Beans use a biological strategy that may be only beginning to play out. This strategy may ultimately change the biosphere radically, enabling considerably more living biomass and thus increasing the profusion and exuberance of life. The strategy is nitrogen fixation, which is the ability of a few plants (notably beans) to get their nitrogen directly from the air. The vast majority of plant life relies for nitrogen on decaying vegetable matter, lightning strikes whose concentrated heat forces nitrogen in the air to combine with oxygen to put it into bioavailable form, and other processes not under the plant’s control. In the ocean, however, some species of cyanobacteria (“blue bacteria,” commonly if problematically called “blue-green algae” since algae are plants, and cyanobacteria are technically not) can fix nitrogen from the air. Beans (more generally, legumes) do not actually fix nitrogen themselves but instead rely on bacteria that they shelter in root nodules.
Once the idea of fixing one’s own nitrogen directly from the air takes hold in the plant kingdom, nitrogen need never be a bottleneck again. Then the Earth will be able to support a thicker, heavier, and more diverse blanket of vegetation. Since the animal kingdom ultimately depends on plants, the Earth will also then support more animal life (and potentially human life) as well. Fertilizer manufacturers may have one less component to worry about including in their products, but on the other hand might find less demand for their products. You might not have thought of beans as the vanguard of a new paradigm of domination among plants. But beans and many thousands of species of their descendants might take over the plant world analogously to how flowering plants began their ascendancy starting more than 100 million years ago.
At least they’ll taste good. The idea of beans as masters of the Earth may be tough to swallow if you’re not crazy about bean dishes. But maybe genetic engineering will change your mind and those of future generations. Genetically engineered crops will become increasingly important, accepted and desired, because there is little chance of stemming the coming tide of crop plants engineered to produce new and delicious foods at reasonable cost. Flavorings are metabolically cheap for plants to produce compared to soil fertility-draining and solar energy-intensive metabolic products like oils, proteins, and carbohydrates. Thus, there is no downside to major changes and improvements in plant product flavors. And it is relatively easy to do compared to some of the genetic engineering goals mentioned earlier. Even old-fashioned selective breeding, the “low tech” approach to genetic engineering, has produced such familiar taste-enhanced foods as sweet corn that is much sweeter than the corn eaten a couple of generations ago. Take beans, for instance (please don’t tire of my discussing them — as future monarchs of the plant kingdom, they are entitled to some respect!). They are already a nutritious protein source, like meat but with less fat. Yet they don’t taste as good as meat to many people. There is no reason they can’t be engineered to taste like small chicken nuggets. Processed fungus mycelium (i.e., roots), sold in grocery stores, taste like chicken already. Try it if you don’t believe it. Yum!. We could make chickpeas that taste like chicken, and rename them “chickenpeas.” But why stop there? Potatoes with small hamburgers in the middle sound good (let’s call them “hamburgatoes”), and there is no reason they can’t be grown once genetic engineering gets a little further along. Carrots are crunchy, as are potato chips. So why not grow carrots that taste like potato chips? Or like Cheetos or other crunchy, cheese-flavored snacks. Kids would want to eat more veggies, and carrot sales would skyrocket.
Speaking of cheese flavor, consider the pits of avocados. They are so large that it seems a waste to just throw them out, as we do now. Avocados already contain lots of fats in the edible part, as cheeses do, so genetic engineering to put more fats in the pit would help make them edible and even taste like a hard cheese, say romano or parmesan. Then grate the pit it on food to taste! Avocado pits are a specialty item of course, but just a start.
Next time: New Plant Paradigms (Part III: Giant seeds taste better)
