NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR
One day when I was taking refuge in the produce cooler at Costco, I heard a bright voice issue forth from a package of fresh corn. Startled, I looked down and noticed how the gleaming rows of starchy nutrition looked to me like rows of perfect teeth. The corn even appeared to be smiling. Still in the grip of what we call long Covid, under which I occasionally suffered from bouts of dissociation, I consoled myself that this voice was merely a projection of my own mind and would soon subside. But as I wheeled my cart around the store, a chorus of other voices chimed in, emanating from peppers, carrots, even a sack of onions. I continued with my shopping, pretending that I had earbuds in and was listening to an amusing audiobook.
I retained the ability to hear vegetables for over a year. This period coincided with a total loss of taste and smell. It was as though, by losing two sensory receptors, another organ uniquely tuned to the frequency of vegetable chatter developed. What happened to me may not be as far-fetched as you would imagine. Saint Francis was said to talk to animals, and while I don’t presume to compare myself to a saint, we must not discount the neurological explanations for his ability. He went blind toward the end of his life; when one sense atrophies, it is natural for other senses to step in to compensate. For example, I read an article about a newly blind woman who developed synesthesia and reported that colors were “talking” to her. After losing a primary sense, the brain rewires itself and finds new pathways for sensory inputs.
I never forced any vegetable to speak to me; I was receptive when they wanted to talk.
I entertained countless such hypotheses. Stress? I was disillusioned with where the country was going, and I hadn’t been sleeping very well. Trauma? I hit my head after falling from an ottoman I had foolishly tried to stand on to reach a book. It was one of those rickety mid-century things that look very elegant but aren’t very stable. Or perhaps it was the psilocybin mushrooms I was microdosing. Certainly, I was devastated when my betta fish died. I admit I lost interest in the outside world. I took a medical leave from the tech startup where I was working. During my time off, the only thing that interested me was what the vegetables had to say.
The following interviews are the result of an intense period of transcription and translation. When I say I heard voices, I am speaking figuratively. What entered my brain was pure understanding, which I then rendered into language. After I received each transmission, I would quickly write down as much as possible, without judgment. Sometimes the vegetables said things I did not agree with, but it was not my job to censor them. Mostly, they shared what they thought about the natural way of things. They seemed resigned about being harvested and did not seem to fear death. After I mastered the skill of listening to them, they seemed to hear my thoughts too. When it sounds as though the vegetables are responding to an interlocutor, you can assume that I was there prompting, clarifying, proposing, challenging. I have edited myself out to spare the reader too much back-and-forth and to shorten the length.
I never forced any vegetable to speak to me; I was receptive when they wanted to talk. Sometimes I listened to tomatoes in porch planters, other times to peas on my plate. It is perhaps unsurprising that I stopped eating vegetables for a year. It is not easy to eat something that talks to you.
My sense of smell has since returned, and I can no longer hear the vegetables. In a way, I am relieved to rejoin the human realm. I can go to restaurants again and shop without eavesdropping on the whispers of the cauliflower. I have also returned to the office, where I was surprised to learn that my superiors had not sacked me. Still, I am left with a sense of irreparable loss. I know I will forever mourn this bittersweet era for the rest of my life, when I could talk to my vegetables.
POTATO
Cultivated potatoes are reproduced clonally, through planted seed tubers that give rise to a new plant. As clones, these potatoes all share the same genetic makeup and can arguably be considered one individual. —TR
What can I say? That first division was thrilling. All I’d ever known was that unruly potato patch, badly tended to by the undergraduates of a mid-tier agricultural school; that rocky field where we potatoes were encouraged to mingle, exchange DNA, and produce offspring. That day, harvesting time, I was readying for my first winter underground when I heard the rumble of a tractor overhead. Suddenly I was routed from the soil. The light was dazzling and—my god. I blinked. Look at that sky. A man hovered over me, clipboard against his chest. He bent down, and I perceived a single bead of sweat forming on his chin. The reflection in that bead was a curved, green globe.
Most of you are worried that your phones are spying on you, but actually it’s us, the humble potatoes in your pantry.
What drama! What beauty! In the ground, all I had for entertainment was the turgid droning of dueling bacterial colonies and the petty gossip of the earthworms and worker ants. I felt the man’s hands yanking my roots, rubbing my skin, saying, “This one’s a keeper.” Immediately a part of me was tossed into a pickup truck. Off we went, and I perceived for the first time the rhyming colors of that late September day, the red truck intersecting with a red stop sign, the ripe apples hanging from an orchard’s gnarled trees, and the swooping bird I now recognize as a cardinal. Texture! Variety! That was how I came online. Meanwhile, residual parts of me remained back in the field, lying warm and exposed in the sun, watching the twitchy-tailed squirrels bury winter nuts in the leaf litter. It never occurred to me to want to be in two places at once, but the moment it happened, I was hooked.
