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The Botany Of Desire by Michael Pollan (Review)

Title: The Botany Of Desire, A Plant’s-Eye View Of The World
Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Random House

michael pollan botany of desire book
 Buy on Amazon: The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World 

In The Botany Of Desire, Michael Pollan asks, “did we cultivate plants, or did they cultivate us?”

Michael Pollan is arguably our most prominent writer on food policy, most notably In Defense Of Food, Food Rules, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Those books crystallized America’s health-related diet issues, explaining the infinite processing of foods made in factories, the absence of diet-related diseases in certain cultures, and how we have over-complicated our ever-changing view of nutrition. In The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, Pollan builds on his former work and demonstrates how humans and plants have formed reciprocal relationships.

We’re all aware of the co-evolutionary relationship between bees and flowers: the flowers open their petals to the bees, who buzz from flower to flower, collecting pollen and nectar and spreading the plants’ genes in the process. Pollan takes this idea one step further and explores the impact of human desires on artificial selection. We best respond to sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. The plants that exhibit the greatest of these traits (or are most responsive to control) have a long association with us. The gene pools of plants that don’t, fade away into obscurity. Hence, artificial selection.

Four plants’ domestication serve as examples: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the humble potato. Following the path that John Chapman blazed, aka “Johnny Appleseed”, Pollan shows how apple trees, native to Kazakhstan as best as anyone can tell, has become associated with all things American. Chapman blazed a trail through the early 19th-century wilderness of Ohio by way of a canoe loaded with apple seed. He carefully picked locations for nurseries, planted his apple seeds, and when settlers moved West on their way to the Northwest Territory, they bought his trees in droves. The apple made Chapman a wealthy man and the genes of the apple were spread across North America.

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The human desire for altered states

In The Botany Of Desire, Pollan notes that every human culture in recorded history has desired to achieve an altered state of mind. Through hundreds of years of hybridizing, humans have bred a Cannabis plant perfectly tuned to “flip the switch” on the reward centers of the brain.

“In the same way the human desire for beauty and sweetness introduced into the world a new survival strategy for the plants that could gratify it, the human hunger for transcendence created new opportunities for another group of plants. No entheogenic plant or fungus ever set out to make molecules for the express purpose of inspiring visions in humans-combating pests is the far more likely motive. But the moment humans discovered what these molecules could do for them, this wholly inadvertent magic, the plants that made them suddenly had a brilliant new way to prosper. And from that moment on this is exactly what the plants with the strongest magic did.”

Michael Pollan, The Botany Of Desire

So a plant that produced THC to confuse insects and predators found in humans the means by which to expand its gene pool.

Big Ag vs Organic

In The Botany Of Desire‘s final chapter, an organic potato farmer and a Big Ag potato grower are profiled. Pollan describes Monsanto’s efforts to develop and own a genetically modified potato (NewLeafs) and describes in detail the plethora of chemicals that Big Ag farmers use on their fields to guarantee their crops. Pollan’s description of the soil on these farms is stunning – “a lifeless gray powder”, which the farmers ironically refer to as a “clean field” (because nothing can live in it – no bug, no animal, no weed – except the potato).  Then we meet the organic potato farmer, standing amidst his green fields where his crops grow in dark, loamy soil, his back turned to industrial agriculture. The Big Ag farmer is not painted as an evil overlord – just a man resigned to his fate in what has become the noose of corporate agriculture.

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The Botany of Desire is a brilliant book, thoroughly researched, and thoroughly absorbing.

2 thoughts on “The Botany Of Desire by Michael Pollan (Review)”

  1. I bought In Defense of Food on CD because I’ve been too busy to sit down and read and I’ve already listened to it three times. I then went and got a second copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma because I couldn’t wait to get it back from the people who borrowed it before I listen to it again. Obsessive much? LOL

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