Tomorrow, Today - Endangered Maize & the Future of Food with Helen Anne Curry

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

The role of corn in our diet cannot be overstated, whether it's through animal feed for meat production, ethanol to transport our food, high fructose corn syrup, corn flour, or any of the other ways it has been introduced. Corn is a staple for good reason; it stores well, grows incredibly efficiently, and we've gotten really, really good at growing it. Despite this, there's an underbelly to this industry that often gets overlooked in the conversation about what the future of our food looks like. How did we get here, and how does the modern corn we eat today related to the crops indigenous people across the Americas have been harvesting and breeding for thousands of years?  In this episode, we're joined by Helen Anne Curry, author of "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture & the Crisis of Extinction" and Kranzberg Professor of the History of Technology in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech. We chat about this complex relationship between modern corn and its relatives, often called landrace or unimproved corn varieties. But are these actually unimproved varieties? Researchers became aware that the corn we grow today had a very narrow genetic pool, and it was imperative to make sure the diversity of corn that existed across the continents was protected. Like most things, it was more complex than that. How did the cold war, multinational corporations, and the green revolution impact the evolution of corn? Tune in to find out! Historian Helen Anne Curry on her book "Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction" from University of California Press. www.ucpress.edu/book/978052030769…/endangered-maize Find Helen Anne Curry on Twitter at @HACurry

Welcome back to tomorrow today, the podcast for your future fears and greatest aspirations or something. Your favorite aspirations. Your worst aspirations. Your favorite fears, your worst aspirations. Your favorite fears. Welcome to the podcast for your favorite fears. And your worst aspirations. And your worst one.

Be the worst version of yourself in the future. That should be the new tag. Yeah. I think it would catch on. Tomorrow today, be the worst version of yourself. I'm your host, Nashplin. appropriate host for this podcast. So today we are talking about one of my favorite subjects.

Oh, God. Collapse. And it rhymes with horn. Porn? Oh, yeah. No, it's corn. Corn hub. You know it.

It's coming. Why would you build me a buttercup only to bring me down? Because it's your worst. What the fuck didn't we say? It's worse aspirations. It's your worst aspirations, Nash. All right. So let me start with this.

What do you know about? corn. Uh, okay. Well, truthfully, the only thing. I know you know what it rhymes with. Well, yes, I know what it rhymes with. Also, the only other thing I know about corn is unfortunately informed by the Austin Powers movie in which we don't digest corn, right?

I mean, Aquitaine covered that too, but everyone knows sweet corn, right? And then, like, the corn on the cob. Oh, is that sweet corn? Okay. Yeah. And then there's, like, the ubiquitous corn that, like, livestock feed, the big monocrops, like, when people are, like, talking about, like, corn. monocrops. They're not talking about like just a lot of people shucking corn during the summer.

Like that's not what that's about, right? Oh, I see. I thought those were the same. You were just like, man, big corn country out there where they're just like plowing through sleeves of curdled corn. I did think that. So now I feel silly. Okay. That is not what they're talking about. Oh. They're talking about what's called dent corn. And dent corn is this hard, high protein, very storable seed. It's, the kernels rather, are seeds, but this corn is like very good at storing. Like, this is very much similar in terms of like its capacity to be stored as like barley or grain, any other like seed that we would use for flour. And that's why you have things like corn tortillas and things like that. That all comes from the dent corn, just really versatile corn, basically.

Does it pop? Is it corn pop? Is that what you're asking? No, I'm asking you if I can turn it into pop. Popcorn. Different corn. This corn is the thing that over the last 70 years has basically taken over the American diet. And because of our relationship with food and that it's not tied, at least here in the United States, to who we are in our identity as generic white people that live here. Sure. We don't see how our diet has changed as quickly as if we're living in places like where our ancestors lived where those foods were tied to tradition.

and you could see that through linear history and its relationship to the place where you live. Because we live in a place where that's not the case, we've been really disconnected from where our food comes from. And in a very short period of time, we've lost how quickly our food has basically evolved. And today, between the corn that's grown, and I'm going to say some that's not actually 100% accurate, but the corn that's grown today is grown for feeding livestock and producing corn oil and ethanol and this base for most of our diet because it's in everything high fructose corn syrup and so on this corn has just completely filled in every orifice of listen i'm going with the porn theme all right so i i understood so it fills every like vacancy that can be found

in our food system. Over the last 70 years, they got really good at breeding corn. The guest we have on today goes into a lot of detail on why and how that happened. While that's not the main point of her book, understanding how we got to where we are today and why the research that she was doing is super important, we have to understand this very basic evolution of our food system. And that's basically framed up in this idea that we got really good at growing corn. And then we just shoved it into everything trying to find a use for it. It was like, let's grow the calories now because humans have always lived like right on the precipice of not having enough calories. We'll figure out how to use it later. Right. And that's what we did. So Helen Kari, Helen and Kari,

she is a researcher. She's actually taking a new position at Georgia Tech as a professor of history of technology, has written a number of books on genetics and specifically around food systems. And her book that we discuss extensively is called Endangered Maze. And the premise of it was that back in the 50s and 60s as breeding these hybrid varieties of corn that were super productive, we started to see that we were thinning the genetic diversity of corn. And all it would take is, you know, one wrong virus, one wrong whatever. And our whole food system could basically come crashing down. Researchers became incredibly aware that corn is a incredibly diverse plant that exists in all these indigenous communities across north and south

America and they basically went to the ends of the earth to find them all or at least as many as they could and there's this a really complicated history that we start talking about between nonprofits stepping in to get involved and to fund these research efforts and governments and corporations and we start to talk a little bit about this idea of like the ownership of genesis of genetic data and what the implications of all these things are and kind of where our food system goes from where we are today. If something's 40, 50% of our diets, we should probably know if that's something that we can believe is going to be there in the future, right? You started talking about having these monocrops or things that people survive on, and I automatically

go to the Irish famine, the Great Hunger in Ireland in the 1840s. Worked out great. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, we have sort of the same ecosystem for that scenario, whereas you have a population that relies predominantly on one food source and you have colonialism. Which always goes well together. Right. Like lamb and tuna fish. Exactly. Like industry and colonialism and a reliance on one food crop that has sort of been a one strain of food crop.