After that, I was divided and planted in fields all over the country. Each time a new plant grew, a new channel of perception awakened. To be many, multiple: what a concept! My singular existence of before seemed so impoverished. I was simultaneously slurping up the rain in Michigan while luxuriating in the mineral soils of California. I learned that, in the city, humans routinely walk their dogs and smoke and listen to podcasts, all at once, while responding to work emails. Maximization is a nifty hack. Of course, this level of toggling took some getting used to for a potato, but I was determined to perceive and enjoy every last detail this world had to offer. I began to archive the countless beautiful things I had once loved as a small potato: the first snow, the first frost, the first sound of peepers in spring. But soon I realized that seasonality no longer mattered; nor did the cycles of day and night, as I now spanned many time zones. Previously, I had to wait a whole day to enjoy one sunrise; now I had many magnificent sunrises to choose from, and if I didn’t like the look of one, I could always switch channels to find a better one.
The next big expansion of my consciousness happened when the tuber parts of me ripened and I was sacked up and distributed in supermarkets. That’s when I entered your homes, into the most intimate recesses of your life. Most of you are worried that your phones are spying on you, but actually it’s us, the humble potatoes in your pantry. With everything I perceived in homes, I began to appreciate the nuances and complexities of people, who provided me with unending content for perusal. Here I was, clutched in the hand of a sniffling woman, informing her friend over speakerphone that she was hired for a job when she hadn’t been; and there I was, watching a pencil roll away from an old man slumped over a crossword puzzle. Simultaneously I was also dashed upon the floor by a child, his beatific face smeared with carrot puree while his mother wept in the corner. And I could perceive all this while listening to Brahms’s Symphony No. 4.
I know the fantasy of immortality and godlike omnipresence is everywhere in your culture. What is it like to never die and to see everything? Well, I confess, during the pandemic, everyone watched a lot of TV and had very good sex—you would be amazed at the things people were willing to do on the kitchen counter. And with your open floorplans, I often watched television over the sleepy forms of myriad pajama-clad humans and studied the cultural creations of your kind. I watched all the popular shows—first enduring the laborious, scrolling search for something suitable—and the entirety of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. In the movie, a legion of invisible angels flies over East Berlin, cataloging in stylish little notebooks all they had seen. The angels lean over the shoulders of children in wheelchairs, acrobats and cab drivers, fathers and sons, overhearing, witnessing. Within ten minutes I was weeping because those angels were the closest thing to what I experience and captured what I love so much about life and everything I don’t want to miss.
However, the movie’s ending suggests that a life bound by death is a privilege. One angel chooses to become a mortal man. Why? The pieces of me puzzled over this angel’s decision. Why put a limit, an end, on your perception? I mentioned to my other parts how once, in a dark auditorium, netted in a produce bag on the lap of a plaid-skirted woman, I had attended a lecture by an eminent writer who said how inefficient, and what a waste, that humans spend decades on the cultivation of a single brain, with its unique network of electrical pulses, only for it to disappear at the moment of death. What a waste for this particular woman to die, this writer said, she who once possessed such vibrant memories of their small town and who earned her perfect witticisms after a lifetime of practice. This writer said that she had always tried to improve her German, but now she doubted whether it was of any use. Why carve out these neural paths if they were all bound to disappear? Death inhibited progress or undercut the idea of it by forcing new generations to learn its old lessons afresh, in perpetuity.
In death, I wondered, what would happen to my precious catalogs? Granted, my debates with myself have worn thin; increasingly I fail to come to any conclusions because I am pulled in another direction that temporarily distracts. At this moment, I am riding in the backseat of a minivan while a woman accosts her husband for buying rotten fish. He hastily grabbed a sack of me that had been attacked by a fungus, liquefying my tissues, which caused me to emit that foul smell. He promises to write a vengeful review of the potato company, but she has already leapt to another topic, saying, “But in the winter, because you don’t sweat, does that mean you can’t shed the salts you’ve consumed that day?” She lowers the car window, gripped with the fear that her husband might die, that his high blood pressure has not been controlled properly, and that is when this channel winks out and fades.
