54 animal, vegetable, miracleconditions, but it has the combined smarts and longevity of all the sires
that ever jumped over the fence. Some of its many different genes are
likely to come in handy, in a pinch.
The loss of that mongrel vigor puts food systems at risk. Crop failure is
a possibility all farmers understand, and one reason why the traditional
farmstead raised many products, both animal and vegetable, unlike the
monocultures now blanketing our continent’s midsection. History has
regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a
few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended
on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated
many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean
strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by
U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest
people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.
/Woe is us, we overfed, undernourished U.S. citizens—we are eating
poorly for so very many reasons. A profi t- driven, mechanized food indus-
try has narrowed down our variety and overproduced corn and soybeans.
But we let other vegetables drop from the menu without putting up much
of a fight. In our modern Café Dysfunctional, “eat your vegetables” has
become a battle cry of mothers against presumed unwilling subjects. In
my observed experience, boys in high school cafeterias treat salad exactly
as if it were a feminine hygiene product, and almost nobody touches the
green beans. Broccoli was famously condemned in the 1990s from the
highest office in the land. What’s a mother to do? Apparently, she’s to
shrug and hand the kids a gigantic cup of carbonated corn syrup. Corn is
a vegetable, right? Good, because on average we’re consuming 54.8 gal-
lons of soft drinks, per person, per year.
Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack
two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take
predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to
taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to
decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted a tradeoff that
amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like