You have one blight that takes out that food crop and you're looking at crazy amounts of mortality just across the board. So. Listen, this time's different. This is a worse aspiration podcast. It was the worst aspiration. We said, you know what, let's take the potato famine and let's make it bigger. Right. How big can we go?

Those are rookie numbers. Let's take everything we learned from the Great Hunger in Ireland and also what we learned about overbreeding pugs and just smash that into one world experiment. The pugato? Okay. Sorry, it's not a corn-related one, but, you know, just think about it, like shoving a pug's face on a potato. It doesn't actually look that much different when you think about it.

Not a good enough excuse to use the word shoving. Pug-tato, come on. When we thought this episode was about porn, it ended up being super depressing and about famines. And oddly shaped pug tatoes. Think about how many eyes there are in that pug. I don't like that at all. I wish you could go back and unsay that.

Do you feel like you know a little bit more about food? I feel like I'm terrified. You should be. I think you're going to have to listen to this interview. I think I'm going to. You should. Right now. That's what we do.

Let's go. Play for me. Play us off, Jack. Helen, thanks so much for coming on. Could you introduce yourself for us and maybe tell us how you ended up basically deciding to hold yourself away and write this very in-depth and thorough book on the history of corn and maybe why you decided it was so important? Yeah, absolutely. So thanks, first of all, for inviting me to be here and to be talking about the book and about my research with you. I'm really delighted at the opportunity.

I'm Helen Ann Curry. I've just taken a position as the Cranesburg Professor of the History of Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. I'm an academic who's spent a lot of time thinking about the history of environment and agriculture with a particular interest in and emphasis on crop development and plant breeding, whether that's biotechnology or a focus on heritage grains or, as in my recent work, thinking about the conservation of crop diversity and how it involves both of those activities, both breeding and a focus on history and heritage.

Yeah, so how did I come to the topic of the conservation of crop diversity and in particular, maze diversity, which is the subject of my recent book? I think the answer to that question really starts with an interest that I had, curiosity that I had in the seed storage facility, that we typically refer to as seed banks. So while I was working on other research, I kept coming across seed banks as pivotal institutions for contemporary crop science, research, agricultural development. And I got interested more in what they really were, what kind of work they were doing,

perhaps also motivated in some ways by, if you're at all familiar with seed banks, you're probably familiar with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened for its first acceptance of donations in 2008, I think, and which at the time that I was pursuing some earlier research was really starting to dominate the headlines, at least in the corner of the news world that I tend to track. So, yeah, so I had this interest in figuring out what it is that seed banks are and what they do, what is the conservation mission that they've been asked to carry out. And as I explored more into the history of seed banks, I came to have a set of questions really about conservation more generally. When and why did people start worrying about the loss of diversity in crops? And what different kinds

of solutions did they see as relevant to addressing that concern? Solutions that include seed banks and different kinds of germplasm storage facilities like seed banks. But other approaches besides everything from subsidizing farmers to continue to grow certain kinds of crops to community seed exchanges, to efforts to change the way that people eat and the things that they might think about consuming. So I got interested in many different concerns related to the loss of crop diversity and many different kinds of conservation imagined or different kinds of practices imagined to be relevant to that conservation activity.

And then I think there's one further element to explain about the book that eventually took shape from this research interest, which is the focus on Nase. I found early on in the project that actually this was a huge set of questions and issues to be tackling and there needed to be a thread to navigate through it. And I really came to think that there was a kind of preponderance of work and energy and interest that took shape around Mays or corn from pretty early in the 20th century onwards, particularly in the U.S. context and also the Mexican context, which I addressed in the book, perhaps for reasons that we'll discuss further in this conversation. But Mays was really the focus of significant conservation attention from early on and continuing through today in ways that let me tell a story that has features that apply more generally to the conservation of crop diversity and through some of the kind of path-breaking moments in that history generally. So the establishment of seed storage facilities dedicated to conservation to, to some of the pioneering work around community-oriented seed-saving and conservation

in efforts in which really maze was a central concern. And so it was both a sort of uniquely important crop in the conservation of crop diversity to let me hit many different points, but also illuminated a kind of more general story. Yeah, yeah, it was a really thorough and fascinating look at a a crop that I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about. And then I was just like, I don't know anything. And that's really cool, like, to be able to say, like, you get to these points where you don't know what you don't know and you get overconfident and, or you get confident, I guess.

And then this whole other scope of knowledge comes in and you're like, oh, wow, there's so much more to learn about this thing that I'm interested in. And I never thought about it from these perspectives. And it's really important to acknowledge those exist. but it's really hard at the same time to not know what you don't know. So this book is really illuminating for me. So I appreciate it from that perspective. No, thanks for sharing that.

