of the land into, well, fat. One has to wonder whether corn hasn’t at last succeeded in domesticating us.

If this sounds like a laughable comparison, consider what it was I was doing in the garden that afternoon: disseminating the genes of one species and not another, in this case a potato instead of, let’s say, a leek. Gardeners like me tend to think such choices are our sovereign prerogative: in the space of this garden, I tell myself, I alone determine which species will thrive and which will disappear. I’m in charge here, in other words.

But that afternoon in the garden I found myself thinking that a bumblebee would probably also regard himself as the decision maker, opting for one bloom or another. But we know that this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom.

All plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error, plant species have found that the best way to do that is to induce animals—bees or people, it hardly matters—to spread their genes. How? By playing on the animals’ desires, conscious or otherwise. The flowers that manage to do this most effectively are the ones that get to be fruitful and multiply.

That May afternoon, the garden suddenly appeared before me in a whole new light. All these plants, which I’d always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realised, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn’t do for themselves. Could it be that we are drawn instinctively to flowers?

Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed an interesting answer. Their hypothesis goes like this: our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 per cent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers, and who, further, could distinguish among them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance. In time the moment of recognition—much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape—would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.

By the same token, natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not at all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower’s rancid scent reinforces this effect.) Flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor, so that even a meadow of wild flowers brims with meanings not of our making. Move into the garden, however, and the meanings only multiply as the flowers take aim not only at the bee’s or the bat’s or the butterfly’s obscure notions of the good or the beautiful, but at ours as well. Sometime long ago the flower’s gift for metaphor crossed with our own and the offspring of that match, that miraculous symbiosis of desire, are the flowers of the garden.

There are flowers around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers whose form and colour and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people’s ideas and desires through time like great books. It’s a lot to ask of a plant, that it take on the changing colours of human dreams, and this may explain why only a small handful of them have proved themselves supple and willing enough for the task. The rose, obviously, is one such flower; the peony, particularly in the East, is another.

The orchid certainly qualifies. And then there is the tulip. Arguably there are a couple more (perhaps the lily?), but these few have long been our canonical flowers, the Shakespeares, Miltons and Tolstoys of the plant world that have survived the vicissitudes of fashion to make themselves sovereign and unignorable.

It isn’t obvious that the tulip belongs in this august company of flowers, probably because, in its modern incarnation, it is such a simple, one-dimensional flower, and its rich history of being so much more than that has largely been lost. The only way we have any idea what made a tulip beautiful in Turkish or Dutch or French eyes is through paintings and botanical illustrations. That’s because a tulip that falls out of favour soon goes extinct, since the bulbs don’t reliably come back every year. In general, a strain won’t last unless it is regularly replanted, so the chain of genetic continuity can be broken in a generation.

Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554. (The word tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word for “turban”.) The fact that the tulip’s first official trip west took it from one court to another—that it was a flower favoured by royalty—may also have contributed to its quick ascendancy, for court fashions have always been especially catching.

But never before or since has a flower—a flower!—taken a star turn on history’s main stage as it did in Holland between 1634 and 1637. It was then that the tulip, still fairly new to the West, unleashed a speculative frenzy that sucked in people at every level of society. A single bulb of Semper Augustus, an intricately feathered red-and-white tulip, changed hands for ten thousand guilders at the height of the mania, a sum that at the time would have bought one of the grandest canal houses in Amsterdam. Semper Augustus is gone from nature, though I have seen paintings of it (the Dutch would commission portraits of venerable tulips they couldn’t afford to buy).

In France in 1608, a miller exchanged his mill for a bulb of Mere Brune. Around the same time a bridegroom accepted a single tulip as the whole of his dowry—happily, we are told; the variety became known as Mariage de ma Fille. Yet tulipomania in France and England never reached the pitch it would in Holland. How can the mad embrace of these particular people and this particular flower be explained?

For good reason, the Dutch have never been content to accept nature as they found it. Lacking in conventional charms and variety, the landscape of the Low Countries is spectacularly flat, monotonous and swampy. In his famous essay on tulipomania, the poet Zbigniew Herbert suggests that the “monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colourful and unusual flora”.

Such dreams could be indulged as never before in 17th-century Holland, as Dutch traders and plant explorers returned home with a parade of exotic new plant species. Botany became a national pastime, followed as closely and avidly as we follow sports today.

Land in Holland being so scarce and expensive, Dutch gardens were miniatures, measured in square feet rather than acres, and frequently augmented with mirrors. The Dutch thought of their gardens as jewel boxes, and in such a space even a single flower—and especially one as erect, singular and strikingly coloured as a tulip—could make a powerful statement.

It is hard to date with precision exactly when tulipomania in Holland started, but the autumn of 1635 marked a turning point. That is when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to the trade in promissory notes: slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered and their price. Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers. Now began the windhandel—the wind trade.

Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair and the connoisseurs and growers who shared a genuine interest in the flowers were joined by legions of newly minted “florists” who couldn’t have cared less. These men were speculators who, only days before, had been carpenters and weavers, smiths and cobblers, schoolmasters and lawyers. Rushing to get in on the sure thing, they sold their businesses, mortgaged their homes and invested their life savings in slips of paper representing future flowers. Predictably, the flood of fresh capital into the market drove prices to new heights. In the space of a month the price of a red-and-yellow-striped Gheel ende Root van Leyden leapt from 46 guilders to 515. A bulb of Switsers, a yellow tulip feathered with red, soared from 60 to 1,800 guilders.

Every bubble sooner or later must burst. In Holland the crash came in the winter of 1637, for reasons that remain elusive. But with real tulips about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled—real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs—and the market grew jittery. Within days tulip bulbs were unsellable at any price.

In the aftermath, many Dutch blamed the flower for their folly, as if the tulips had, like the sirens, lured otherwise sensible men to their ruin. This is going too far, though there are plants in the garden that manufacture molecules with the power to change the subjective experience of reality we call consciousness.

Why in the world should this be so—why should evolution yield plants possessing such magic? The manifold and subtle dangers of the garden, to which a creature’s sense of taste offers only the crudest map, are mainly the fruits of strategies plants have devised to defend themselves from animals. Some plant toxins, such as nicotine, paralyse or convulse the muscle of pests which ingest them. Others, such as caffeine, unhinge an insect’s nervous system and kill its appetite. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant’s predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures’ mind off lunch.

By trial and error, animals figure out—sometimes over eons, sometimes over a lifetime—which plants are safe to eat and which forbidden. Evolutionary counter-strategies arise too: digestive processes that detoxify, feeding strategies that minimise the dangers (like that of the goat, which nibbles harmless quantities of many different plants), or heightened powers of observation and memory. This last strategy, at which humans particularly excel, allows one creature to learn from the mistakes and successes of another.

The “mistakes” are, of course, especially instructive, as long as they’re not your own or, if they are, they prove less than fatal. For even some of the toxins that kill in large doses turn out in smaller increments to do interesting things—things that are interesting to animals as well as people. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favourite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese to that plant’s special properties.

For most of their history, after all, gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty—with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill.

I once grew opium poppies in my garden—yes, with felonious intent. I also grew marijuana, back when that was no big deal. The demonising of a plant that less than 20 years ago was on the cusp of general acceptance will surely puzzle historians of the future. They will wonder why it was that the “drug war” of the late 20th century was fought mostly over marijuana.

There has been another dramatic change in the story of marijuana since my brief career as a grower and that is the change in the genetics and the culture of the plant. It is richly ironic that the creation of a powerful new taboo against marijuana led directly to the creation of a powerful new plant.

American gardeners have managed to transform “homegrown” domestic marijuana into what is today the most prized and expensive flower in the world. Top-quality sinsemilla sells for upward of $ 500 an ounce, making cannabis the country’s leading cash crop. Two hundred million years ago, there were no flowers. There were plants then, of course—ferns and mosses, conifers and cycads, but these plants didn’t form true flowers or fruit and so couldn’t support many warm-blooded creatures.

