A.I want to go to Iceland. I just finished reading Independent People, by Haldor Laxness. He was from Iceland and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. The book is absolute genius, and as best as I can tell no one has heard of it. I'm now moving on to his other work. I have become obsessed with Iceland, the sheep, the crofts. I got a picture book of Iceland for my birthday. I really, really want to go.
Q.Where wouldn't you go even if you won an all-expenses-paid, first-class trip?
A.Afghanistan. Iraq. North Korea. Ogden, Kansas.
Q.Steven, we thought you were the perfect person to write about the cutting-edge developments in wheat research because you are such a fluid and fluent cross-disciplinary thinker. What do you think are some emerging trends in agriculture and why are they relevant to today's consumer?
A.I think there are clearly two dominant trends in agriculture (and in our relationship to the things we eat): The first is the high-tech movement towards various superfoods, thanks in large part to the scientific and technological advances in our understanding of genetics. Even the perennial wheat movement relies, in part, on genetic analysis that would have been impossible 20 years ago. But what's so interesting is that the second trend is running in the exact opposite direction: in the obsession with organic, in the whole "slow food" movement. It is a very dialectical progression: a thesis conjuring up an antithesis. It will be fascinating to see how it gets resolved.
Q.How do you think these trends will change society in the developed world? What about the developing world?
A.It's truly hard to say right now, but the obvious direction we seem to be headed is a scenario where the developed world goes backward in time, and the developing world goes forward: The developed world tries to recreate the older, slower, more local agricultural patterns, while the developing world embraces more "advanced" biotechnology and genetic engineering. The developed world can afford to slow down and focus less on maximizing yields, because, of course, the problem in a country like the United States is obesity, not starvation. The developing world doesn't have that luxury. That pattern is not necessarily a bad thing, if that's how it plays out. It ultimately depends on whether genetically altered food is a genie that can be put back in the bottle. If the developing world can use "frankenfoods" to help its populations get out of subsistence living, and elevate them to standard of living where they can contemplate going back to "natural systems" and "slow food" approaches to agriculture, that's probably good news. But biotech may be one of those things like nuclear weapons where it's very hard for the world to rewind the clock once the innovation has been widely adopted and understood.
Q.The fact that the researchers you write about in the piece consider agriculture a "wrong turn" that human beings made 10,000 years ago seems really counterintuitive. Homo sapiens, after all, used agriculture to re-engineer their world. But do you think that it's possible that agriculture re-engineered Homo sapiens?
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