Now, I think people, just I think part of the world we live in, because of our disconnection from where our food comes from, we've very quickly been able to ignore the fact that the way our diets have shifted over the last hundred years have really evolved around corn. And in some ways, that's been really great in the sense that it's allowed people to move off of farms and to do things that they're passionate about or at least create new markets, new products and things that we think are important. At the same time, that process that freed us from having to live and subsist on farms and

things like that has also made things more precarious, specifically around the breeding genetics. Now, could you explain this a little bit? You talk about it in the book, but even as somebody that is around, I don't do a lot of breeding, so it's a little confusing even for me. Yeah, sure. So feel free here to interrupt me and push me in different directions if there's different parts of this story that you want to know about. But I think one way to get at the issues that you've just raised is to point to some of the

constraints that come along with scaling up production. Right. So one of the reasons that we've been able to produce so much more per acre of farmland of various different crops, including corn over, say, the past half century plus, maybe the past 70 years, is to do with genetic enhancements that enable crops to be more productive, whether that's because they're responding to fertilizers in a particular way or dealing with crowding in a particular way, right, responding to their environments in in such a way that yields are able to be maintained or go up even as conditions shift around them.

And so what we refer to as genetic gains as a result of plant breeding have gone along with other things that I think people are more familiar with. So the use of synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides or insecticides, right? So controlling the environment at which crops grow in these very obvious ways to most of us has also been accompanied by a process that's much more hidden, I think. And that's what you're referring to, these things that go on that we're not necessarily as aware of. But in attempting to control both the environments that crops grow in as well as the internal material, right, the genetics of the plants themselves, the sort of pathway of industrialization tends to

push towards both environments and genetics that are ever more similar. over time, right? So in the scope of the genetics of plants, people talk about a bottleneck, a genetic bottleneck that historically has accompanied plant breeding in which superior individuals or plants that perform best are selected for in terms of the genetic material that they contain and that they tend also to be grown more because of their performance ability or because of the ways in which they are marketed. So we end up with plants that are ever more kind of genetically similar within a particular variety, but then also grown over or sort of across varieties, I guess, but then also grown over wider areas, right? So sort of both in terms of genetically

similar, basically at different scales of ecosystems and environments, I think. And that that is the kind of precarity that you referred to. There are many people who think that, certain kinds of genetic narrowing eliminate variability that might be useful if there are either catastrophic weather events or disease events or changes in climate that change the pressures on growing crops in different sorts of ways. Because when you have populations that are very genetically similar, you have reason to expect that they're all going to behave the same as opposed to maybe populations that came before that were more heterogeneous. And so we have made plants incredibly more productive over time,

but it isn't without a worry that some of that productivity brings with it a risk of potential kind of losses or catastrophes in the future based around this kind of uniformity. And all of this kind of stems from a number of different things, from the Dust Bowl and the Cold War and all of these, it's kind of a perfect storm of things that came together between the researchers getting better at this type of work and like all these other outside forces that really created kind of the conditions that allowed for what became this race to try to quote unquote save indigenous species. And one of the things I think is really interesting about this process or this idea of like hyper-specialized

plants that are incredibly productive is that the further that they get from the other varieties, trying to breed those other varieties with these characteristics, these traits that may help them in the future becomes harder and harder because of the difference in yields that each of those plants has. And it seems like in a way where, and this is probably more philosophical than scientific, I guess, but that we're getting further and further away as these plants become more productive from being able to breed them these genetics in because of how further and further apart they've become from the land race varieties or whatever term you want to use to describe some of these other corns that don't fit the super productive American style commercial crops.

Yeah, I think there's a couple interesting things to say about that. One is there's some research that's been done that suggests that had open pollinated varieties of maize received the same amount of attention that hybrid development did. Hybrid was preferred by commercial producers because it allowed them more control over seed production and reuse. As much attention had been put into open pollinated corn development as into hybrid corn development, we would have seen open pollinated varieties that were more competitive just because of the ability of breeding to generate varieties. So that would perform better over time. And so one of the reasons that hybrid corn is so productive is simply because it was the subjects to so

much resources and inputs and intellectual activity. But it needn't have been the case that it outperformed to such an incredible extent, the open pollinated varieties that came before. So that's, that is one thing that I think there's actually continues to be good research coming out on, on what those, those genetic differences, that potential difference really is. But the other thing to say is that I think there is actually, it's an interesting area in which there's a lot of optimism right now. This is something that I don't touch on at all in the book is about the possibility of genomic science and gene editing to overcome some of these barriers to using land races or farmer varieties, whatever you want, whatever your favorite designation of those that are have been less subject to professional or commercial breeding activity that with the ability to for example run the sequence of a genome

on different samples to see what the genetic signature is and to think about combinations of crops at that level but then especially to be able to use things like gene editing tools like CRISPR CAS 9 to actually kind of toggle the genetic material much more precisely. And it would depend on how one feels about gene editing as a biotechnology, obviously. People have mixed feelings about that. But some of the real kind of gaps that might exist right now between, say, an industrial hybrid corn and open pollinated land race that's, not been subject historically to the same kind of concentrated productivity-oriented attention,

some of that gap might actually be able to be bridged in a way that was not possible in recent past. And so for what it's worth, some of this trajectory that we've seen could potentially be overcome if people were interested in using the technology to do that. Yeah, and it points to something I think that's really difficult for people, to discern, which is the difference between the technology and the proprietors of the technology sometimes. So, you know, we're talking about hybrid corns and how they've been bred so far away from traditional land race varieties. And people justifiably are suspicious of technologies and science that comes from proprietary technology and how that's traditionally been utilized for corporate