Flowers changed everything. The angiosperms, as botanists call the plants that form flowers and then encase seeds, appeared during the Cretaceous period and they spread over the earth with stunning rapidity. Now, instead of relying on wind or water to move genes around, a plant could enlist the help of an animal by striking a grand co-evolutionary compact: nutrition in exchange for transportation. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals.

Without flowers, the reptiles, which had prospered in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

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.

It appears that biotechnology, which heretofore had little more to offer the world than plants that could shake off a shower of herbicide, has finally found a “killer app” that can silence its critics and win over journalists. It’s working, too: Time magazine put golden rice on its cover, declaring, “This rice could save a million kids a year.” Even Greenpeace has acknowledged that “golden rice is a moral challenge to our position.”

Yet the more one learns about biotechnology’s Great Yellow Hope, the more uncertain seems its promise—and the industry’s command of the moral high ground. Indeed, it remains to be seen whether golden rice will ever offer as much to malnourished children as it does to beleaguered biotech companies. Its real achievement may be to win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem. Which means we may be witnessing the advent of the world’s first purely rhetorical technology.

If that sounds harsh, consider this: an 11-year-old would have to eat 15 pounds of cooked golden rice a day—quite a bowlful—to satisfy his minimum daily requirement of vitamin A. Even if that were possible (or if scientists boosted beta-carotene levels), it probably wouldn’t do a malnourished child much good, since the body can only convert beta-carotene into vitamin A when fat and protein are present in the diet. Fat and protein in the diet are, of course, precisely what a malnourished child lacks.

Further, there’s no guarantee people will eat yellowish rice. Brown rice, after all, is already rich in nutrients, yet most Asians prefer white rice, which is not. Rice has long had a complicated set of meanings in Asian culture. Confucius, for example, extolled the pure whiteness of rice as the ideal backdrop for green vegetables. That works fine so long as you’ve still got the vegetables. But once rice became a monoculture cash crop, it crowded the green vegetables out of people’s fields and out of their diet.

Proponents of golden rice acknowledge that persuading people to eat it may require an educational campaign. This begs a rather obvious question. Why not simply a campaign to persuade them to eat brown rice? Or how about teaching people how to grow green vegetables on the margins of their rice fields, and maybe even give them the seeds to do so? Or what about handing out vitamin-A supplements to children so severely malnourished their bodies can’t metabolize beta-carotene?

As it happens, these ridiculously obvious, unglamorous, low-tech schemes are being tried today, and according to the aid groups behind them, all they need to work are political will and money.

Money?

More than $100 million dollars has been spent developing golden rice, and another $50 million has been budgeted for advertisements touting the technology’s future benefits. A spokesman for Syngenta, the company that plans to give golden rice seeds to poor farmers, has said that every month of delay will mean another 50,000 blind children. Yet how many cases of blindness could be averted right now if the industry were to divert its river of advertising dollars to a few of these programs?

Which brings us to some uncomfortable questions about the industry’s motives. In January, Gordon Conway, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation—which financed the original research on golden rice—wrote, “The public-relations uses of golden rice have gone too far.” While genetically engineered rice has a role to play in combating malnutrition, Conway noted, “We do not consider golden rice the solution to the vitamin-A deficiency problem.”

So to what, then, is golden rice the solution? The answer seems plain: To the public-relations problem of an industry that has so far offered consumers precious few reasons to buy what it’s selling—and more than a few to avoid it. Appealing to our self-interest won’t work, so why not try pricking our conscience? (Do I hear an echo? Eat your peas—there are children starving in Africa.)

Ordinarily, evaluating a P.R. strategy in terms of morality rather than efficacy would seem to be missing the point. But morality is precisely the basis on which we’ve been asked to think about golden rice. So let us try. Granted, it would be immoral for finicky Americans to thwart a technology that could rescue malnourished children. But wouldn’t it also be immoral for an industry to use those children’s suffering in order to rescue itself? The first case is hypothetical at best. The second is right there on our television screens, for everyone to see.

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.

Stylistically, too, the European protests seem so old. There they go, those Brits, indulging their Luddite fear of the new, actually taking seriously a prince (a prince!) who declares that this technology lacks the sanction of God. And the French! Hopelessly sentimental, urinating in protest on shipments of high-tech seed and nattering on about “culinary dispossession” as if this were 1968. “Europe seems to be gripped right now by a collective madness,” Senator Richard Lugar suggested during a visit to Germany last summer. “And we don’t want that to spread to the rest of the world.”

Since then, of course, the “madness” has spread; witness the events in Seattle. In a global economy, protest moves as easily across borders as products.

In recent months, activists dressed as monarch butterflies have popped up in London, Chicago and Washington (as well as Seattle), reminders of a famous recent study at Cornell that found biotech corn may pose a threat to the beloved insect. A cliche of chaos theory holds that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing in, say, Timbuktu, can set off a hurricane half a world away. So it was with these butterflies in Ithaca, who moved the biotech story from the business pages to the front pages. For most Americans, it came as news that there were already some 20 million acres of biotech corn planted in the United States. You mean we’re already eating this stuff? And how come nobody thought of doing these tests 20 million acres ago?

The wonder is that it has taken so long for the political debate about G.E. food to reach our shores. One theory about why Europeans got so hysterical so quickly about G.E. food is that they lack a trusted regulator like the F.D.A. protecting their food supply. Sounds rational enough, until you discover that the F.D.A.’s “regulation” of biotech is voluntary; companies decide for themselves whether to submit a new biotech food to the agency for review. In other words, the agency’s oversight of biotech food has been based less on law and science than on faith.

Last year, the Center for Food Safety, a public-interest group, sued the F.D.A., charging that its 1992 rules covering biotech food were illegal because the agency had failed to seek public comment or conduct a thorough scientific review. The agency’s response was alarming: since we have no regulations concerning biotech food, they can’t be illegal. Just last month, seven years after first approving G.E. food, the F.D.A. held its first public hearings about it.

The industry and its regulators evidently didn’t think we needed to be informed that our entire food supply was about to be transformed. After all, Americans are by now so far removed from the farm that we know remarkably little—at least compared with the Europeans—about the processes by which food finds its way to our plates. Food? That comes from the supermarket. So who was going to notice or care if one more high-tech link was quietly added to a food chain already so long and intricate? We are the people who eat Olestra, after all.

Labeling was rejected out of hand—too cumbersome and too risky. For who, given the choice, would reach for the spuds with the biotech label?

Right there, in the produce section, lurks the question that goes to the heart of what it means to be rational or hysterical about biotech food. What if I approach the matter as rationally as possible and decide which vegetables to buy based on a strict “cost-benefit analysis” First, I’ll need a little information—a label (which we may yet get: last month a bill was introduced in Congress calling for the labeling of biotech food). Next, I’ll need to know what benefits these novel foods offer. According to the industry that makes them, today’s biotech crops (like Round-Up Ready soybeans that resist herbicides, and potatoes and corn that produce their own pesticide) offer plenty of advantages to farmers. They acknowledge, however, that the benefits to consumers are negligible. The food is no cheaper, safer or tastier.

Now add to this calculus what we know about the risks. None to my health have been established, but then, no one’s looked very long or hard, either. So: probably safe, but no guarantee. As for risks to the environment, several have already been identified—the threat to butterflies, the prospect of superweeds and superbugs.

The cost-benefit analysis seems clear: I’d have to be crazy to buy this stuff.

The industry realizes that, in its case, an educated consumer is not its best customer, so lately it has adopted a new tack—suggesting my produce-aisle calculus is shortsighted and selfish. That’s because the real benefits of genetically engineered food will be reaped in the future by hungry people in the third world. Some day, “golden rice” will nourish the malnourished and bananas will be re-engineered to deliver vaccines.

The industry, in other words, is asking consumers to do something it has yet to do itself: Forget rational self-interest, and act on faith. Maybe Monsanto and the others are sincere. So bring on the golden rice! And what will they say about this epiphany in the aisles of my supermarket or on Wall Street? A word leaps to mind: hysterical.

