By Rob Dunn. Little Brown, 2017. 331 pp.
The fable of the ant and the grasshopper has been told for millennia. Aesop’s familiar version is well over 2,500 years old. According to the fable, a starving grasshopper begs the hard-working ants to help him out with some of the grain they stored during the summer. One of the ants looks up from its work and asks the grasshopper, “What were you doing all summer when you should have been putting food away for the winter?”
“I was too busy making music,” the grasshopper replies.
“Since you were making music all summer,” the ant laughs, “you’ll have to dance the winter away hungry!”
The joyless moral of the fable is: work hard and prepare for the future. No time for fun now.
Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future, a new book with a spoiler-alert for a title by Rob Dunn is a 21st-century version of the ant and the grasshopper. Dunn, Professor of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State, has written three books, enough academic articles to be tenured, and blogged for Scientific American. His latest book, Never Out of Season, is the story of how the plants that feed us are always in a process of surviving and succumbing to the blights that attack them.
In Dunn’s retelling of Aesop’s fable, we consumers who can buy abundant produce year-round are the grasshopper, busy enjoying our pleasures with no care for the future. The adjective improvident describes us, too. In our prosperous society’s age of plenty, we don’t realize that we are enjoying the bounty of the harvest season and that winter is on the way. The ants in Never Out of Season are the scientists who are working to preserve the biodiversity of food plants, so that when the inevitable new crop-killing blight appears, we will have a reserve of DNA in seed banks from which to hybridize new, blight-resistant strains of those failing crops.
On the face of things, the biodiversity of food plants is hardly as sexy a topic as immigration, cure-all diets, or the Kardashians. But after the couple of hours you spend reading Dunn’s book, you’ll be an anxious passenger on board the biodiversity band wagon.
Agriculture is not as hot a topic as it was a hundred years ago. Back then the combination of droughts and the financial collapse of the Great Depression caused hundreds of thousands of American family farms to fail. What happened to farmers was no fiction, although John Steinbeck made their reality the basis for a novel, The Grapes of Wrath. The demise of so many farms and ranches in the 1920s and 30s affected large groups of American citizens and consequently, large groups of voters, so the crisis received plenty of well-deserved attention. Nowadays however only 2% of the American workforce is employed in agriculture, and the corporate face of agribusiness is generally hidden behind many veils of marketing and PR.
The role of immigrants, both with and without the required bureaucratic permits to work in the United States, has heated up discussions of American agriculture, but this is more about immigration politics and farm labor than the food we eat.
Such interest in food cultivation as there is today comes from Americans’ passions about genetically modified plants. Other proselytizers among us are committed to ethical vegetarianism, and others at this end of the spectrum to the health benefits of a vegan diet. Talking about the Paleo Diet inevitably brings farming into the conversation, if only by omission, since by its very definition the diet forbids eating all those foods domesticated during the agricultural revolutions of eleven thousand years ago. Ever since Francis Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet was a best-seller in 1971, the notion that our consumption of meat was causing environmental disaster has been an argument without interruption. So while it isn’t the issue it once was when farmers were so numerous, agriculture has not exactly been absent from the national conversation.
Even so, few of us can claim to know a commercial farmer personally, and our first-hand knowledge of agricultural practice is limited to drive-by glances from interstate highways.
What we think we know about 21st century agriculture is mediated by a multibillion-dollar advertising and public relations machine that is telling us that everything is just fine — and that we ought to buy lots more of its harvests. Monsanto alone spends hundreds of millions a year on advertising and lobbying with a consistent message: heroic farmers using our products feed the nation, grow our economy, provide us with jobs, and protect our environment, etc.
We ought to be asking whether this is the truth about modern agriculture.
Never Out of Season offers a complicated “yes, but…” answer.