gain and not for the benefit of the general public. I mean, we are where we are in terms of climate change because of oil companies doing basically the same thing. So it becomes really difficult to say, hey, listen, when we're talking about things like GMOs or whatever term you want to use, they're not inherently evil. It offers us different tools and we have to understand those tools within the context and confines of what they are and disconnected from some of the negative connotations that come with them because of how they've been leveraged and utilized. And I think because of that, people get really suspicious and uncomfortable with that conversation of, okay, yes, these things may be considered dangerous, whether it's in your own book, you talk about Chappas and the Zapatistas

and their concerns about the pollination from the commercial strains, their own indigenous crops. They have every reason to be suspicious and concerned, even if it isn't inherently the technology itself. That's the problem. You're absolutely right. I think that intellectual property is the sort of central issue in crop biotechnologies and why they have proved so enduringly controversial. I mean, I think the early activism around this, especially in the 1970s and 80s, was spurred on not so much by dangers of the technology in terms of biological consequences, but really in terms of the social justice consequences of owning crop, having ownership over seeds in a very strict way that would be enabled or facilitated further

by biotechnological development and indeed was as we've seen. And so, but to my mind, that really points to, and many other people have said this as well, right, thinking about the parallel trajectory industrial seed development and the pairing down of publicly funded programs for crop development. I think there's a kind of interesting set of work that could be done looking at what happened to public breathing programs over the course of the 20th century. It's not something I've necessarily undertaken.

And thinking about how that relates to crop diversity. If we don't have people who are given the job of working in the public interest to develop, crop varieties, be it with biotechnology, gene editing, right, or quote-unquote, more traditional methods, you might actually see the existence of those programs if they had been maintained, could have been associated with perhaps a different crop landscape than we have today. And I think that's where the commodification of corn in its unique characteristics as a C4 grass that can evolve incredibly quickly comparatively to even, you know, if you look at wheat,

which you talk about a bit in the book, as a crop that's also been treated very similarly in terms of development and hybridization and things like that. The amount of productivity that's come out of corn versus like two-row barley is incredibly different because of corn's ability to just produce incredible, incredible amounts of calories. And one of the things I've actually heard you on another podcast talk about is that people will become, they'll talk about things like, okay, we're growing this corn for livestock, we're doing, you know, we're making seed oils, we're doing all these things. And that's what's driving the productivity or the usage of corn as this massive monocrop. But that kind of is the flip side of it is we're really good at producing it. And then we're trying to find ways to use it instead because we are so good.

good at creating calories. And historically speaking, humans have always existed, at least in, I guess, the modern era. And I'll use modern as in, I guess, like industrial era, pre-industrial era, recorded history era, as subsistence in slightly more maybe, whereas today, because of corn, we are not in that place. We were able to produce far more calories than we've ever needed. And it's kind of hard to shake the idea that we should be not growing it if we can. Yeah, no, I think you've captured some of the challenges there. The push after World War II, especially to increase global grain production, especially the drive to develop agriculture in other places on the model,

especially seen in the United States, but also elsewhere, Canada and beyond. That ever-increasing pile of grain is in many ways as much a burden as it is, something to celebrate it. And if we think about how diets have changed in relation to industrial food products and the health consequences of some of those shifts, a lot of people do point back to the emphasis on breeding, high-yielding varieties that would respond to synthetic fertilizers in the immediate sort of 1940s, 1950s post-war period. And the incredible success is seen in driving up productivity of wheat. Corn obviously has a sort of history that starts a little bit earlier in the United States.

But yeah, and I think, you know, it's important to remember that the fear of hunger and the devastation of famine was and is real, right? I think we need to be attending to agricultural production and ensuring that we are always kind of advancing the front of productivity. but a lot of the problems remain in distribution and how grain gets used and in what governments are willing to exchange grains for and so on. Yeah, and this kind of immense productivity hasn't necessarily meant resolution of the problems that it was originally targeting. You touch on it in the book and you don't go into too much detail, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. You mentioned a lot about the Rockefeller Foundation and a little bit about the Ford Foundation and a couple other nonprofits that have existed to advocate on behalf of the Green

Revolution, as you talk about it in the book. And we've seen that get replicated with similar failures in India and in Africa today with the inclusion of like the Gates Foundation, which has come with a number of challenges. First, could you kind of summarize maybe a little bit about what the Green Revolution was in Mexico and then maybe kind of some of your thoughts on maybe stuff that you didn't necessarily cover in the book, but thought was really interesting or areas for further exploration around the subject area? Sure. So when people talk about the green revolution with a capital G and a capital R, they're usually referring to this where historically that was a phrase used to refer

to a transition in agricultural productivity seen in parts of Asia. and the Middle East and then also Mexico and a bit of Latin elsewhere in Latin America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And these were agricultural productivity increases tied specifically to the introduction of new varieties, which were kind of often referred to as high yielding varieties. That mostly meant that they were varieties that were very responsive to fertilizer and had been bred to use fertilizer in a kind of efficient way. And then also to the kind of the green revolution could also, in productivity, could also be attributed to other elements of what's called a technological package that were put in place at the same time. So it wasn't just seeds and fertilizer, but also in some cases, irrigation systems or possibilities. Also credit schemes for farmers to be able to borrow the money. They might need to obtain all these tools, in some cases, mechanization of farming as well.