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).

Today I planted something new in my vegetable garden — something very new, as a matter of fact. It’s a potato called the New Leaf Superior, which has been genetically engineered — by Monsanto, the chemical giant recently turned ”life sciences” giant — to produce its own insecticide. This it can do in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root and (here’s the creepy part) spud. The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome and voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight. Any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of my New Leafs will supposedly keel over and die, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in the leaves of these otherwise ordinary Superiors. (Superiors are the thin-skinned white spuds sold fresh in the supermarket.) You’re probably wondering if I plan to eat these potatoes, or serve them to my family. That’s still up in the air; it’s only the first week of May, and harvest is a few months off.

Certainly my New Leafs are aptly named. They’re part of a new class of crop plants that is rapidly changing the American food chain. This year, the fourth year that genetically altered seed has been on the market, some 45 million acres of American farmland have been planted with biotech crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton and potatoes that have been engineered to either produce their own pesticides or withstand herbicides. Though Americans have already begun to eat genetically engineered potatoes, corn and soybeans, industry research confirms what my own informal surveys suggest: hardly any of us knows it. The reason is not hard to find. The biotech industry, with the concurrence of the Food and Drug Administration, has decided we don’t need to know it, so biotech foods carry no identifying labels. In a dazzling feat of positioning, the industry has succeeded in depicting these plants simultaneously as the linchpins of a biological revolution — part of a ”new agricultural paradigm” that will make farming more sustainable, feed the world and improve health and nutrition — and, oddly enough, as the same old stuff, at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should be concerned.

This convenient version of reality has been roundly rejected by both consumers and farmers across the Atlantic. Last summer, biotech food emerged as the most explosive environmental issue in Europe. Protesters have destroyed dozens of field trials of the very same ”frankenplants” (as they are sometimes called) that we Americans are already serving for dinner, and throughout Europe the public has demanded that biotech food be labeled in the market.

By growing my own transgenic crop — and talking with scientists and farmers involved with biotech — I hoped to discover which of us was crazy. Are the Europeans overreacting, or is it possible that we’ve been underreacting to genetically engineered food?

After digging two shallow trenches in my garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes that Monsanto had sent and opened up the Grower Guide tied around its neck. (Potatoes, you may recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from seed but from the eyes of other potatoes.) The guide put me in mind not so much of planting potatoes as booting up a new software release. By ”opening and using this product,” the card stated, I was now ”licensed” to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I will harvest come August are mine to eat or sell, but their genes remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under numerous United States patents, including Nos. 5,196,525, 5,164,316, 5,322,938 and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of them to plant next year –something I’ve routinely done with potatoes in the past — I would be breaking Federal law. The small print in the Grower Guide also brought the news that my potato plants were themselves a pesticide, registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.

If proof were needed that the intricate industrial food chain that begins with seeds and ends on our dinner plates is in the throes of profound change, the small print that accompanied my New Leaf will do. That food chain has been unrivaled for its productivity — on average, a single American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed 100 people. But this accomplishment has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot achieve such yields without enormous amounts of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, machinery and fuel, a set of capital-intensive inputs, as they’re called, that saddle the farmer with debt, threaten his health, erode his soil and destroy its fertility, pollute the ground water and compromise the safety of the food we eat.

We’ve heard all this before, of course, but usually from environmentalists and organic farmers; what is new is to hear the same critique from conventional farmers, government officials and even many agribusiness corporations, all of whom now acknowledge that our food chain stands in need of reform. Sounding more like Wendell Berry than the agribusiness giant it is, Monsanto declared in its most recent annual report that ”current agricultural technology is not sustainable.”

What is supposed to rescue the American food chain is biotechnology — the replacement of expensive and toxic chemical inputs with expensive but apparently benign genetic information: crops that, like my New Leafs, can protect themselves from insects and disease without being sprayed with pesticides. With the advent of biotechnology, agriculture is entering the information age, and more than any other company, Monsanto is positioning itself to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary ”operating systems” — the metaphor is theirs — to run this new generation of plants.

There is, of course, a second food chain in America: organic agriculture. And while it is still only a fraction of the size of the conventional food chain, it has been growing in leaps and bounds — in large part because of concerns over the safety of conventional agriculture. Organic farmers have been among biotechnology’s fiercest critics, regarding crops like my New Leafs as inimical to their principles and, potentially, a threat to their survival. That’s because Bt, the bacterial toxin produced in my New Leafs (and in many other biotech plants) happens to be the same insecticide organic growers have relied on for decades. Instead of being flattered by the imitation, however, organic farmers are up in arms: the widespread use of Bt in biotech crops is likely to lead to insect resistance, thus robbing organic growers of one of their most critical tools; that is, Monsanto’s version of sustainable agriculture may threaten precisely those farmers who pioneered sustainable farming.

Sprouting

After several days of drenching rain, the sun appeared on May 15, and so did my New Leafs. A dozen deep-green shoots pushed up out of the soil and commenced to grow — faster and more robustly than any of the other potatoes in my garden. Apart from their vigor, though, my New Leafs looked perfectly normal. And yet as I watched them multiply their lustrous dark-green leaves those first few days, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first doomed beetle, I couldn’t help thinking of them as existentially different from the rest of my plants.

All domesticated plants are in some sense artificial — living archives of both cultural and natural information that we in some sense ”design.” A given type of potato reflects the values we’ve bred into it — one that has been selected to yield long, handsome french fries or unblemished round potato chips is the expression of a national food chain that likes its potatoes highly processed. At the same time, some of the more delicate European fingerlings I’m growing alongside my New Leafs imply an economy of small market growers and a taste for eating potatoes fresh. Yet all these qualities already existed in the potato, somewhere within the range of genetic possibilities presented by Solanum tuberosum. Since distant species in nature cannot be crossed, the breeder’s art has always run up against a natural limit of what a potato is willing, or able, to do. Nature, in effect, has exercised a kind of veto on what culture can do with a potato.

My New Leafs are different. Although Monsanto likes to depict biotechnology as just another in an ancient line of human modifications of nature going back to fermentation, in fact genetic engineering overthrows the old rules governing the relationship of nature and culture in a plant. For the first time, breeders can bring qualities from anywhere in nature into the genome of a plant — from flounders (frost tolerance), from viruses (disease resistance) and, in the case of my potatoes, from Bacillus thuringiensis, the soil bacterium that produces the organic insecticide known as Bt. The introduction into a plant of genes transported not only across species but whole phyla means that the wall of that plant’s essential identity — its irreducible wildness, you might say — has been breached.

But what is perhaps most astonishing about the New Leafs coming up in my garden is the human intelligence that the inclusion of the Bt gene represents. In the past, that intelligence resided outside the plant, in the mind of the organic farmers who deployed Bt (in the form of a spray) to manipulate the ecological relationship of certain insects and a certain bacterium as a way to foil those insects. The irony about the New Leafs is that the cultural information they encode happens to be knowledge that resides in the heads of the very sort of people — that is, organic growers — who most distrust high technology.

One way to look at biotechnology is that it allows a larger portion of human intelligence to be incorporated into the plant itself. In this sense, my New Leafs are just plain smarter than the rest of my potatoes. The others will depend on my knowledge and experience when the Colorado potato beetles strike; the New Leafs, knowing what I know about bugs and Bt, will take care of themselves. So while my biotech plants might seem like alien beings, that’s not quite right. They’re more like us than like other plants because there’s more of us in them.

Growing

To find out how my potatoes got that way, I traveled to suburban St. Louis in early June. My New Leafs are clones of clones of plants that were first engineered seven years ago in Monsanto’s $150 million research facility, a long, low-slung brick building on the banks of the Missouri that would look like any other corporate complex were it not for the 26 greenhouses that crown its roof like shimmering crenellations of glass.