Time only goes forward, and as much as I want to dwell on death, I can’t stop the onslaught of images that sparkle forth and fade. It is relentless, like a dream that won’t end. I, potato, am a web of feeling, pulsing outward, contracting. This is my best approximation of my interior life, impossible to translate into your language. And the more I do, the less I remember. Perceptions back then were imprinted with such startling clarity. I had the ability to concentrate. I was simply in one field, the field where I was born, and day after day, I perceived the same maples and oaks in the margins and saw the goldenrod dipping their heads in the wind. Each morning was brand new, the beauty like a struck bell. The first time I heard the peenting woodcock, with its watery, garbling song as it circled the field at dusk, I shivered, astonished. No less magical was the beeping of a trailer truck backing up in the gravel drive, that exhilarating sound of waves over shingle, or the first time I heard a little girl whispering, “He loves me, he loves me not . . .”
By a genetic fluke, your kind saw something useful in me, and I know I won’t die anytime soon. Yet I’ve heard the students at the agricultural school say that I am what is called a biological dead end. I will simply exist and be useful until the next, better version of me comes along. And then I will be retired. I wonder when that day will come, but then I recall how my forebear, the Irish Lumper, several centuries old at this point, still lives on in niche restaurants serving heritage potatoes. I may live longer than that. For now, I can simply wonder what death will feel like, when the various parts of me wink out, all the different strands of experience snipped until I’m back to being one. I’ll hear the sparrow singing in the field, and I’ll no longer hear it alongside the smack and scurry of rats behind a dumpster, where I lay decaying; or feel the halogen buzz of strung lights in some eatery, the proprietors smoking their cigarettes after a long night, massaging their feet. Suddenly, all of that will disappear, and maybe then, in the last moment, I’ll finally see the sunlight filtered through leaves, casting those ripples of shadow.
ASPARAGUS
Considered a seasonal delicacy, white asparagus is cultivated in the dark—covered with canopies or mounded with dirt—to prevent it from photosynthesizing. The resulting asparagus will be exceedingly pale, tender, and fat. White asparagus is still harvested manually, and the supply of cheap labor remains the most critical factor in its production. —TR
Here we are at the cafeteria of this prestigious university. The students eat very well, don’t you agree? They have everything they could possibly want—food, housing, intellectual enrichment—even white asparagus. And yet something seems amiss. I can sense their unhappiness, their fear. Why does everything feel wrong? I know they are worried about jobs, about being replaced by technology. Here they are training themselves to do things that a machine could do in mere seconds. They don’t see the point. Soon AI will render them moot. If I could, I would tell them what it’s like to be harvested by a higher intelligence, as you humans do to us. It’s not so bad, I would tell them. But acceptance requires a spiritual readjustment and letting go of a certain etiological understanding of things. And that’s not what they want.
Here we are at the cafeteria of this prestigious university. The students eat very well, don’t you agree?
“Expose yourself to sunlight first thing upon waking!” their school counselors advise. “Turn on that light-therapy lamp—they’re rentable from the student-life center—for light must hit your eyes, penetrate them, spear through the backs of your corneas, as soon as you can manage it. Brain fog and lethargy are natural consequences when your circadian rhythm is out of whack!” I imagine these poor students, jagged with sleep, emerging from warm beds to blind themselves first with their lamps, then with their phones. Dutifully, they ingest various supplements, pills, powders, and then it’s back to the screens. Headphones on, wrist supports, goggles to cancel out the spectrum of blue light. They either sit on bouncy balls with no backs to them or walk listlessly on treadmills tucked underneath their desks. Endomorph or ectomorph? I propose adding etiolated to your list of modern physical types.
It’s the best we’ve ever been and the worst we’ve ever been. That’s our modern condition. As for me, I’ve never even seen the light of day. I know previous generations had access to plenty of light. The beautiful stories of my forebears are a lovely dream. Before, asparagus emerged at the first sign of spring, when the meltwater trickled and the familiar birds returned, and we burst out of the soil, unfurling feathered fronds to the sky. We lived in densely packed communities, a patch at a time, and we would tickle one another in the wind.
Sunlight! There was no end to it. We absorbed it hungrily and transformed the light into sugars through chlorophyll. We were green. We had purplish tips. Of course, there were certainly dangers, the way you humans might remember wolves or scarlet fevers. We all knew someone whose spear had been nibbled by an asparagus beetle or whose stalks had been wilted with fusarium rot. We learned how to secrete toxins to repel our predators. But nowadays, we are sprayed regularly with fungicides, insecticides, and no longer have the opportunity to practice our survival skills. Access to water used to be touch and go, a constant source of anxiety. But now it comes in drip lines. There are pluses and minuses, I suppose. Spaced far apart for easy harvesting, I hardly touch feathers with my kind.