And the green revolution, as it in that sort of narrow sense, as it unfolded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was claimed by, I would say, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation as a product of philanthropic investment in research for agricultural development, research to create varieties, work on extension and bringing those varieties to communities to communities. and so on. And so there was a sort of a narrative solidified early on in the early 1970s about how philanthropy had created the possibilities for agricultural transformation, which it was then assumed would also bring social transformation, new possibilities, new opportunities, but that was a narrative that was almost immediately contested and remains contested today. You also have in the early 1970s the first ever kind of social scientist and environmental or ecological studies that come in and say, oh, actually the introduction of these seeds, these technologies, these new ways of obtaining credit and resources to farm have created new inequalities among farmers.

They've created new environmental challenges, for example, with fertilizer runoff, maybe with loss of crop diversity. And so even as the sort of celebration of the Green Revolution as solving looming crises of hunger, of malnutrition, even as that was being declared and put forward, there was a body of literature that was saying, oh, no, the Green Revolution is something to be upset about, something to condemn, not something to celebrate. And really those two pathways of understanding this history and what it means to undergo this specific kind of agriculture. transformation, I think that remains a contest, right, over which of those narratives better. My own view is that it's a little bit of both, but we can come back to that. But I think as those debates over what the Green Revolution was and whether it was good or bad

unfolded, that narrow Green Revolution that I just described as a sort of particular historical event, Green Revolution has come to have a more general meaning in which people refer to Green Revolutions, you know, what happened elsewhere. in South America or in Central America, what happened in Korea or what happened in, well, as you already mentioned in your comment, what was attempted to be implemented in Africa. People talk about a green revolution for Africa. And so there is a sense in which any agricultural transformation that involves these elements of seeds and fertilizer and a certain kind of what we often refer to modernization, a loaded

term in many ways. Those are all kind of packaged as green, green revolutions of a kind. I think the, the dialogue continues as to the desirability of green revolutions on the, the model of the green revolution of the 1960s. And so I think if I, you asked about, you know, other things to, to other research pathways to take within that history. I mean, obviously, there's work to be done on thinking through the many efforts that have been made to undertake agricultural transformations in Africa as a part of development aid programs

that really have never produced the kind of outcomes that have been imagined for them. And this is true from the 1970s really onwards. And there's a lot of good social science research that really pushes at trying to understand some of the limitations of development. developers' visions, also some of the ecological challenges. But I also think there's probably questions we should ask about the good faith efforts that have been made by many people to respond to some of those critiques arising of the Green Revolution approach and to try and envision new ways of instituting agricultural change that's perhaps more sensitive to communities, perhaps more sensitive to gender dynamics and gender dimensions of agriculture,

that's more cognizant of the long-term ecological harm that might arise from certain shifts in production, that's more incorporative of diverse agricultural elements, including crop diversity. Because a lot of those two have stumbled despite their greater social awareness. And despite, I think, really, you know, the truly genuine good intentions behind them. And so I think we've spent a lot of time trying to unpack the green revolution and all of the bad things about it. But I think we need to start doing a better job, at least this is speaking as a historian and what historians have focused on. We could do a better job of also thinking through how research transformed in response to critique, you know, in the 1970s,

in the 80s and later, and understanding the ways in which research changed and tried to address shortcomings that were pointed out. Because if we're still living with some of these problems and challenges, that seems to me essential to really understanding why we're still living with them. I do want to talk about kind of those early stages going back to seed saving and then working with indigenous farmers because it does frame up some of the things you're talking about right now. But before we go there, I ended up going down a rabbit hole after I read your book on I'm never going to pronounce his name. So I'm just going to call him his nickname, Zolo, who, you instructor at the school that the seed bank was basically framed around in Chippingo.

And he kind of does what you're talking about a bit in a really interesting way. I was only able to find like a thesis that was written about it. During a student protest blockade of the school, he was kind of the facilitator between the Mexican government and the students. He was an interesting person because he had, when the government refused to give him money, he went to the Rockefeller Foundation and basically asked for money for really important research on seed saving. And he was a major proponent for agroecology and recognizing the knowledge that indigenous farmers had and was kind of one of the first academic voices really pushing that in Mexico. But what was really interesting is that he understood the complexity and the nuance of the conversation in a way we don't often hear about when we read books.

And I think that's something you do in this book that it's not a Greenwood Revolution bad. Indigenous farmers have no interest in these products and that there's no place for some of the work that they're doing. Because to bring it back to the beginning of the book, you talk extensively about well-meaning and well-intentioned researchers who are, in their opinion, very justifiably concerned about keeping these indigenous land races from being lost and how that was both appreciably. and leveraged by companies, even if the companies didn't have the indigenous farmers' best interests at heart, that doesn't mean there weren't any good things that came out of it. Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about. So it's Ephraim Hernandez Cholokotzi, and he was a Mexican agroecologist, trained in Mexico as well as the United States, employed, as you pointed out at various times,

by the Rockefeller Foundation, by the Mexican government, working very much as a project. part of the kind of effort to advance what later became known as the Green Revolution in Mexico, and then became a striving critic of it. Trained generation of students in agroecology in Mexico really helped to kind of cement and advance different ideas about how agricultural development might unfold, the ways in which it might involve what he called traditional agricultural technologies, but really a kind of agricultural development in Mexico for Mexicans, right? And being cognizant of the extent to which agribusiness was dominated by non-Mexican interests and especially non-Indigenous interests. He, I think, was one of the pioneers of an alternative

vision, at least in Mexico. And really, really pleased to hear you describe the way in which the history that I tell in the book comes across as not one of being villains and heroes, but really the complexity that we find at any juncture, the complexity of good intentions, of structural constraints, of competing visions for what, for example, good conservation means. And I think, yeah, in a lot of debates, especially in the sort of agricultural space about like what good agriculture is. I think there's a lot of drawing of black and white lines. And we don't have a lot of space for those conversations that basically admit, you know,