Dave Stark, a molecular biologist and co-director of Naturemark, Monsanto’s potato subsidiary, escorted me through the clean rooms where potatoes are genetically engineered. Technicians sat at lab benches before petri dishes in which fingernail-size sections of potato stem had been placed in a nutrient mixture. To this the technicians added a solution of agrobacterium, a disease bacterium whose modus operandi is to break into a plant cell’s nucleus and insert some of its own DNA. Essentially, scientists smuggle the Bt gene into the agrobacterium’s payload, and then the bacterium splices it into the potato’s DNA. The technicians also add a ”marker” gene, a kind of universal product code that allows Monsanto to identify its plants after they leave the lab.

A few days later, once the slips of potato stem have put down roots, they’re moved to the potato greenhouse up on the roof. Here, Glenda DeBrecht, a horticulturist, invited me to don latex gloves and help her transplant pinky-size plantlets from their petri dish to small pots. The whole operation is performed thousands of times, largely because there is so much uncertainty about the outcome. There’s no way of telling where in the genome the new DNA will land, and if it winds up in the wrong place, the new gene won’t be expressed (or it will be poorly expressed) or the plant may be a freak. I was struck by how the technology could at once be astoundingly sophisticated and yet also a shot in the genetic dark.

”There’s still a lot we don’t understand about gene expression,” Stark acknowledged. A great many factors influence whether, or to what extent, a new gene will do what it’s supposed to, including the environment. In one early German experiment, scientists succeeded in splicing the gene for redness into petunias. All went as planned until the weather turned hot and an entire field of red petunias suddenly and inexplicably lost their pigment. The process didn’t seem nearly as simple as Monsanto’s cherished software metaphor would suggest.

When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. ”From an intellectual-property standpoint, it’s exactly right,” he said. ”But it’s a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as many mistakes as an organism does” — in interpreting its DNA, he meant — ”I’d throw it out.”

I asked him for a better metaphor. ”An ecosystem,” he offered. ”You can always intervene and change something in it, but there’s no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don’t get one rude shock after another.”

Flowering

My own crop was thriving when I got home from St. Louis; the New Leafs were as big as bushes, crowned with slender flower stalks. Potato flowers are actually quite pretty, at least by vegetable standards — five-petaled pink stars with yellow centers that give off a faint rose perfume. One sultry afternoon I watched the bumblebees making their lazy rounds of my potato blossoms, thoughtlessly powdering their thighs with yellow pollen grains before lumbering off to appointments with other blossoms, others species.

Uncertainty is the theme that unifies much of the criticism leveled against biotech agriculture by scientists and environmentalists. By planting millions of acres of genetically altered plants, we have introduced something novel into the environment and the food chain, the consequences of which are not — and at this point, cannot be — completely understood. One of the uncertainties has to do with those grains of pollen bumblebees are carting off from my potatoes. That pollen contains Bt genes that may wind up in some other, related plant, possibly conferring a new evolutionary advantage on that species. ”Gene flow,” the scientific term for this phenomenon, occurs only between closely related species, and since the potato evolved in South America, the chances are slim that my Bt potato genes will escape into the wilds of Connecticut. (It’s interesting to note that while biotechnology depends for its power on the ability to move genes freely among species and even phyla, its environmental safety depends on the very opposite phenomenon: on the integrity of species in nature and their rejection of foreign genetic material.)

Yet what happens if and when Peruvian farmers plant Bt potatoes? Or when I plant a biotech crop that does have local relatives? A study reported in Nature last month found that plant traits introduced by genetic engineering were more likely to escape into the wild than the same traits introduced conventionally.

Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Technology Assessment in Washington, told me he believes such escapes are inevitable. ”Biological pollution will be the environmental nightmare of the 21st century,” he said when I reached him by phone. ”This is not like chemical pollution — an oil spill — that eventually disperses. Biological pollution is an entirely different model, more like a disease. Is Monsanto going to be held legally responsible when one of its transgenes creates a superweed or resistant insect?”

Kimbrell maintains that because our pollution laws were written before the advent of biotechnology, the new industry is being regulated under an ill-fitting regime designed for the chemical age. Congress has so far passed no environmental law dealing specifically with biotech. Monsanto, for its part, claims that it has thoroughly examined all the potential environmental and health risks of its biotech plants, and points out that three regulatory agencies — the U.S.D.A., the E.P.A. and the F.D.A. — have signed off on its products. Speaking of the New Leaf, Dave Stark told me, ”This is the most intensively studied potato in history.”

Significant uncertainties remain, however. Take the case of insect resistance to Bt, a potential form of ”biological pollution” that could end the effectiveness of one of the safest insecticides we have — and cripple the organic farmers who depend on it. The theory, which is now accepted by most entomologists, is that Bt crops will add so much of the toxin to the environment that insects will develop resistance to it. Until now, resistance hasn’t been a worry because the Bt sprays break down quickly in sunlight and organic farmers use them only sparingly. Resistance is essentially a form of co-evolution that seems to occur only when a given pest population is threatened with extinction; under that pressure, natural selection favors whatever chance mutations will allow the species to change and survive.

Working with the E.P.A., Monsanto has developed a ”resistance-management plan” to postpone that eventuality. Under the plan, farmers who plant Bt crops must leave a certain portion of their land in non-Bt crops to create ”refuges” for the targeted insects. The goal is to prevent the first Bt-resistant Colorado potato beetle from mating with a second resistant bug, unleashing a new race of superbeetles. The theory is that when a Bt-resistant bug does show up, it can be induced to mate with a susceptible bug from the refuge, thus diluting the new gene for resistance.

But a lot has to go right for Mr. Wrong to meet Miss Right. No one is sure how big the refuges need to be, where they should be situated or whether the farmers will cooperate (creating havens for a detested pest is counter-intuitive, after all), not to mention the bugs. In the case of potatoes, the E.P.A. has made the plan voluntary and lets the companies themselves implement it; there are no E.P.A. enforcement mechanisms. Which is why most of the organic farmers I spoke to dismissed the regulatory scheme as window dressing.

Monsanto executives offer two basic responses to criticism of their Bt crops. The first is that their voluntary resistance-management plans will work, though the company’s definition of success will come as small consolation to an organic farmer: Monsanto scientists told me that if all goes well, resistance can be postponed for 30 years. (Some scientists believe it will come in three to five years.) The second response is more troubling. In St. Louis, I met with Jerry Hjelle, Monsanto’s vice president for regulatory affairs. Hjelle told me that resistance should not unduly concern us since ”there are a thousand other Bt’s out there” — other insecticidal proteins. ”We can handle this problem with new products,” he said. ”The critics don’t know what we have in the pipeline.”

And then Hjelle uttered two words that I thought had been expunged from the corporate vocabulary a long time ago: ”Trust us.”

‘Trust” is a key to the success of biotechnology in the marketplace, and while I was in St. Louis, I asked Hjelle and several of his colleagues why they thought the Europeans were resisting biotech food. Austria, Luxembourg and Norway, risking trade war with the United States, have refused to accept imports of genetically altered crops. Activists in England have been staging sit-ins and ”decontaminations” in biotech test fields. A group of French farmers broke into a warehouse and ruined a shipment of biotech corn seed by urinating on it. The Prince of Wales, who is an ardent organic gardener, waded into the biotech debate last June, vowing in a column in The Daily Telegraph that he would never eat, or serve to his guests, the fruits of a technology that ”takes mankind into realms that belong to God and to God alone.”

Monsanto executives are quick to point out that mad cow disease has made Europeans extremely sensitive about the safety of their food chain and has undermined confidence in their regulators. ”They don’t have a trusted agency like the F.D.A. looking after the safety of their food supply,” said Phil Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications. Over the summer, Angell was dispatched repeatedly to Europe to put out the P.R. fires; some at Monsanto worry these could spread to the United States.