The yes part is easy enough to recognize and acknowledge. In the hundred years after 1850, the production of grains increased a hundred times. The Green Revolution, by developing prodigiously productive strains of wheat and rice grown with the help of the holy trinity of irrigation, fertilizer and pesticides, has come close to eliminating famine on the planet. World food supplies were 23% higher in 2003 than in 1960, even though the earth’s population had more than doubled. Our planet’s food production moves forward at an unprecedented speed and scale. The world now faces more diabetes and obesity than hunger.
As usual, the “but…” discussion is much more complicated than the “yes,” and it risks being dismissed out of hand as pessimism and half-empty-ism. There may be some fear-mongering in Never Out of Season, but Dunn’s patient explanation of the threats to sustaining agriculture as it is now practiced around the world offers convincing, evidence-based arguments that there are indeed risks to our food supply.
The greatest risk is that one of our major food crops will fail catastrophically when a new blight attacks it. A new blight is a “when,” not an “if” risk. New strains of plant pathogens appear continuously because nature works that way, always changing, adapting, and evolving. The reason we now risk Farmageddon is because as science and industry have revolutionized world agriculture, they radically reduced the variety of the crops we raise for food. Just fifteen plant species are providing 90% of the calories consumed by humans. The most important are the great world food crops: rice, wheat, corn, potatoes, soybeans, barley, and cassava.
Today most of these crops are being raised in only one strain. The hybrids scientists have developed are much more productive and disease-resistant than any of their ancestors. It makes perfect economic sense to plant only the best cultivars. But it is biologically risky, since as those few high-yield crops become increasingly common, any pathogen has only to find one vulnerability to attack every individual plant in the entire crop world-wide.
It is as though a lock company invented a lock that was cheaper and worked better than every other. Everyone would buy that one to keep the doors locked. Why not? Well…, if all the locks on all the doors were exact copies and used exactly the same key, an intruder would only need to find one key to open every single lock. This is the perfect analogue for modern agriculture. We mostly depend on genetically identical, and therefore universally vulnerable, plants worldwide to feed us.
The most horrific example of this sort of catastrophic crop failure by monoculture was the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. Understanding how it happened helps us understand the risks to our food crops today, and Never Out of Season tells its awful story with great clarity.
Potatoes are among the all-stars of nutrition. They provide complete nutrition, and you can survive on them. The intensive cultivation of one super-productive potato variety known by the unpoetic name “lumper” had made it possible for the Irish population to quadruple in the hundred years after it was introduced. It was the only crop productive enough to support the eight million Irish, who were thriving on that single food. It is estimated that adult Irish in 1845 were eating fifty potatoes a day. (Really! You could look it up!)
The Irish lumper was just one of the thousands of potato varieties developed by the ancient farmers of the Andes, where they are still in cultivation. It was precisely this genetic variety that made it possible for the Andean farmers to continue raising potatoes in spite of the ceaseless attacks against them by natural enemies. In South America it was never a question of putting all the eggs in one basket. In Ireland, however, that single foreign potato flourished for a hundred years because none of its predators had made the trip across the Atlantic and then the Irish Sea with it.
Everything was fine for the Irish lumper until the Botyris infestans blight arrived from Peru in the summer of 1845 and wiped out the entire potato crop in a matter of weeks. By 1847 a million people on the island had died, and millions more starving Irish had emigrated, many not healthy enough to survive the passage to lands with food to eat. Fifteen years later the population of Ireland was only a little above four million. This was a famine of enormous devastation, one of the great tragedies of the modern world.
Dunn calls the Irish potato famine not the last ancient plague but rather “the first truly modern one.” What made it modern was that people’s survival had become dependent on the intensive cultivation of a single cultivar of a non-native food crop. Dunn continues, “whereas the threat from the potato famine was regional, the threat we now face, in our far more connected economy, is global.”