no, we need to keep a lot of the elements that we have in agriculture in place, at least in terms of feeding the number of people that we have in the world. And so some of the kinds of shifts that happened around the Green Revolution are shifts that sort of enable us to go on, right? And that the changes that need to happen from here in developing an agriculture that's more sustainable moving forward is about finding some balance between how and where we use land in the ways that we do today, for example, in the Midwest, and where we make changes, either towards different crop varieties, different modes of production. And the same goes for other places in the world. Finding the places where we support

big farmers and finding the places where it makes more sense to support small scale and local and smallholder farmers or subsistence farmers. I think, you know, if there's anything, it's just really moving away from the one size fits all model to recognize that there's a whole range of models and that that range of models also includes the ways that we farm now, right? And that's part of the future trajectory that I think we have to probably get comfortable with. but that involves accepting a sort of big gray zone in the middle, as with so many of these things. So anyway, so I'm delighted that that comes through in the book.

And I think the history and the biography of people like Hernandez-Tulocotez really exemplify that because of the way in which he straddled these different domains was part of different dialogues and conversations. And the sort of complexity of his biography shows the way in which, oh, actually the Rockefeller Foundation in its Green Revolution or pre-green revolution activities in Mexico, funded a huge range of educational opportunities for researchers across Mexico, Central, and South America. And as a result of that, transformed agricultural knowledge, including creating some of the discussions that were ultimately

agro-ecological, right? It's very easy to make the argument that the Rockefeller Foundation is like this anti-communist propaganda machine that allows American companies to go, into peripheral countries, third world countries, whatever term that people decide to use. And like, that might be true, but also, like, good things can come out of that. It might not all be good, but good things. And we can't just erase those good things just because bad things came with them. And in terms of, like, the way we do agriculture today, we have to be able to say, okay, well, if our goal isn't to make everyone go back to farming, we have to find what is the highest

capacity we can do with the least ecological destruction. And that means using all the tools that exist around us. Yeah. Yeah. And I would also say some of this sort of inhabiting the muddled middle zone applies to the history of seed banking, which is, which as I said, is what originally brought me to this work. Because as I emphasize in the book, I think seed banks have been at best a kind of partial conservation solution, that putting things in cold storage in the way that began happening, you know, from the 1930s and 40s onwards, that the cold storage trajectory enabled a certain kind of security or a sort of vision of security, but also created new insecurities. So things wouldn't necessarily disappear forever if they went out of cultivation

in the fields. But once stored in the seed bank, required new kinds of. conservation stewardship, the difficulties of which only became apparent over time, and I think in many ways are still becoming apparent. So one of the reasons that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault exists as an entity is because seed banks, as they were established all over the world in the 50s and 60s and 70s came to be seen as actually quite invulnerable and themselves not safe storage spaces. So hence we have an even bigger freezer than ever, basically, in the Arctic that now keeps most of the world's major seed collections and are copies of them. But at the same time that I think it's important to recognize the limitations of seed banking. There's not a world in which I wish

that they would disappear. I think we need seed banks. Absolutely. Right. And so, so it's hard not to, you know, sort of critiquing the salvage mentality that then sees storage as a solution doesn't mean abandoning storage as a, as an enterprise. No, it's just recognizing that it's a partial solution and it needs to be, you know, well resourced and well financed, but also buttressed by other alternatives out there in the world. And so often I think, you know, we get to the critique and seeing the shortcomings, but then, yeah, forget to say, actually, we can't live, we can't live without that solution. That has to be part of the package that we, that we have in place.

Yeah, and you talk about this a bit in the book, the sheer scope and size of actually keeping seeds in storage and like what that looks like because of the fact that seeds can't sit indefinitely frozen and be viable. So that means taking them out, letting them grow for a year, harvesting those seeds, and you have to do it in the conditions because of the plasticity of the seeds. You have to do in the conditions that those plants come from or they're going to start losing those traits that are so desirable in the seeds themselves. The point you make in the book is basically, or at least from my perspective, was that seed banks are important. But, that's only one part of the puzzle and that it erases the existence of the plant as a plant that

has a place in time and uh you know that comes with the indigenous knowledge of growing the plant it comes with its relationships with the things around it the pests that that try to eat the plant and you know continuously evolving alongside those things as a community putting it in free in storage in case you know an entire village were to get wiped out and that that crop was lost forever is important, but you're freezing that place and time. It's not continuing to exist as a dynamic piece of a community. And that's the part that was getting missed by researchers for the first probably 40 years, it seems like. Or it was at least, yeah, the sort of priority given to that concern wasn't as great as it might have been. But those were researchers who, you know,

I think it's really important also to, you know, sort of situate oneself. And the historical imagination of being crop scientists in the 1950s, having just seen, for example, the wholesale transformation of maize production in the Midwest of the United States, right, the wholesale changeover of varieties being grown from open pollinated to hybrid, projecting changes like that, right, forward into the future and really feeling like there would be no space that was not transformed and that would not be transformed at, actually in some cases really quite quickly. I think sitting today we see,

that's not the way that agricultural transformation unfolded. But that wasn't necessarily the world that seemed apparent to some of the people who first set seed banks in motion as conservation sites. I think they might have seen the future unfolding quite differently from the way that it actually did. I think the researchers themselves were very intimate with the knowledge of the plants and the needs of the plants and the relationships that evolved around those plants. Or they wouldn't have been doing the research.

