No small potatoes.

All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki Viking, 2003. 417 pages. $24.95.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan Random House, 2001. 271 pages. $24.95 (hardcover). Random House, 2002. 304 pages. $13.95 (paperback).

Ruth Ozeki is an antidote to all the vapid, consumer-oriented "chick lit" thrown at women these days. She creates characters that are concerned with more than tracking their cigarette habits. In Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats (Penguin, 1998), the protagonist is an independent filmmaker who learns much more than she wanted about the meat industry. In her second novel, Ozeki takes on genetically engineered potatoes. Her characters wrestle with an essential question: Who controls life?

In All Over Creation, she spins a tale about life and death on the American farm--in this case, a family of potato farmers in Idaho. The novel starts with the story of Yumi Fuller, a fourteen-year-old girl who has an abortion. Her father, Lloyd, can't forgive her for that transgression against life and against God. She runs away. Twenty-five years later, Yumi is forced to return home to care for her aging parents. Momoko, her mother, has grown too senile to care for the two of them, and passes her days in the garden, talking to the plants in Japanese. Lloyd's heart condition continues to worsen.

Yumi has to make gut-wrenching decisions about Lloyd's care while she watches her mother slip away. And she must also decide the fate of her parents' small, mail-order seed company.

For fifteen years, the Fullers have sold a large variety of seeds, all of them open-pollinated. In his catalogues, Lloyd propagates his agricultural beliefs alongside heirloom cultivars. He thinks genetic engineering is yet another transgression against God. "Terminator" technology, the ability to create seeds that produce sterile offspring, violates Creation, he says. Only God can create (and take away) life.

In the middle of these familial difficulties, a small group of radical environmentalists shows up at the farm. The Seeds of Resistance, as the five anti-biotechnology activists call themselves, travel around the country in a vehicle called the "Spudnik," an RV that they've modified to run on french fry oil ("bio-diesel"). After stumbling across a catalogue, the Seeds realize they must visit Lloyd Fuller. The Seeds cannot resist the appeal of this small, righteous potato farmer, "defending his seed against the hubris and rapacious greed of the new multinational life-sciences cartel. In Idaho, no less!"

But the agribusiness companies have their own farmers to showcase, including Will Quinn, Lloyd's neighbor. Will has decided to grow the genetically modified "NuLife" potato, patented by the Cynaco corporation. NuLife potatoes are designed to include a chemical that kills the dreaded Colorado potato beetle. Thanks to genetic engineering, the pesticide is present in every cell of the potato. Cynaco sells NuLife potatoes as a way to use fewer chemicals on potato fields, and this argument resonates with farmers, including Will. He's not happy about the amount of chemical inputs potato monoculture requires.

Elliot Rhodes, a former journalist now doing ER., promotes NuLife potatoes. Part of his "proactive management strategy" includes monitoring the anti-biotech movement. When Rhodes's detective sends him word that the Seeds of Resistance are contemplating an action on Will's NuLife potato plots, he seizes the opportunity.

"We need victims on our side, and the guy who farms those fields is perfect," Rhodes tells his boss. Quinn is "even a Vietnam vet, for chrissakes. I can see it playing as a story of domestic terrorism--honest American farmer, salt of the earth, his crops targeted by the anti-progress forces of the Luddite left sort of thing. A vicious attack on the American way of life."

The story ends at the 1999 "Battle in Seattle." The Seeds of Resistance take part in the revolt against the World Trade Organization. Meanwhile, Yumi returns to Hawaii with her mother in tow, her father having passed away.

All Over Creation lacks the taut storytelling that made My Year of Meats such a fun romp. And the story ends too neatly. The tragic death of a young activist doesn't seem like the shock it could have been.

And while it's nice to see anarchists portrayed in a positive light, there's none of the misunderstandings, starchy food, and long, debilitating meetings that mark so many collectively run endeavors I've ever seen or experienced. How can there be no dissent in a Winnebago full of anarchists?

But Ozeki's portrayal of the agribusiness industry reflects an unseemly reality. These days, corporate P.R. strategies do include monitoring activists in the anti-globalization and corporate responsibility movements. Companies toss lawsuits against people or organizations that are causing too much trouble. Multinational businesses sue farmers for copyright infringement if genetically modified crops are found on their lands and they aren't under contract. Never mind that seeds travel.

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan reminds us that seeds do travel and that we humans play a critical role in the dissemination of plant DNA throughout the world. This provocative book notes that plants have one duty: to propagate. And since plants don't move about, they must make other creatures do the work for them. Plants have developed clever ways to get animals to carry their pollen and seeds. Burs stick to wooly undercoats. Squirrels forget where they stash their nuts. And bumblebees spread pollen as they dine on flowers.