Am I nourished or tortured by the memory of what was? I love to hear stories of our glory days, when we were prized by emperors, from Julius Caesar to Louis XIV, so revered we were kept on ice in the Alps. I suppose these stories are like the reserves in my roots that keep me going. What does it mean to know that I’ll be plucked and harvested before I reach the sun? Mounded up, the soil is heavy against my sides. But what choice do I have but to keep sprouting? That is what I do; that is my namesake. The Greeks took my name from the Persian word asparag, meaning to sprout. My determination to keep growing is encoded within me. How can life persist under these conditions? I sometimes wonder. Am I happy or am I miserable? I hear that when asphalt and concrete are poured over old asparagus fields, packed down into parking lots, we find our way through the cracks. We push through, somehow. We don’t know what else to do.
CORN
The domestication of corn likely began in central Mexico around nine thousand years ago, from a wild ancestor called teosinte that resembled a tall grass. Modern corn is purely a product of human invention. Without the work of humans to continually seed and harvest and modify the plant, modern corn would likely disappear within a few years. —TR
“That’s a monument to petroleum,” a woman says, pointing to the sprawling black-and-white edifice beyond the acres of enhanced green lawn. “You can only make a concrete-and-glass building like that if you know you’ll have a cheap source of energy for cooling and heating.” The woman’s companion is nodding solemnly, running a hand over our broad leaves. They have been walking among us in the crop garden, gently prying the husk from our ears. It is a normal morning. Jet planes take off from the Westchester County airport. Ultrafine particles drift down from the sky. Goldfinches dip and dive between stalks of overburdened sunflowers. Here we grow in rigid, regimental lines. Next to us is a perfect stripe of buckwheat and next to that a perfect stripe of sativa. The potatoes were harvested earlier in the season, and soon the winter wheat will arrive.
From what we’ve gathered from the daily supplicants who walk these grounds, devotional pamphlets in hand, we have been planted in what they charmingly refer to as an ornamental “crop garden” to demonstrate the power and reach of a benign multibillion-dollar corporation that produces innumerable foodstuffs for everyday consumption. Humans visit this out-of-the-way place because, as we’ve gleaned, humans are a pious bunch. For decades now, this campus has been meticulously maintained by a squadron of groundskeepers who faithfully, exactingly blow leaves and dust away from the paths and keep the vast stretches of fertilized lawn well trimmed. We’ve heard of Zen monks who comb plots of gravel for hours for no higher purpose than to pray. We likewise interpret this zooming and grooming of the lawn mowers as a practice of faith. Certainly these rituals serve no other functional purpose.
Five days a week, members of this tidy team will don their high-visibility green and set about raking. They command a battalion of edgers, blowers, sprayers, and wheelbarrows. They keep the soil at our roots clean and bare. During breaks, bottles of soda are twisted open, bags of chips crinkle and pop. These men might well be meditating. To us, they are seers administrating rites of spiritual sustenance. The garden’s visitors rarely speak to them or appear to see them at all. Perhaps these high priests have ascended the visible spectrum. We don’t have eyes. We don’t know how it works.
Sometimes I wonder: What is the meaning behind ancient crop circles, those catascopic patterns that can be seen only from an avian perspective, the perspective of the gods? Why did your ancestors do it? You have also planted us in a perfect circle in the center of this enormous green lawn. It must mean something. The visitors here rely heavily on the placards erected among us, printed with symbols that compel them to chant the contents aloud. We are so starved for the human voice these days; we love its wavelengths and tenor. Your kind used to sing to help us grow. We listen avidly for your voices, chanting: “Here you will find three of our hero crops, potatoes, corn, and oats! They form the key ingredients we depend on to create many of our beloved products.” While other placards are written in first person, curiously, from the perspective of us: “I’m corn! Whether I’m popped, milled, mixed or shaped, I’m a chameleon and a hero ingredient in so many nutritious products.” And: “I’m corn! All it takes is a little salt and oil to turn me into a perfect crunchy corn chip.”
Toxic codependency is a term that gets thrown around more frequently in your world and defines more and more of your relationships. Is that our new dance?
When the woman mentioned a monument to petroleum, at first, I thought she was talking about us. A fair enough conclusion because, well, look around! (I’ve mentioned already how we don’t have eyes, but we can sense in other ways; I’m simply using this terminology for your sake.) The fertilizer used to feed us is chemical nitrogen, harvested from the air, a process enabled by natural gas. Additionally, we have been genetically modified in a sterile laboratory to produce a toxin that kills our enemies, and then this seed was carefully grown out, saved, dried, bagged, shipped, and reseeded in fields that were prepped with diesel-powered machines. Think about monster tractors, seed drills, fertilizer drones. Climate-controlled warehouses, trucks, railcars. Conveyer belts pouring seed into receptacles and speeding them around the world. Every step of this process requires huge amounts of petroleum. And then, after we reach the end of our growing cycle every year, we are harvested, ground up, milled, shot through funnels, channeled into barges, propelled across the seas, fed to animals, or processed into corn syrup or oil. One of the somewhat ungrammatical garden placards says: “7,000 railcars is the equivalent of corn produced by our products annually.” We’re made into corn syrup and oil for toothpaste and adhesives, for chewing gum, shampoo, the cornmeal on your pizza crust. Paper, explosives, plastics, poisons. What I’m saying is that we are all part of the monument to petroleum these days. I hear you are also increasingly made of microplastics.