In separate chapters, Never Out of Season reviews the vulnerabilities that are destroying various crops. The fusarium fungus wiped out the Gros Michel strain of banana by 1950, and clones of the Cavendish banana are now universally grown. Now a new variant of the fusarium has appeared and killed off all the Cavendish bananas in Asia and East Africa. When that new deadly strain reaches Central America and Ecuador, there will be no more of the Cavendish bananas we’ve been buying all our lives (unless you are over 75 years old) in the supermarket. By then scientists will either have developed a new fusarium-resistant hybrid, or at some point soon, there will be no more commercially grown bananas for sale.
Coffee, cacao, cassavas, corn, wheat, sugar cane, and beets, each has its own unique story of resisting and succumbing to a succession of natural enemies. Dunn manages to make the complicated science of their vulnerabilities clear to the layman.
A second story line in Never Out of Season is Dunn’s account of the scientists who have studied — and in many cases preserved — the plant diversity on which survivable hybrids depend. Among them are scientists like the Peruvian agronomist Carlos Arbizu who saved the largest heirloom potato collection in Peru just ahead of the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas who destroyed what he didn’t manage to smuggle out.
The Moroccan Ahmed Amri single-handedly saved the entire Aleppo seed bank of historic Mesopotamian wheats, lentils, barley, peas, and garbanzos, the founding crops of domestic agriculture. The Aleppo seed bank he oversaw had 141,000 different seed samples, 38,000 of them varieties of wheat. Amri saved them all in 2011 by moving them to Turkey and Lebanon just ahead of ISIS.
Nikolai Vavilov was a Soviet scientist who spent twenty-five years collecting the seeds of rare domesticated food plants and their wild relatives from remote areas in Mexico, Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean. At his seed collection in Leningrad 170,000 different seeds had been collected and stored, many of them unique specimens. Unfortunately, that was in 1941. By the end of summer the invading German Army had surrounded the city, and the siege lasted until 1944. In the meantime, Vavilov and his heroic staff without electricity, heat, or food protected the seeds from the cold and damp that would have spoiled them. The seeds survived, but their Russian guardians did not. They did not touch the grains and starved.
Cary Fowler was a 22-year-old groovy 60s guy who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1971. As he endured the surgeries and treatments he realized that he didn’t like his answer to the existential question, “What have you done with your life?” Fowler didn’t die, and while working with Frances Moore Lappé on Food First, her follow-up to Diet for a Small Planet, he discovered his life’s vocation to protect heirloom seeds. In 2008, almost forty years later, Fowler’s project culminated in the building of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a converted mine on a remote island in the Greenland Sea three hundred miles north of Norway, where all the world’s seed collections are now represented. It holds almost a million seeds from which agricultural crops could be reproduced after some unthinkable future disaster. Svalbard is often referred to as “The Doomsday Vault” or “Noah’s Ark.”
Another crop rescuer, Hans Herren, a Swiss hippy, spent the 70s finishing a PhD in agricultural biology at Berkeley and ended up working in Africa. At that time, a mealybug began spreading through West Africa destroying cassavas, the primary food crop of the continent. No one had even noticed the pest before 1972, and by 1977 it was threatening cassavas across the entire African continent. Pesticides were too expensive to be an option, food shortages were already beginning, and there was not nearly enough time to develop a new mealybug-resistant cassava before the crisis became a famine.
In the quickly developing crisis, Herren guessed that there would be a natural mealybug predator in the cassava’s original homeland. The big problem was that no one knew just where in Central or South America the cassava had been domesticated, so Herren went to Mexico and worked his way down to South America looking for ancient cassavas. He finally found the same mealybug preying on the descendants of what turned out to be the original cassavas in Paraguay. Once he’d found them, it wasn’t hard to find the mealybugs’ own predator, the López wasp. Herren immediately brought the wasp to Ghana and began a crash wasp reproduction program. After releasing the López wasps, it only took a couple of years to end the African cassava mealybug crisis.
Dunn also tells the astonishing story of how a group of leftist bureaucrats in Brazil resorted to agricultural terrorism as class war. In 1987 Brazil was the worlds’ second-largest producer of cacao fruit, and ultimately of chocolate. The state of Bahia was the center of cacao tree plantations, and every single, highly productive tree had been propaged from the Amelonado variety.
