The Botany of Desire: A Plants-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire: A P...

by
Michael Pollan

published

2001 by Thorndike Press

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binding

Hardcover, 355 pages

isbn

0783896417 (isbn13: 9780783896410)

description

Working in his garden one day, Michael Pollan hit pay dirt in the form of an idea: do plants, he wondered, use humans as much as we use them? While th...more

[close] Working in his garden one day, Michael Pollan hit pay dirt in the form of an idea: do plants, he wondered, use humans as much as we use them? While the question is not entirely original, the way Pollan examines this complex coevolution by looking at the natural world from the perspective of plants is unique. The result is a fascinating and engaging look at the true nature of domestication.

In making his point, Pollan focuses on the relationship between humans and four specific plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. He uses the history of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) to illustrate how both the apple's sweetness and its role in the production of alcoholic cider made it appealing to settlers moving west, thus greatly expanding the plant's range. He also explains how human manipulation of the plant has weakened it, so that "modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop." The tulipomania of 17th-century Holland is a backdrop for his examination of the role the tulip's beauty played in wildly influencing human behavior to both the benefit and detriment of the plant (the markings that made the tulip so attractive to the Dutch were actually caused by a virus). His excellent discussion of the potato combines a history of the plant with a prime example of how biotechnology is changing our relationship to nature. As part of his research, Pollan visited the Monsanto company headquarters and planted some of their NewLeaf brand potatoes in his garden--seeds that had been genetically engineered to produce their own insecticide. Though they worked as advertised, he made some startling discoveries, primarily that the NewLeaf plants themselves are registered as a pesticide by the EPA and that federal law prohibits anyone from reaping more than one crop per seed packet. And in a interesting aside, he explains how a global desire for consistently perfect French fries contributes to both damaging monoculture and the genetic engineering necessary to support it.

Pollan has read widely on the subject and elegantly combines literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific references with engaging anecdotes, giving readers much to ponder while weeding their gardens. --Shawn Carkonen [close]

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Summer rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

08/23/07

bookshelves: 2007

In any work of nonfiction that is heavy on facts, the author should provide definite sources for each of his statements, especially if he is writing a popular science work. That way, when the reader slogs through a chapter on how groovy marijuana is, she won't be confronted with an absurd factoid like the one about witches using drugged dildos to "fly" and spend the rest of the book wondering where in hell he dragged up that trash.

This book is terribly written, and I'm honestly sur...more

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Trevor rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

11/13/08

In East Asian cultures – according to my increasingly Japanese daughters – the number four brings bad luck. This is because it sounds a bit like the word for death. Clearly the number four has no such associations for Michael Pollan. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is based around four meals and this one is based around four plants. I’ve done more than just enjoy these two books, they have completely enchanted me whilst also informing me and keeping me greatly amused.

Now, desire so...more In East Asian cultures – according to my increasingly Japanese daughters – the number four brings bad luck. This is because it sounds a bit like the word for death. Clearly the number four has no such associations for Michael Pollan. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is based around four meals and this one is based around four plants. I’ve done more than just enjoy these two books, they have completely enchanted me whilst also informing me and keeping me greatly amused.

Now, desire sounds like a strong word to use about botany. There is, of course, that Frank Zappa song Call Any Vegetable and it will respond to you – I think this is also the song which ends with the memorable line, “O what a pumpkin!”

Now that isn’t quite the desire Pollan is talking about here. His four plants are: the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato. As a one time Irishman I have no problem with the idea that the potato might make the list of plants of desire, but I can see that others might struggle most with that one being included.

This book is based on the idea that plants use us as much as we use them – and the plants best able to meet our desires are the plants we help most to spread about the world. So much so that we tend to make monocultures of those plants that best match our desires – something that is arguably as much a problem for the plants as it is a boon for them.