I checked with the F.D.A. to find out exactly what had been done to insure the safety of this potato. I was mystified by the fact that the Bt toxin was not being treated as a ”food additive” subject to labeling, even though the new protein is expressed in the potato itself. The label on a bag of biotech potatoes in the supermarket will tell a consumer all about the nutrients they contain, even the trace amounts of copper. Yet it is silent not only about the fact that those potatoes are the product of genetic engineering but also about their containing an insecticide.

At the F.D.A., I was referred to James Maryanski, who oversees biotech food at the agency. I began by asking him why the F.D.A. didn’t consider Bt a food additive. Under F.D.A. law, any novel substance added to a food must — unless it is ”generally regarded as safe” (”GRAS,” in F.D.A. parlance) — be thoroughly tested and if it changes the product in any way, must be labeled.

”That’s easy,” Maryanski said. ”Bt is a pesticide, so it’s exempt” from F.D.A. regulation. That is, even though a Bt potato is plainly a food, for the purposes of Federal regulation it is not a food but a pesticide and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the E.P.A.

Yet even in the case of those biotech crops over which the F.D.A. does have jurisdiction, I learned that F.D.A. regulation of biotech food has been largely voluntary since 1992, when Vice President Dan Quayle issued regulatory guidelines for the industry as part of the Bush Administration’s campaign for ”regulatory relief.” Under the guidelines, new proteins engineered into foods are regarded as additives (unless they’re pesticides), but as Maryanski explained, ”the determination whether a new protein is GRAS can be made by the company.” Companies with a new biotech food decide for themselves whether they need to consult with the F.D.A. by following a series of ”decision trees” that pose yes or no questions like this one: ”Does. . .the introduced protein raise any safety concern?”

Since my Bt potatoes were being regulated as a pesticide by the E.P.A. rather than as a food by the F.D.A., I wondered if the safety standards are the same. ”Not exactly,” Maryanski explained. The F.D.A. requires ”a reasonable certainty of no harm” in a food additive, a standard most pesticides could not meet. After all, ”pesticides are toxic to something,” Maryanski pointed out, so the E.P.A. instead establishes human ”tolerances” for each chemical and then subjects it to a risk-benefit analysis.

When I called the E.P.A. and asked if the agency had tested my Bt potatoes for safety as a human food, the answer was. . .not exactly. It seems the E.P.A. works from the assumption that if the original potato is safe and the Bt protein added to it is safe, then the whole New Leaf package is presumed to be safe. Some geneticists believe this reasoning is flawed, contending that the process of genetic engineering itself may cause subtle, as yet unrecognized changes in a food.

The original Superior potato is safe, obviously enough, so that left the Bt toxin, which was fed to mice, and they ”did fine, had no side effects,” I was told. I always feel better knowing that my food has been poison-tested by mice, though in this case there was a small catch: the mice weren’t actually eating the potatoes, not even an extract from the potatoes, but rather straight Bt produced in a bacterial culture.

So are my New Leafs safe to eat? Probably, assuming that a New Leaf is nothing more than the sum of a safe potato and a safe pesticide, and further assuming that the E.P.A.’s idea of a safe pesticide is tantamount to a safe food. Yet I still had a question. Let us assume that my potatoes are a pesticide — a very safe pesticide. Every pesticide in my garden shed — including the Bt sprays — carries a lengthy warning label. The label on my bottle of Bt says, among other things, that I should avoid inhaling the spray or getting it in an open wound. So if my New Leaf potatoes contain an E.P.A.-registered pesticide, why don’t they carry some such label?

Maryanski had the answer. At least for the purposes of labeling, my New Leafs have morphed yet again, back into a food: the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act gives the F.D.A. sole jurisdiction over the labeling of plant foods, and the F.D.A. has ruled that biotech foods need be labeled only if they contain known allergens or have otherwise been ”materially” changed.

But isn’t turning a potato into a pesticide a material change?

It doesn’t matter. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act specifically bars the F.D.A. from including any information about pesticides on its food labels.

I thought about Maryanski’s candid and wondrous explanations the next time I met Phil Angell, who again cited the critical role of the F.D.A. in assuring Americans that biotech food is safe. But this time he went even further. ”Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food,” he said. ”Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job.”

Meeting the Beetles

My Colorado potato beetle vigil came to an end the first week of July, shortly before I went to Idaho to visit potato growers. I spied a single mature beetle sitting on a New Leaf leaf; when I reached to pick it up, the beetle fell drunkenly to the ground. It had been sickened by the plant and would soon be dead. My New Leafs were working.

From where a typical American potato grower stands, the New Leaf looks very much like a godsend. That’s because where the typical potato grower stands is in the middle of a bright green field that has been doused with so much pesticide that the leaves of his plants wear a dull white chemical bloom that troubles him as much as it does the rest of us. Out there, at least, the calculation is not complex: a product that promises to eliminate the need for even a single spraying of pesticide is, very simply, an economic and environmental boon.

No one can make a better case for a biotech crop than a potato farmer, which is why Monsanto was eager to introduce me to several large growers. Like many farmers today, the ones I met feel trapped by the chemical inputs required to extract the high yields they must achieve in order to pay for the chemical inputs they need. The economics are daunting: a potato farmer in south-central Idaho will spend roughly $1,965 an acre (mainly on chemicals, electricity, water and seed) to grow a crop that, in a good year, will earn him maybe $1,980. That’s how much a french-fry processor will pay for the 20 tons of potatoes a single Idaho acre can yield. (The real money in agriculture — 90 percent of the value added to the food we eat — is in selling inputs to farmers and then processing their crops.)

Danny Forsyth laid out the dismal economics of potato farming for me one sweltering morning at the coffee shop in downtown Jerome, Idaho. Forsyth, 60, is a slight blue-eyed man with a small gray ponytail; he farms 3,000 acres of potatoes, corn and wheat, and he spoke about agricultural chemicals like a man desperate to kick a bad habit. ”None of us would use them if we had any choice,” he said glumly.

I asked him to walk me through a season’s regimen. It typically begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes, many potato farmers douse their fields with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide (like Thimet) is applied to the soil; this will be absorbed by the young seedlings and, for several weeks, will kill any insect that eats their leaves. After planting, Forsyth puts down an herbicide — Sencor or Eptam — to ”clean” his field of all weeds. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, an herbicide may be sprayed a second time to control weeds.

Idaho farmers like Forsyth farm in vast circles defined by the rotation of a pivot irrigation system, typically 135 acres to a circle; I’d seen them from 30,000 feet flying in, a grid of verdant green coins pressed into a desert of scrubby brown. Pesticides and fertilizers are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth’s farm draws most of its water from the nearby Snake River. Along with their water, Forsyth’s potatoes may receive 10 applications of chemical fertilizer during the growing season. Just before the rows close — when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next — he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, one of the biggest threats to the potato crop. (Late blight, which caused the Irish potato famine, is an airborne fungus that turns stored potatoes into rotting mush.) Blight is such a serious problem that the E.P.A. currently allows farmers to spray powerful fungicides that haven’t passed the usual approval process. Forsyth’s potatoes will receive eight applications of fungicide.

Twice each summer, Forsyth hires a crop duster to spray for aphids. Aphids are harmless in themselves, but they transmit the leafroll virus, which in Russet Burbank potatoes causes net necrosis, a brown spotting that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. It happened to Forsyth last year. ”I lost 80,000 bags” — they’re a hundred pounds each — ”to net necrosis,” he said. ”Instead of getting $4.95 a bag, I had to take $2 a bag from the dehydrator, and I was lucky to get that.” Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect; yet because big buyers like McDonald’s believe (with good reason) that we don’t like to see brown spots in our fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

”Monitor is a deadly chemical,” Forsyth said. ”I won’t go into a field for four or five days after it’s been sprayed — even to fix a broken pivot.” That is, he would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to Monitor, which has been found to cause neurological damage.

It’s not hard to see why a farmer like Forsyth, struggling against tight margins and heartsick over chemicals, would leap at a New Leaf — or, in his case, a New Leaf Plus, which is protected from leafroll virus as well as beetles. ”The New Leaf means I can skip a couple of sprayings, including the Monitor,” he said. ”I save money, and I sleep better. It also happens to be a nice-looking spud.” The New Leafs don’t come cheaply, however. They cost between $20 and $30 extra per acre in ”technology fees” to Monsanto.

