Q.What was your most memorable trip this year?
A.I went to Ogden, Kansas, to visit a set of octogenarian second cousins I had never met before. You fly to Kansas City and then drive two-and-a-half hours through the treeless frozen tundra. It was certainly memorable. The bleakness will be burned into my memory unto death.
Q.Your most memorable meal (not necessarily on the same trip)?
A.Well, no, not generated on the same trip, since I ate nothing but KFC (and I was grateful to get it). I had a wonderful birthday dinner at my favorite Nashville restaurant, Margot's—homemade linguine with broccoli rabe and ricotta. Very simple, very lovely.
Q.Did you stay in, or visit, a hotel that particularly wowed you?
A.Another magazine, a magazine that cares about me and my needs, sent me to Russia in February. I stayed at the Hotel Astoria in Saint Petersburg, and it was pretty splendid, with a big curving marble stairwell with an old brass-cage elevator running up the center of it. It would have been a great place to shoot a thriller. They also had first-rate slippers.
Q.What place did you find overrated or disappointing?
A.The American Resort in Kohler, Wisconsin, but that might have had to do with the fact that they didn't have a room for me for six hours after I checked in. The shower was so confusing that the instructions were laminated so that you could read them while the water was running, and the hallways were so endless I was lost for an hour. It was like The Shining.
Q.What was your worst (or funniest) travel experience?
A.I spent six hours sitting at LaGuardia waiting for a plane. Everyone was massively delayed, and there was barely enough room to find a place on the floor. I had just come from giving a graduation address and was wearing high heels and pearls and a navy silk dress that was very Grace Kelly. I got the first 150 pages of The Ambassadors read. You get a lot of attention reading James in a silk dress at LaGuardia, let me tell you.
2007: RING IN THE NEW
Q.What's going to be hot this year?
A.Odgen, Kansas. You read it here first.
Q.Is there a restaurant or a chef whom everyone is watching?
A.Some New Orleans refugees washed up from Katrina have opened a little joint in Nashville called Nola's. It's very good but seems to be hanging by a thread. I'm hoping they'll make it.
Q.What trips do you have planned for 2007?
A.I'm going to be on book tour all year. If they read in English, chances are I'll be there.
Q.Where do you most want to go in the world that is still a dream away?
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?
A.There's no doubt about it. Agriculture made dense human settlements possible, and there are probably hundreds if not thousands of significant human traits that were selected in response to those radically new environments. This is one of Jared Diamond's key points in Guns, Germs, and Steel: Living in dense communities next to livestock created a whole new class of human diseases that agrarians eventually developed a resistance to, which subsequently enabled them to "conquer" hunter-gatherer communities that hadn't been exposed to the same organisms. And Richard Manning has made the point that the origins of sickle-cell anemia, for instance, coincide neatly with those of agriculture; clearing the forests in those parts of the world created an environment in which mosquitoes flourish, and because carriers of the sickle-cell gene are largely protected against malaria, those genes quickly spread through the human population.