Luiz Timóteo and five co-conspirators had been frustrated by the failure of their socialist government’s plans to nationalize and redistribute farm lands, a failure they blamed on the wealthy absentee Bahian cacao plantation owners. To take revenge, they smuggled branches of cacao infected with the “witches broom” fungus from over the Andes in Colombia and attached them with string to the healthy trees in Bahia. It was very effective. Four years later the blight had infected most of Brazil’s cacao trees and reduced production by 75%. Brazil is no longer a large producer of cacao.
Agro-terrorism is hardly a recent concept. German scientists developed ways to destroy French grain supplies with fungi in WWI. After the next world war, the US and the Soviet Union developed biological agents to attack crops, as if nuclear and conventional warfare might not generate sufficient devastation. The US didn’t destroy these weaponized blights until 1973, and the USSR waited until the 1980’s. Although we found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, American troops did discover an Iraqi program that had developed two pathogens that would destroy wheat crops. These crop-killers were stockpiled and ready for delivery.
Who knows what the madmen are working on now? Agro-terrorism is yet another doomsday scenario to add to our hall of horrors.
Never Out of Season is an easy and informative read. Depending on your interests, some of the science may seem dull, or some of the human-interest stories distracting. If you believe that climate change and global warming are part of a vast conspiracy to hoodwink you into believing a hoax, then you probably won’t want to waste time listening to a scientist anyway.
If I were to criticize anything about Never Out of Season, it would be its occasionally apocalyptic tone. Dunn puts aside his rational, sober-minded scientist’s prose to write terrifying sentences like, “rather than grow our crops in ways that make disasters like the potato famine less likely, we have done everything necessary to make such catastrophes more likely. A perfect pathological storm gathers steam just over the horizon, and rather than threatening only a few boats, it threatens whole countries.”
Reading breathless warnings like this, I sense the guiding hand of an editor turning a rational, but unexciting, account of crops and their enemies into a book that will get some attention in the crowded publishing marketplace. I took this overlay of purple passages with a grain of salt, like a gratuitous sex scene in a movie, as part of the buzz needed to make it profitable.
Which leaves me with a question: Why do end-of-the-world scenarios have so much appeal to us today? It isn’t easy to pick up a book or a magazine, watch a TV documentary, or go to a movie without facing an apocalypse in one version or another. I don’t have in mind the Preppers with their canned food and automatic weapons in the Idaho hills. Nor am I thinking of those Americans who spend their time contemplating The Second Coming. What I’m wondering about are the more widely shared shudders about secular apocalypses. The collision with an asteroid, nuclear warfare, eruption of a super-volcano, a geomagnetic storm, Ebola, Artificial Intelligence run amok… I could go on. We live with these anxieties. Why?
Our age is one of unparalleled material comfort, and we obsessively scare ourselves with how it could all end. Is it anxiety about the stability of our comfortable lives? Do we need to scare ourselves to sleep at night?
While there is nothing that anyone can do beside worry about the apocalyptic scenarios of the asteroid, the super-volcano, or the Mayan Calendar, we could do something about the consequences of our own making like global warming or nuclear warfare, but very little is being done beyond the worrying as we spend all our time arguing about who is trying to take advantage of whom –and even what the facts are. For whatever reasons, we keep having these nightmares.
Never Out of Season has plant scientists who are studying biodiversity to save us from Farmageddon a counter-story to our apocalyptic visions, an alternative story of tenacious, but rational. According to Dunn’s updated fable, we grasshoppers can enjoy our picnic fun today, because when winter comes, and one crop after another fails, the scientist ants will have developed new strains that will feed us.
If Dunn’s editor had figured out how to make the book end with no hope and an imminent cataclysmic disaster, it might be a best-seller.
As it is, we have an ultimately hopeful glimpse of a non-horrible future.
Whew! Close one. Somebody play another song. Pass the chips.