Forsyth and I discussed organic agriculture, about which he had the usual things to say (”That’s all fine on a small scale, but they don’t have to feed the world”), as well as a few things I’d never heard from a conventional farmer: ”I like to eat organic food, and in fact I raise a lot of it at the house. The vegetables we buy at the market we just wash and wash and wash. I’m not sure I should be saying this, but I always plant a small area of potatoes without any chemicals. By the end of the season, my field potatoes are fine to eat, but any potatoes I pulled today are probably still full of systemics. I don’t eat them.”

Forsyth’s words came back to me a few hours later, during lunch at the home of another potato farmer. Steve Young is a progressive and prosperous potato farmer — he calls himself an agribusinessman. In addition to his 10,000 acres — the picture window in his family room gazes out on 85 circles, all computer-controlled — Young owns a share in a successful fertilizer distributorship. His wife prepared a lavish feast for us, and after Dave, their 18-year-old, said grace, adding a special prayer for me (the Youngs are devout Mormons), she passed around a big bowl of homemade potato salad. As I helped myself, my Monsanto escort asked what was in the salad, flashing me a smile that suggested she might already know. ”It’s a combination of New Leafs and some of our regular Russets,” our hostess said proudly. ”Dug this very morning.”

After talking to farmers like Steve Young and Danny Forsyth, and walking fields made virtually sterile by a drenching season-long rain of chemicals, you could understand how Monsanto’s New Leaf potato does indeed look like an environmental boon. Set against current practices, growing New Leafs represents a more sustainable way of potato farming. This advance must be weighed, of course, against everything we don’t yet know about New Leafs — and a few things we do: like the problem of Bt resistance I had heard so much about back East. While I was in Idaho and Washington State, I asked potato farmers to show me their refuges. This proved to be a joke.

”I guess that’s a refuge over there,” one Washington farmer told me, pointing to a cornfield.

Monsanto’s grower contract never mentions the word ”refuge” and only requires that farmers plant no more than 80 percent of their fields in New Leaf. Basically, any field not planted in New Leaf is considered a refuge, even if that field has been sprayed to kill every bug in it. Farmers call such acreage a clean field; calling it a refuge is a stretch at best.

It probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise that conventional farmers would have trouble embracing the notion of an insect refuge. To insist on real and substantial refuges is to ask them to start thinking of their fields in an entirely new way, less as a factory than as an ecosystem. In the factory, Bt is another in a long line of ”silver bullets” that work for a while and then get replaced; in the ecosystem, all bugs are not necessarily bad, and the relationships between various species can be manipulated to achieve desired ends — like the long-term sustainability of Bt.

This is, of course, precisely the approach organic farmers have always taken to their fields, and after my lunch with the Youngs that afternoon, I paid a brief visit to an organic potato grower. Mike Heath is a rugged, laconic man in his mid-50′s; like most of the organic farmers I’ve met, he looks as though he spends a lot more time out of doors than a conventional farmer, and he probably does: chemicals are, among other things, labor-saving devices. While we drove around his 500 acres in a battered old pickup, I asked him about biotechnology. He voiced many reservations — it was synthetic, there were too many unknowns — but his main objection to planting a biotech potato was simply that ”it’s not what my customers want.”

That point was driven home last December when the Department of Agriculture proposed a new ”organic standards” rule that, among other things, would have allowed biotech crops to carry an organic label. After receiving a flood of outraged cards and letters, the agency backed off. (As did Monsanto, which asked the U.S.D.A. to shelve the issue for three years.) Heath suggested that biotech may actually help organic farmers by driving worried consumers to the organic label.

I asked Heath about the New Leaf. He had no doubt resistance would come — ”the bugs are always going to be smarter than we are” — and said it was unjust that Monsanto was profiting from the ruin of Bt, something he regarded as a ”public good.”

None of this particularly surprised me; what did was that Heath himself resorted to Bt sprays only once or twice in the last 10 years. I had assumed that organic farmers used Bt or other approved pesticides in much the same way conventional farmers use theirs, but as Heath showed me around his farm, I began to understand that organic farming was a lot more complicated than substituting good inputs for bad. Instead of buying many inputs at all, Heath relied on long and complex crop rotations to prevent a buildup of crop-specific pests — he has found, for example, that planting wheat after spuds ”confuses” the potato beetles.

He also plants strips of flowering crops on the margins of his potato fields — peas or alfalfa, usually — to attract the beneficial insects that eat beetle larvae and aphids. If there aren’t enough beneficials to do the job, he’ll introduce ladybugs. Heath also grows eight varieties of potatoes, on the theory that biodiversity in a field, as in the wild, is the best defense against any imbalances in the system. A bad year with one variety will probably be offset by a good year with the others.

”I can eat any potato in this field right now,” he said, digging Yukon Golds for me to take home. ”Most farmers can’t eat their spuds out of the field. But you don’t want to start talking about safe food in Idaho.”

Heath’s were the antithesis of ”clean” fields, and, frankly, their weedy margins and overall patchiness made them much less pretty to look at. Yet it was the very complexity of these fields — the sheer diversity of species, both in space and time — that made them productive year after year without many inputs. The system provided for most of its needs.

All told, Heath’s annual inputs consisted of natural fertilizers (compost and fish powder), ladybugs and a copper spray (for blight) — a few hundred dollars an acre. Of course, before you can compare Heath’s operation with a conventional farm, you’ve got to add in the extra labor (lots of smaller crops means more work; organic fields must also be cultivated for weeds) and time — the typical organic rotation calls for potatoes every fifth year, in contrast to every third on a conventional farm. I asked Heath about his yields. To my astonishment, he was digging between 300 and 400 bags per acre — just as many as Danny Forsyth and only slightly fewer than Steve Young. Heath was also getting almost twice the price for his spuds: $8 a bag from an organic processor who was shipping frozen french fries to Japan.

On the drive back to Boise, I thought about why Heath’s farm remained the exception, both in Idaho and elsewhere. Here was a genuinely new paradigm that seemed to work. But while it’s true that organic agriculture is gaining ground (I met a big grower in Washington who had just added several organic circles), few of the mainstream farmers I met considered organic a ”realistic” alternative. For one thing, it’s expensive to convert: organic certifiers require a field to go without chemicals for three years before it can be called organic. For another, the U.S.D.A., which sets the course of American agriculture, has long been hostile to organic methods.

But I suspect the real reasons run deeper, and have more to do with the fact that in a dozen ways a farm like Heath’s simply doesn’t conform to the requirements of a corporate food chain. Heath’s type of agriculture doesn’t leave much room for the Monsantos of this world: organic farmers buy remarkably little — some seed, a few tons of compost, maybe a few gallons of ladybugs. That’s because the organic farmer’s focus is on a process, rather than on products. Nor is that process readily systematized, reduced to, say, a prescribed regime of sprayings like the one Forsyth outlined for me — regimes that are often designed by companies selling chemicals.

Most of the intelligence and local knowledge needed to run Mike Heath’s farm resides in the head of Mike Heath. Growing potatoes conventionally requires intelligence, too, but a large portion of it resides in laboratories in distant places like St. Louis, where it is employed in developing sophisticated chemical inputs. That sort of centralization of agriculture is unlikely to be reversed, if only because there’s so much money in it; besides, it’s much easier for the farmer to buy prepackaged solutions from big companies. ”Whose Head Is the Farmer Using? Whose Head Is Using the Farmer?” goes the title of a Wendell Berry essay.

Organic farmers like Heath have also rejected what is perhaps the cornerstone of industrial agriculture: the economies of scale that only a monoculture can achieve. Monoculture — growing vast fields of the same crop year after year — is probably the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture. But monoculture is poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a field of identical plants will be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds and disease. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and that virtually every input has been designed to solve.

