from Hunger
Forty days into the nine hundred, scientists from our institute and from others braved German fire to pull tubers from the ground of the experimental fields that lay just outside the city’s reach. As the count of days rose into the hundreds and was dropped altogether by everyone but historians and masochists, botanists moved to the city’s defense. They analyzed land camouflage, carefully — but with strained eyes and stiff fingers — reading over serial air photos of woodland, tundra, bog. They cultivated mushroom spawn, developed collecting and processing methods to render antiseptics from sphagnum. They hunted for new sources of vitamins and medicine. Through their work, they expanded the very definition of edible.
Part of our collection was taken to an experimental station in Estonia in a convoy of twenty trucks — a move that I helped to plan but was unable, at only the last moment, to join. Those who were able to go posed as Soviet peasants seeking war profits by selling grain to the Hitlerite soldiers. At the Estonian station, Leppik, one of the great director’s esteemed colleagues, cared for the seeds for two years. The collection that was under his protection was seized by the German Army late in the war. But it was, quite miraculously, eventually returned intact.
* * * * * At least at first, I laughed when Lysenko called the institute Babylon. He meant to insult us as corrupt and decadent, of course, but I always heard it as a compliment. The ancient Babylonians had impressed me ever since I studied the early history of agricultural science back in the university. Like the members of our own expeditions, the Babylonians traveled widely to collected medicinal herbs and unusual fruits. Either they or the Assyrians, who inhabited Babylon for a time, planted the world’s first botanical garden. Babylonian agriculture was a thing of envy. The ancient Babylonians ate dates, figs, pomegranates, apples, pears, and plums. They ate onions, leeks, garlic, and turnips, as well as cucumbers and lettuces. They made cheeses from the milk of sheep and goats and dined on game, pork, and mutton. Locusts were a delicacy. In old Babylon, no fewer than fifty kinds of fish were eaten, though fish apparently went out of fashion later, as the word fisherman came to mean something closer to ruffian, opportunist. The Babylonians seasoned their food with mustard, coriander, and cumin. They had bread, oil, butter, beer, and eventually honey, and both red wine and white. Several kinds of grain, including a spelt, were also part of Babylonian meals. But barley stood at the center of their diet and was preferred over silver for exchange. When Hammurabi attempted to standardize interest rates, the rate for borrowed barley was much higher than that for a loan of silver. Anything could be purchased with sacks of barley. It united wealth and weight, joined prosperity and health.
* * * * * When they spoke of it, and they spoke of it seldom, the Babylonians described the place of the dead as a place where dust is nourishment, clay is food. Convinced that their sins would be punished in this world, this life — whether by men or by gods — they had little use for hell.

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