They wouldn't have been doing the dirty work of going out and hiking through the jungle for miles and miles and not speaking the language and all of these barriers that made this a very uncomfortable and difficult job to do. And also with like a very precarious existence in academia or research through nonprofits or whatever, if they didn't see the whole picture. But I do think in their quest for saving these things, they kind of forgot the transience of those existences, which is, like you said,

they probably were aware of it. It just wasn't as big of a priority. The idea was like, okay, right now we're trying to stop the bleed versus like fixing things, which is, I guess, an important piece of the process. What was really amazing to me, it was amazing. Sorry. Stupid pun.

What was amazing to me was the volume of varieties that they were able to find. I know one of the stats I think was like there was 2,500 different varieties of maize at one point that were cataloged in Mexico, which is just like it's mind blowing given like if I think there's like right now like 84 varieties of peas that are available. And like that's a huge part of like the human diet because of its ability. to nitrogen fix and so on. So like talking about a plant that has that volume in just one country with thousands more in South America and the United States is just, it's like beyond the scope of what we can fathom. Well, I think, well, and I think it's important to recognize some of the discussion of, you know, what constitutes a variety when you're looking at these populations is quite different

than what gets registered as a variety, for example, of peas for sale. And when they were collecting samples, they were registering as individual samples. things that would have looked perhaps quite similar to folks not necessarily tracking differences from community to community or valley to valley. So they were, today there are, I think, the current accepted number of distinct. They're called, and it's a problematic term even as applied to maize, but they're called the races of maize, but they refer to subpopulations of the species via maize that are clearly distinguished genetically from each other.

There are 59 of those in Mexico. So of those thousands of samples that were collected and individually registered researchers, the number has shifted over time, but they've agreed mostly that there are about 60, 60 subgroups that can be aggregated from that larger number, which is still, I mean, amazing. And if you were to, and I encourage anyone listening, if you've not seen what the diversity of maize land races looks like, they range wildly in terms of color, shape, size.

I mean, they're truly distinct from one another in terms of their features, in terms of taste, in terms of where they grow and what they're good for. And I think to most of us, you know, who maybe if you grew up in the United States, eating a cob of sweet corn in the summertime, you've only really encountered the very tip of what the diversity of Mays can be. And if you expand out for Mexico, obviously, to take in more of the Americas, the diversity just sort of expands from there. So one of the things towards the end of the book is you're kind of taking a look at both the Green Revolution,

folks that are fighting against it, and then you start looking at some solutions, and I'll use the term solutions kind of loosely here, to this challenge of how do we work with folks, these indigenous farmers, to give them a voice. in these conversations and to support them in the sense that while these people have sustainably farmed on their landscape for hundreds if not thousands of years because of capitalism, you know, the marketplace and all these different things, their ability to exist independently of that world is becoming harder and harder. And you highlight this with one of the conversations around giving farmers the authority

and the autonomy to do some of the breeding work themselves. with input from the researchers. And there's this really beautiful quote that you use. And I'm not sure if it was you or someone else. So I apologize. I should have probably written it down. And you say social scientists placed peasant farmers and professional scientists at two ends of a continuum of knowledgeable investigators.

They differ in the type of knowledge they possessed rather than the amount. And like that's a really beautiful way to kind of merge these two worlds together. But in the practice, again, to get to my point, that doesn't really be. play out as easily as it sounds like it should, where giving this autonomy to these people would allow them to take the work done breeding and apply it to the Milpa system or however they're farming in their community. So I'm curious, I want to hear some of your thoughts or reflections, I guess now, having written the book and probably gotten a lot of feedback and maybe done more research. Yeah, I think it boils down to what you're pointing to even with this question has more to do with

sovereignty and sovereignty in general than it does to do with a particular conservation strategy or way of organizing scientific research. The fundamental challenge of sustaining communities, whether they are culturally distinct communities or people who have come together for different reasons, but who wish to pursue diets, lifestyles, other ways of being separate. not even separate from, but just, you know, kind of of their own choosing, right? And so I think many indigenous peoples around the world, they rightly articulate that what is required in order for their, not just sort of sustaining, but flourishing in the way that we should want all people to flourish,

is greater access to and control over land that was historically their land. The foundation, the foundation of sovereignty is in many ways of a sovereignty over place. And that along with that, the decision to be sowing whatever seeds one deems most appropriate and to be benefiting from programs that purport to be working in the public interest that are also developing the seeds and the crops that they wish to be growing so long as that's also what they would like to have happen. And so I see the, you know, it's reflected in the international peasant movement via Campasina, one of their central campaign pillars is seed sovereignty. It comes back to this issue that we were talking about earlier, about intellectual property overseas. The seed sovereignty issue is

really one in which the ever increasing or ever, yeah, ever increasing kind of extent of the umbrella that transnational industry has in terms of encompassing ownership of, of, seed genetic material. There has been a struggle since the 1970s to keep that at bay. And the seed sovereignty movement that that you may have heard about today is really one component of that. And it's the component involved or associated with indigenous and peasant communities. So yeah, I think that there's no easy answer to your question about, you know, the research

program or the breeding program. Because I think ultimately those are going to be superficial that the real problems are much deeper and that they are serious political issues about about sovereignty and social justice that governments around the world need to be addressing better than they are right now. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. And unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot of hope that that's going to happen in the near future. But it does point to the fact that, like, we can, you know, one of the shortfalls, I think the social scientists or social science arena is that we think we can almost like,