Do you know when you sort of know the story to something, even if you don’t quite know the details? I had that kind of relationship with the story of Johnny Appleseed (aka John Chapman). While I had some notion of him going around frontier America planting apple seeds (and ten points for promoting dental health) he was never really going to cut it beside, say, Daniel Boone (what a dream come-er-true-er was he!). Little did I know that rather than being a man dedicated to the random distribution of apple seeds, he actually sold apple trees to pioneers (when not considering matrimony with stray 10 year olds). Pioneers were keen to buy the said apple trees not due to the dearth of doctors being kept away by all those apples being eaten, but rather the equally troubling shortage of bartenders. Apples being as good a way as any to make a pleasant alcoholic drink – and one that wasn’t complained about in the Bible.

It is here that Pollan develops one of his major metaphors – borrowed from Nietzsche (that most popular of masturbatory German philosophers) of the dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. I’ve generally found this to be one of the more lucid and intelligent things Nietzsche ever said and so wasn’t disappointed that so much time was devoted to this idea in this book. Basically, Apollo was the god of order and light, Dionysus the god of wine and orgies. Our obsession with growing the same potato all over the world to make the perfect McDonalds fry is symbolic of the Apollonian desire – Johnny Appleseed growing apple trees from seed and thereby getting a vast number of genetically different trees symbolic of the Dionysian.

This central tension forms a large part of the basis of the book. It proves an interesting thing to say about Tulips too, and obviously also of marijuana. I guess it is possible that if Dionysus was with us today he might well be a pot head. The stuff about marijuana is very interesting. Particularly the fact that it has become about 10 times more potent over the years and that this increase in potency is directly attributable to the ‘war on drugs’. Pollan makes an interesting case for the idea that if the US government hadn’t spent billions of dollars imprisoning its citizens and fighting a war it could never win, pot would still be coming into the States from Mexico and would not have been bred up to being the super drug it is today. Pollan says that his initial reaction to smoking pot was much the same as mine has always been. That its main effects seemed to be to make me feel paranoid and stupid. Having been brought up in the loony left I really didn’t need chemistry to help me be paranoid, or stupid, for that matter. Apparently, this is because on the rare occasions when I did smoke pot I was smoking ‘blue collar’ marijuana. Which is probably for the best.

Again, as with the apples and the tulips, I did know much of the story of marijuana before I started reading, but not really all of the details. The story of tulips causing a major economic bubble is worth reflecting on at the moment. The plants themselves are equally fascinating, as are little facts gleaned along the way about depression and plant viruses.

But the section on the potato is riveting – and not just for the Irish. This is similar to the first section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma on corn. We really are going to have to do something about the way we produce food – and if you need to know why, then reading this chapter will make it all clear. If the only way we can grow potatoes for McDonald’s fries is to kill the planet then perhaps (and this is just a suggestion) we shouldn’t be eating McDonald’s fries.

I think I liked The Omnivore’s Dilemma better than this one, but really, they were both fascinating and well worth the read.
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Eh! rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

10/03/07

Read in October, 2007

Four common plants and I didn't know they each held such a rich history. Well, I was kind of familiar with marijuana's development (not from personal toking, honest Asian, but from being surrounded by tokers - hey, it was Oregon) and that it was completely villified in the "just say no" era of drug awareness education. The chapters on the apple, tulip, and potato offer cautionary evidence on the danger of destroying diversity in the name of commerce. Dratted industry and their shipp...more

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Don rated it:

(review of isbn 0375501290)

01/20/08

bookshelves: entheogens, favorites, food, history

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Don by: Scott Abbott
recommends it for: Jason, Dad, Jono

I read this a few days after "The Omnivore's Dilemma", and began it the day after picking up "In Defense of Food". I loved the former, thought the latter was thin and a resaying of what he'd already said. This book was a beautiful book, though not the tome that O.D was, it's beautifully written. It also sets the stage nicely for O.D.

