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“When I last spoke to Borlaug, a few years before he passed away, I asked him about the past criticisms. Critics, he said, never wanted to answer the counterfactual question: Where would the world be today if we had the same growth in population and affluence but none of the yield increases of the Green Revolution? Overuse of fertilizer, water-logging soils, loading up land with toxic salts from badly run irrigation schemes—these were real issues, he said. But wouldn't you rather have these for problems than the kind of hunger we had in 1968? He asked me if I had ever been to a place where most of the people weren't getting enough to eat. "Not just poor, but actually hungry all the time," he said. I told him that I hadn't been to such a place. "That's the point," he said. "When I was getting started, you couldn't avoid them.” — Charles C. Mann