To put the matter baldly, a farmer like Heath is working very hard to adjust his fields and his crops to the nature of nature, while farmers like Forsyth are working equally hard to adjust nature in their fields to the requirement of monoculture and, beyond that, to the needs of the industrial food chain. I remember asking Heath what he did about net necrosis, the bane of Forsyth’s existence. ”That’s only really a problem with Russet Burbanks,” he said. ”So I plant other kinds.” Forsyth can’t do that. He’s part of a food chain — at the far end of which stands a long, perfectly golden McDonald’s fry — that demands he grow Russet Burbanks and little else.

This is where biotechnology comes in, to the rescue of Forsyth’s Russet Burbanks and, if Monsanto is right, to the whole food chain of which they form a part. Monoculture is in trouble — the pesticides that make it possible are rapidly being lost, either to resistance or to heightened concerns about their danger. Biotechnology is the new silver bullet that will save monoculture. But a new silver bullet is not a new paradigm — rather, it’s something that will allow the old paradigm to survive. That paradigm will always construe the problem in Forsyth’s fields as a Colorado potato beetle problem, rather than as a problem of potato monoculture.

Like the silver bullets that preceded them — the modern hybrids, the pesticides and the chemical fertilizers — the new biotech crops will probably, as advertised, increase yields. But equally important, they will also speed the process by which agriculture is being concentrated in a shrinking number of corporate hands. If that process has advanced more slowly in farming than in other sectors of the economy, it is only because nature herself — her complexity, diversity and sheer intractability in the face of our best efforts at control — has acted as a check on it. But biotechnology promises to remedy this ”problem,” too.

Consider, for example, the seed, perhaps the ultimate ”means of production” in any agriculture. It is only in the last few decades that farmers have begun buying their seed from big companies, and even today many farmers still save some seed every fall to replant in the spring. Brown-bagging, as it is called, allows farmers to select strains particularly well adapted to their needs; since these seeds are often traded, the practice advances the state of the genetic art — indeed, has given us most of our crop plants. Seeds by their very nature don’t lend themselves to commodification: they produce more of themselves ad infinitum (with the exception of certain modern hybrids), and for that reason the genetics of most major crop plants have traditionally been regarded as a common heritage. In the case of the potato, the genetics of most important varieties — the Burbanks, the Superiors, the Atlantics — have always been in the public domain. Before Monsanto released the New Leaf, there had never been a multinational seed corporation in the potato-seed business — there was no money in it.

Biotechnology changes all that. By adding a new gene or two to a Russet Burbank or Superior, Monsanto can now patent the improved variety. Legally, it has been possible to patent a plant for many years, but biologically, these patents have been almost impossible to enforce. Biotechnology partly solves that problem. A Monsanto agent can perform a simple test in my garden and prove that my plants are the company’s intellectual property. The contract farmers sign with Monsanto allows company representatives to perform such tests in their fields at will. According to Progressive Farmer, a trade journal, Monsanto is using informants and hiring Pinkertons to enforce its patent rights; it has already brought legal action against hundreds of farmers for patent infringement.

Soon the company may not have to go to the trouble. It is expected to acquire the patent to a powerful new biotechnology called the Terminator, which will, in effect, allow the company to enforce its patents biologically. Developed by the U.S.D.A. in partnership with Delta and Pine Land, a seed company in the process of being purchased by Monsanto, the Terminator is a complex of genes that, theoretically, can be spliced into any crop plant, where it will cause every seed produced by that plant to be sterile. Once the Terminator becomes the industry standard, control over the genetics of crop plants will complete its move from the farmer’s field to the seed company — to which the farmer will have no choice but to return year after year. The Terminator will allow companies like Monsanto to privatize one of the last great commons in nature — the genetics of the crop plants that civilization has developed over the past 10,000 years.

At lunch on his farm in Idaho, I had asked Steve Young what he thought about all this, especially about the contract Monsanto made him sign. I wondered how the American farmer, the putative heir to a long tradition of agrarian independence, was adjusting to the idea of field men snooping around his farm, and patented seed he couldn’t replant. Young said he had made his peace with corporate agriculture, and with biotechnology in particular: ”It’s here to stay. It’s necessary if we’re going to feed the world, and it’s going to take us forward.”

Then I asked him if he saw any downside to biotechnology, and he paused for what seemed a very long time. What he then said silenced the table. ”There is a cost,” he said. ”It gives corporate America one more noose around my neck.”

Harvest

A few weeks after I returned home from Idaho, I dug my New Leafs, harvesting a gorgeous-looking pile of white spuds, including some real lunkers. The plants had performed brilliantly, though so had all my other potatoes. The beetle problem never got serious, probably because the diversity of species in my (otherwise organic) garden had attracted enough beneficial insects to keep the beetles in check. By the time I harvested my crop, the question of eating the New Leafs was moot. Whatever I thought about the soundness of the process that had declared these potatoes safe didn’t matter. Not just because I’d already had a few bites of New Leaf potato salad at the Youngs but also because Monsanto and the F.D.A. and the E.P.A. had long ago taken the decision of whether or not to eat a biotech potato out of my — out of all of our — hands. Chances are, I’ve eaten New Leafs already, at McDonald’s or in a bag of Frito-Lay chips, though without a label there can be no way of knowing for sure.

So if I’ve probably eaten New Leafs already, why was it that I kept putting off eating mine? Maybe because it was August, and there were so many more-interesting fresh potatoes around — fingerlings with dense, luscious flesh, Yukon Golds that tasted as though they had been pre-buttered — that the idea of cooking with a bland commercial variety like the Superior seemed beside the point.

There was this, too: I had called Margaret Mellon at the Union of Concerned Scientists to ask her advice. Mellon is a molecular biologist and lawyer and a leading critic of biotech agriculture. She couldn’t offer any hard scientific evidence that my New Leafs were unsafe, though she emphasized how little we know about the effects of Bt in the human diet. ”That research simply hasn’t been done,” she said.

I pressed. Is there any reason I shouldn’t eat these spuds?

”Let me turn that around. Why would you want to?”

It was a good question. So for a while I kept my New Leafs in a bag on the porch. Then I took the bag with me on vacation, thinking maybe I’d sample them there, but the bag came home untouched.

The bag sat on my porch till the other day, when I was invited to an end-of-summer potluck supper at the town beach. Perfect. I signed up to make a potato salad. I brought the bag into the kitchen and set a pot of water on the stove. But before it boiled I was stricken by this thought: I’d have to tell people at the picnic what they were eating. I’m sure (well, almost sure) the potatoes are safe, but if the idea of eating biotech food without knowing it bothered me, how could I possibly ask my neighbors to? So I’d tell them about the New Leafs — and then, no doubt, lug home a big bowl of untouched potato salad. For surely there would be other potato salads at the potluck and who, given the choice, was ever going to opt for the bowl with the biotech spuds?

So there they sit, a bag of biotech spuds on my porch. I’m sure they’re absolutely fine. I pass the bag every day, thinking I really should try one, but I’m beginning to think that what I like best about these particular biotech potatoes — what makes them different — is that I have this choice. And until I know more, I choose not.

But this is not the only kind of information encoded in a garden seed. For the seeds I order are inscribed with cultural, political and economic information as well. And if I am to believe some of the more polemical seedsmen whose catalogues-cum-tracts have found their way to my mailbox this season, the decision to plant one variety and not another is freighted with moral and environmental significance. A political fight is not exactly what I came to vegetable gardening to pick, but I seem to have stumbled into one anyway.

There I was, looking for a new variety of corn to try, and I wind up reading in the catalogue from Seeds of Change—part of a growing army of seed firms fired with a sense of political mission—about the negative impact that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), of all things, will have on the free exchange of seeds and global biodiversity. Then Seeds Blum, a boppy counterculture catalogue published in Boise, Idaho, buttonholes me to explain that by planting modern hybrids, I am helping multinational corporations to monopolize the gene pool. And J. L. Hudson, Seedsman, who publishes the somewhat forbidding Ethnobotanical Catalogue of Seeds, preaches that by planting traditional nonhybrid seeds in my garden I can help to preserve cultural as well as genetic diversity.