Once upon a time, we would have considered ourselves, Zea mays, to be a monument to reciprocity, not petroleum. What changed? I’d like to puzzle over this question this morning. Maybe you find this activity frivolous—thinking—but I don’t have much else to do these days. I have plenty to eat and drink, and of course there are no pests to speak of. These days I have plenty of downtime. I can afford to think a lot.
I am thinking now of the domestication of corn. If you humans had to do it all over again, you would not have the wherewithal. Imagine the years of work that went into the development of the cob—the sheer determination, the ingenuity! We’re talking thousands upon thousands of years. A targeted effort that spanned generations. Back then in the Balsas Valley of south-central Mexico, before our teosinte cousins branched off, we all just looked like tall grass. You would’ve walked right by. As teosinte, our kernels were enclosed in a protective case called a glume, hard as rocks. Sheathed in a delicate, papery skin, these triangular kernels fell to the ground upon maturing. The seeds on the ground would have been picked up by birds and animals, and maybe humans, too, which would have passed through their digestive systems unharmed. That’s how we traveled and disseminated in the old days.
Over millennia, a slow dance takes place. One day, a woman comes along. She picks up a few kernels, masticates with great difficulty, hurting her teeth in the effort, and frowns. Some years later, another woman comes by and does the same with a toddler in tow, who playfully collects sticky palmfuls of seeds and drops them into a satchel. Later, around the cooking fire, this toddler dumps out the items he had collected and . . . surprise! A few kernels of teosinte explode in the fire and pop! Popcorn! Years later, a fire rages through the campsite. In the aftermath, humans find little white puffs of food scattered about.
For then on, humans hover over the ground, scouring it for teosinte, picking each kernel and wishing for an easier way. They pop the kernels in the fire. Until one day, another woman discovers a teosinte plant with larger seeds that somehow stay attached to the stem. She doesn’t know how it’s happened, but she saves these seeds and plants them again next year. Her children do the same, and their children, until that plant can reliably hold on to its kernels. Over thousands upon thousands of years, we bring one another into being. You feed upon our body and guarantee our continuation.
We have grown side by side. You cultivate us, and your prize is the cob. In the beginning, these cobs were only two centimeters long, with a measly two rows of kernels. Now, we grow up to twenty-two. Our teosinte grass cousins do gossip. They say our proportions are all wrong, our anatomy disfiguring. They say our engorged ears seem to jut out tumorously from the stalk. Imagine a human creature with clusters of eyes growing on their knees or a dangle of babies erupting from an external appendage like grapes. Corn is not beautiful, they say. Not the way we are beautiful to you humans. To our teosinte cousins, who can still bend and wave with the wind, whose sexual organs are positioned at the top of their heads for easy pollination, their form is beautiful. That is nature to them.
But to you, we look beautiful. We saw the slow dance. The soft caresses and the singing of songs of the Hopi and the Navajo. The words gold, mother, deity came to mind. Humans held our leaves as one would in matrimony. I said earlier that we love the timbre of the human voice. To the Hopi, singing to us was as integral to the process as photosynthesis. Not singing to us would be depriving us of an essential nutrient, like sun or soil.
Perhaps what I’m saying is this: so much work goes into planting, harvesting, selecting, and breeding. These are gestures of love. Reciprocity still exists. Your word, cultivation, shows that you agree. The root of cultivation is the Latin cultus, to care for. The word culture contains the same root. Cicero used the agricultural metaphor to talk about the development of the soul. We have coevolved, you and us. Now, for better or worse, we can’t imagine life apart. More than ninety-five million acres of corn are planted in this place you call America. The scale of this production is beyond our comprehension. Your bodies and your lives are made of corn, but you’ve forgotten. Toxic codependency is a term that gets thrown around more frequently in your world and defines more and more of your relationships. Is that our new dance? Are we toxic? You say that we are slowly killing you, that our sugars are too sweet, that the animals who feed on us are destroying the planet. But there’s nothing yet that can replace us. Your future depends on our future. Our future depends on your future. Without you to plant us, we would only be chaff.