The Botany of Desire tells a natural history of four plants that evolved with humans: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. For the purpose of this essay, the story of the potato is the most relevant. But all four stories are fascinating.

We would not have edible potatoes if it weren't for human intervention. Wild potatoes are too toxic and bitter to eat. Through selective breeding and chance, humans have cultivated a wide variety of potatoes. Agribusiness, meanwhile, has tried to maximize production through monoculture, creating an opportunity for nature to wreak havoc. Pollan points out that every advance in the control of the garden, such as pesticides, monoculture, or genetic modification, leads to unimagined consequences.

The Russet Burbank potato is a good example of the interplay between humans and nature. In All Over Creation, we discover that Luther Burbank stumbled upon a rare potato seed ball in his garden. People usually grow potatoes by cloning from an old potato: Cut it up and plant it in the ground. Growing potatoes from seed can lead to too much variation. Burbank's chances paid off, as two of the potato varieties that sprouted were hearty and tasty. After more cultivation, the Russet Burbank potato thrived. This spud now dominates the international potato market. McDonald's uses the Russet to make its trademark golden three-inch fries.

But the Russet requires a lot of chemical inputs to make it that golden fry. Pollan visits an Idaho potato farmer whose entire Russet crop was rejected by a processor due to brown spotting of the potato's flesh. Pollan writes: "Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect, yet because McDonald's believes--with good reason--that we don't like to see brown spots in our french fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals now in use."

In 1998, Pollan wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine entitled "Playing God in the Garden," which examined the genetically modified potato owned by the Monsanto corporation. (The P.R. flacks in Ozeki's novel discuss this article.) Pollan admits that Monsanto was remarkably open and generous, giving him access to scientists, laboratories, executives, customers, and potato seeds.

Pollan's visits to the Monsanto laboratory are revealing. Who knew that gene splicing was so crude? A Monsanto employee tells Pollan how a "gene gun" splices foreign genes into a plant. Writes Pollan, "The gun here is not a metaphor: A .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells' nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance."

Monsanto named its genetically modified potatoes "NewLeaf." The NewLeaf potatoes are engineered to produce bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, a common bacterium found in the soil and used as a pesticide to kill the dreaded Colorado potato beetle. Monsanto spliced a Bt gene into the NewLeaf potato. Since the potato produces the pesticide in every cell, the need for pesticides is supposed to decrease. Bt is normally used topically on the leaves. This new use of Bt will theoretically add more and more toxins to the soil, making an ideal environment for the creation of a Bt-resistant beetle.

"Resistance is essentially a form of coevolution that occurs when a given population is threatened with extinction," Pollan writes. "That pressure selects for whatever chance mutation will allow the species to change and survive. Through natural selection, then, one species' attempt at total control can engender its own nemesis."

Monsanto has developed a "Resistance Management Plan" to postpone Bt resistance. The company's scientists say that Bt resistance could be postponed for thirty years. But then what?

A Monsanto executive assures Pollan that Bt resistance shouldn't trouble us. "We can handle this problem with new products," he tells the author over lunch.

Pollan decides to experiment himself and plants some of Monsanto's NewLeaf spuds in his home garden. Sure enough, the NewLeaf potato thrives in his garden, and beetles are nowhere to be found. But he's left' with a bag of potatoes he doesn't want to eat. He's not sure he wants to eat conventionally grown potatoes, either, as the amount of chemical inputs potato monoculture demands is startling.

Is there anything wrong with genetic engineering? Both authors look at that question. Nobody knows, as there hasn't been enough testing. But what is known should give us pause: NewLeaf potatoes are registered as a pesticide with the EPA.

Genetic modification marks a radical change in the relationship between plants and people. We are crossing genes that would never occur in nature. A flounder would never mate with a tomato except in a lab. And genetic engineering has given companies like Monsanto patents on seeds. Plants, as a life form, have been privatized under the guise of intellectual property rights.

All Over Creation and The Botany of Desire examine humanity's quest for control over life. The lowly potato exemplifies the ingenuity and the pitfalls inherent in this quest. Ozeki and Pollan both acknowledge the powerful allure of creating new life forms, and this makes the books enjoyable to read.

Ozeki told me that if she had become a scientist instead of a filmmaker and novelist, she "would probably be working on the cutting edge of biotech. It scares me to think about that. The idea of the silver bullet, the idea of the quick fix, the idea of ending world hunger, all of these things are really seductive."

Elizabeth DiNovella is Associate Editor of The Progressive.