The alternative seed catalogues paint the “F-1″ hybrid, in particular, as an environmental menace and make a point of refusing to handle the dread seed. In the last few decades F-1 hybrids, which are simply the first generation produced by the crossing of two plant varieties, have become the stock in trade of the commercial seed industry, and they are gradually crowding traditional “open pollinated” varieties (ones pollinated by bees, birds or wind instead of plant geneticists) out of the marketplace. According to the Seed Savers Exchange, an organization established in 1975 to encourage backyard gardeners to preserve certain open-pollinated varieties, almost half of all the nonhybrid vegetable varieties on the market just 10 years ago have been dropped from mail-order catalogues. This often results in extinction, since many domesticated species will not survive unless they are planted over and over again by humans. W. Atlee Burpee & Company would tell you that the disappearance of traditional varieties is simply the Darwinian operation of the marketplace: if the old varieties were any good, they’d compete more successfully. In fact the chairman of Burpee made exactly that argument last spring in a Times Op-Ed piece in defense of the embattled hybrid, likening open-pollinated seeds to Model T’s.

The seed savers see another, darker reason for the hybrid’s predominance. As the Seeds Blum catalogue puts it, in words plain as those of Marx and Engels, “The reason hybrids exist is to protect the breeding investment of the seed company.” Unlike the seeds of open-pollinated varieties, the seeds produced by an F-1 hybrid plant don’t “come true”—their offspring are apt to exhibit the undesirable traits of one or the other parent. In other words, seeds of these hybrids can’t be saved or reproduced; their biology makes them proprietary. By forcing gardeners and farmers to return for new seeds each season, the companies selling F-1 hybrids have effectively taken control of the means of production.

These are not the only ways in which modern hybrids remake nature in the image of capitalism. Given heavy doses of fertilizer, F-1 hybrids grow swiftly and produce high yields. They also produce genetically uniform plants. What could better suit factory farming than a robust field of identical tomato or corn plants genetically coded to ripen all at once, thereby facilitating mechanical harvesting?

But the same uniformity that smoothes capitalism’s way into the farm and garden also violates one of nature’s cardinal principles: genetic diversity. A field of genetically identical plants is much more vulnerable to disease, as American corn farmers discovered in 1970 when a blight decimated the nation’s crop, which had grown dependent on a few genetically similar hybrids. After such blights, breeders have historically turned to traditional varieties of corn, found in places like Mexico, to refresh the gene pool and provide new resistance. But what happens when Mexican farmers have been sold on fancy new hybrids and their traditional varieties have become extinct?

Seeds of Change claims in its catalogue that, second to destruction of habitats, “possibly the biggest single trigger of extinctions is the introduction of hybrid seeds.” This sounds like hyperbole, and yet the seed insurgents are probably right to perceive a threat to biodiversity in the commercial seed trade’s promotion of hybrids. We’re accustomed to think of biodiversity only in connection with wild species in places like the rain forest, but the species that humans have selected and bred since the invention of agriculture are no less important. They represent a priceless worldwide store of genetic and cultural information, the heritage of some 10,000 years of coevolution between humans and their crop plants.

As the seed savers see it, the battle for the survival and control of that heritage is about to intensify. The promise of genetic engineering has set off a “gene rush” as breeders seek to identify and control plant genes for a variety of traits—resistance to disease or frost, say, or to weed-killing chemicals. At the same time, under the new GATT accords, which will be phased in over the next five years, the world will take a giant step toward the privatization of seeds. That’s because the GATT provisions on “intellectual property rights” require all signatories—many for the first time—to set up a system for the patenting of plant varieties.

This development has already ignited powerful protests in the third world. Many farmers worry that by promoting F-1 hybrids and patenting local plant varieties that were previously saved and exchanged freely, multinational corporations will ruin traditional agriculture. Last July a group of Indian farmers destroyed a Cargill seed-processing plant under construction in southern India, the second attack on the American seed giant’s facilities there. (During the first, in December 1992, 300 protesters broke into Cargill’s office in Bangalore and made a bonfire of corporate documents.) And in October, in what may be the largest protest ever against GATT, more than 500,000 farmers in India rallied in defense of their “sovereignty over seeds.” Though it has gone virtually unreported in this country, India’s “seed satyagraha” suggests that freedom of seeds is becoming a point of sharp contention between North and South.

SEEDS OF CHANGE, WHOSE LATEST CATALOGUE brings news of this seed savers Boston Tea Party, bids me to see a connection between my garden and the freedom and diversity of the world seed trade. Take the packet of corn seeds I’m in the market for. What I’m really in the market for, the catalogue makes clear, is a particular set of corn genes, and the choice I make will constitute a kind of evolutionary vote. I could, for example, order a hybrid from Burpee. This year I see they’re offering several of the modern “supersweet” hybrids (several years ago some university researchers figured out how to double the gene for sugar in corn and slow its conversion to starch), including Illini Xtra-Sweet, which the catalogue claims is “four times as sweet as standard hybrids 48 hours after picking!” This is a revealing boast. It suggests that Illini Xtra-Sweet and hybrids like it were developed with factory farmers rather than backyard gardeners in mind. For what gardener would need a corn that holds its sweetness for two days?

To order Illini Xtra-Sweet would be a vote not just for a particular kind of corn but for a kind of agriculture—indeed, for a kind of culture. You could probably deduce a great deal about contemporary America from the genes of Illini Xtra-Sweet; for example, that this is the product of a capitalist economy whose farms rely on petrochemicals (which most hybrids require to thrive) and are typically located a long truck ride away from their consumers, who prize sweetness over nutrition and tend to boil rather than roast their corn. (New corn hybrids have been bred for sweetness and tenderness, usually at the expense of nutritional value.)

The alternative seed catalogues brim with unusual varieties whose genes encode whole different cultures and culinary possibilities that seem worth experiencing—and helping to preserve. From Seeds of Change I can order Black Aztec, said to be a pre-Columbian Aztec variety that does well in poor, dry soils and whose kernels stand up well to roasting. (At maturity the kernels turn blue black and can be ground into a highly nutritious cornmeal.) Seeds Blum recommends Trucker’s Favorite, an heirloom “dent corn” that supposedly makes up in corn flavor what it lacks in sweetness and looks. J. L. Hudson, the most radical of the seedsmen, offers several native American field corns whose appeal seems distinctly less gustatory than, well, ethnobotanical (but then J. L. Hudson believes that we work for the seeds rather than the other way around). This year he’s carrying Pod Corn, an ancestral strain whose every kernel is encased in its own husk, and Mandan Bride, “a beautiful multicolor corn said to be from the Mandan people in what is now called North Dakota.”

Hudson’s catalog is such a vast, teeming democracy of seeds that it makes room for common weeds such as mullein and burdock, four varieties of leaf tobacco (including one grown by Zapotec Indians), even seeds for giant sequoia trees. As one of his cranky, enlightening catalogue essays makes clear, Hudson believes in preserving human as well as genetic diversity—hence the Zapotec tobacco and the Mandan Bride corn, both of whose genes encode specific cultural practices he’s bent on saving. And who knows, one of the old Indian varieties he carries might turn out to contain a trait we will desperately need someday, perhaps the gene that will help us adapt corn to a warmer, drier climate.

That’s the wager J. L. Hudson and his fellow seed insurgents are urging me to make—to turn a corner of my garden into a kind of botanical ark, a blooming, fruiting archive of genetic and cultural information, a multicultural free-port city of open-pollinated, public-domain seeds to be saved and freely disseminated, Burpee and Cargill and GATT be damned! Hudson, Seeds of Change and Seeds Blum hold out a powerful, beguiling and wildly ambitious vision of the garden—and yet it awaits nothing more than a handful of seeds.

I’m expecting my packet of Black Aztecs in the mail any day now.