Potato Flowers
A little cosmic convergence of potato news:
Last night, PBS ran it’s ambitious 2 hour program “Botany of Desire,” based on Michael Pollan’s popular book about the evolutionary relationship of plants and humans.
In the section of the show profiling potatoes (all shot in Idaho), Pollan “points up the peril of trying to control nature.”
“More than most other foods,” the show says “the easily cultivated, immensely nourishing potato appeals to our desire to control the messy, fickle business of farming and feeding ourselves.”
One attempt at control was Monsanto’s genetically modified NewLeaf potato. The show says “The NewLeaf potato ultimately failed, largely due to the public outcry against genetically engineered foods.”
This morning, Capital Press, an excellent source of Western agribusiness news, published a story stating “The U.S. potato industry is working to make the reintroduction of genetically modified spuds into the American marketplace a success. Four or five companies are working on genetically modified varieties, said John Keeling, executive vice president of the National Potato Council.”
The potato industry is understandably sensitive to the fact that the public is wary of GM products, so, according to Capital Press “The potato council will put together a task force this fall that will try to determine the best way to handle the reintroduction of genetically modified spuds into the marketplace without disrupting commerce.” That disruption refers in part to Japan’s recall of millions of dollars of food products, back in 2001, that contained the NewLeaf GM potato.
According to the story “It will likely be a few more years before any of the GM varieties under development are released and grown commercially.”
Obviously, a question asked by PBS’s “Botany of Desire” isn’t going to be answered any time soon: “Will the farms of the future continue to grow monocultures, which can be protected against pests and diseases only by large amounts of pesticides or through genetic modification of the crops? Or can we grow large amounts of food the way the Incas grew potatoes, by preserving the crop’s diversity and spreading out the risk of a failed harvest?”
Edible Idaho looked at that potato question, and one possible solution, a while back. Here’s the link: Potatoes and Pesticides
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Guy Hand is a writer, public radio producer and photographer specializing in food and agriculture. |