policy wonk in terms of like how we treat and discern the challenges that exist around these things into fixing them without addressing those core fundamental issues of well why do the campasina farmers need to try to change things like what is going on that's causing these folks to have to go work in the city or in the example in the book that you give he joins the military and he isn't able to grow the crops that he had partnered with the researchers to test and see if they would fit for his milpa system. And those are problems that changing how we relate to one another as researchers or farmers isn't going to solve because there's a fundamental economic piece that's driving a wedge between a real viable solution. That's probably a bigger question for another day unless

you want to. Well, what I think, yeah, I think it's important to recognize the limitations of some of the interventions that we, for example, as academics, thinking from my own perspective, try and make, within larger social structures that have deeply ingrained inequalities, right? It doesn't mean that we shouldn't do the work that we can do at a certain scale and that there isn't a sort of desirability to always push forwards. But I think it also means attending to the larger structures that shape, you know, not just farming, but everyday life for all of us. And that really constrain opportunities for many people unjustly. And so there needs to be, to be an awareness of that.

And I suppose, yes, also the conversations about how to redress those structural injustices. Yeah. And fundamentally, I mean, I think there are ways in which one could imagine it. I think there's a lot of great research that's coming out right now. This is specific to the United States. but about historical racism in terms of USDA programs, funding, support, and the extent to which black farmers in the United States have really suffered from the discrimination specifically within a specific federal agency, right?

And so we might think, well, what does what does redress of that historic wrong look like? What are the programs we should put in place to counterbalance the racism that the institution has historically shown? And that would be a meaningful way to think about some of the, of these more structural issues. Not at a global scale, but at the scale of a quite powerful entity, right? That shapes some of these landscapes and issues that we've been talking about today. And this really drives home the point that we're in the process of learning how to deal with

these issues. And without addressing them fundamentally, we're not going to make the significant headway we want to. I think that kind of gets underscored in the entire book. Hopefully, if people have enjoyed this conversation, they can go grab it. So with all this research we've done and kind of your understanding of corn as it exists today as a crop, where are we in 20 years, 30 years? In the book you talk quickly about the Texas male sterile breeding project and the impact it had when there was issues

because of having this giant monocrop and how it impacted corn productivity for a while and there was basically a shortage. Now, is that something that we should be worried about going forward? into the future, or do you think between, it sounds like you're really optimistic about some of the genetics research. Where are we in 20 years? Well, you know, historians are notoriously bad at forecasting. Looking over our shoulders, we've got that down. Looking forward to the future, much harder. So one thing to say about the crop diversity issue in particular, I spoke a bit about there being a breeding, a plant breeding bottleneck in which you see these sort of winnowing of diversity. but our knowledge of genetics has actually, I think, been such that in some crops,

there has actually been a broadening out again in recent decades of crop diversity as researchers and breeders get better at using extant diversity in breeding programs. And so that's in a way in that very narrow issue of crop diversity, slightly encouraging. As are, I think there are many people now who are interested in the very challenging, challenging to name category of either neglected or forgotten crops, crops which are neither neglected nor forgotten. It just depends on what perspective you're looking from. But there are terms that generally refer to those that haven't been subject to as much breeding

and research attention. But I think actually there is quite a bit of energy now among crop scientists and specialists and breeders in working with things that are, for example, crops that are more climate resilient. So some millet, other grain crops. that we don't currently put a lot of energy into researching and developing, but actually might do much better in hotter, drier climates. And those kinds of initiatives focused on bringing new crops to the table, as it were,

or old crops to new tables. That's probably a better way of saying it. You know, the fact that there are those conversations and that there is that research happening, I think should be encouraging. We have incredible, yeah, knowledge of plant genetics. and incredible tools for working with crops, both genetic engineering and editing, but also more traditional techniques. And so to answer your question, I think if we put our resources into responsible use of those

tools, I think towards public funding of research to produce crops that maybe address a wider range of social needs and aspirations and demands than maybe we do right now. there would be, I think, good reason to be kind of optimistic, right? We could go in interesting directions and probably good ones in terms of sustainability, social and ecological. I think the probably more realistic side of me sees that it's very hard to think of a way out of some of the dominance of transnational capital in decision making in agriculture. And then unless we build up, for example, public programs or reduce some of the intellectual property, possibilities that there are in agricultural development right now.

Things will not go down a pathway where a wider range of interests are served and therefore, you know, more possibilities are out on the table. And instead, we will continue down the pathway that we've been going down. Hopefully that provides some answer to that question. Yeah, yeah, it does. I am probably with you in the pragmatic side of things that I don't doubt that we will continue to see half of our plates, proverbially speaking, being corn or some corn byproduct, even if there are, as you said, many old crops that could fill a lot of those spaces and provide

some diversity in both our diets and some diversity in the landscape. But it's possible. It is possible. And I think that's really important to recognize, right? The decision isn't any one of ours individually, but collectively it is, right? It is fair. Now, for folks that want to get your book, I know you've also got another book that you released a few years ago. I don't know if you want to plug them. If you've got any new stuff coming, social media, all that good stuff. Sure. I'm on Twitter at H.A. Curry, but my books are evolution made to order, which is a book

about the history of early genetic technologies and the aspirations that researchers had from there, and that's available from the University of Chicago Press. And, of course, we've been talking about endangered maze, which covers the history of crop genetic conservation through the history of corn. And that's available from the University of California Press. Awesome. Ellen, thanks so much. This has been fantastic. I could talk about corn all day. So could I, believe me. So thank you so much. Thanks for having me here. I really appreciate it.