Here, using apples (with their amazing capacity to evolve based on seeds that don't grow true to the parent), tuplips, cannabis and potato...more

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Emily rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

08/28/07

Read in August, 2007

Okay, okay, books by Michael Pollan are clearly a fad right now, but I have bought into it whole-heartedly. He is an amazing, amazing writer: he makes me want to plant a garden, to tour his garden (his bedroom? what?), to only eat organic food, and to find out the story and origin of every morsel of food I put in my body. But he does it in a way that isn't overly preachy or agenda-driven. Instead, he lets you get what he is saying while at the same time telling an engaging, well-researched story...more

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Kat rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

04/08/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in January, 2004

recommends it for: Everyone

Pollan's The Botany of Desire is by far one of the best books I have ever read, and it is one of those books that has changed my world view for the better. Pollan takes his readers on an odyssey through the natural histories of four plants that have been important to the course of human history, and relates them to a certain form of desire that he believes to be inherent in each and every person. He chronicles the potato (sustenance), the tulip (beauty), cannabis (pleasure), and the apple (swe...more

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Jenn rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

01/27/08

Read in January, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Frances rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

03/13/08

Read in March, 2008

This was a really great read, and I've never really liked Botany or had much of a green thumb. Pollan covers botany well, but he also brings in history, philosophy, neuroscience, economics and many other fields of interest in this study of 4 plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. As far as non-fiction books go, I can't imagine it being any better.

Many other reviewers have complained that he did not stick to his argument that plants, by catering to human desires, actually manipula...more

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Elfscribe rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

12/09/07

Read in March, 2007

recommends it for: anyone who likes history, natural science

In highly readable prose, Michael Pollan explores the ways four different plants have influenced human culture and history and in turn been influenced by human manipulation. These plants are the apple tree, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In four different essays,he defines our relationship with these plants in terms of how they fulfill a human desire: apples = sweetness, tulip = beauty, marijuana = intoxication, and potato = control. The stories of these plants are absolutely fascinating ...more

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Jen rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

04/16/08

I've wanted to read this book ever since it came out, but, so far, I've been pretty deeply disappointed by it. From the jacket copy and reviews I'd read, I'd come to expect a poetic lay-science book about the entwined destinies of plants and humans. Hell, that's what the author's introduction led me to expect, too.

I did not expect, nor want, most of the chapter on the apple to be more concerned about the historical realities of Johnny Appleseed than with the apple itself. I didn't ...more

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emily rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

11/27/07

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: people who eat

i enjoyed this book, but i didn't find it as interesting as _the omnivore's dilemma_. but then, you can't win 'em all, can you? as with _the OD_, the last chapter (potatoes) was the most fascinating, making me feel like i really never want to eat potatoes again, unless i know their origin.

this is a little off the subject, but the more i read the more i want to leave the united states. what is wrong with us here? seriously. i mean, we let corporations like monsanto use us as guinea pigs so t...more

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Valerie rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

09/26/07

bookshelves: greek-ecstatic

Read in September, 2007

the premise--"a plant's eye view of the world"—could sound like a gimmick. he asks, Why would plants go to this trouble? Why would they evolve to affect humans in the specific ways that they have? Why would an apple be sweet? And be able to be pressed into cider to get us drunk? What needs of ours did the tulip evolve to gratify?

If I'd thought about it at all before, I think I'd subconsciously assumed that this stuff is incidental, that the plant is unaware of people, that it e...more

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Jennifer rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

09/21/07

bookshelves: conscious-living, nonfiction

Read in September, 2007

Michael Pollan constantly forces me to rethink my relationship with nature and society. He writes without ever feeling dogmatic, yet is able to shed some harsh light on aspects of our relationship with nature and each other that we shouldn't ignore.

The book is broken up into four different plants and an associated human desire that helped shape them; the apple:sweetness, the tulip: beauty, marijuana: intoxication, and the potato: control.

Of course, none of these plants were truly shaped...more

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Manderson rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

09/03/07

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in August, 2007

In a kind of a meandering, relaxed writing style, Michael Pollan tells the tale of apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes and their co-evolution with human desire. Although I agree somewhat with his premise---that plants also influence human desires, not just vice versa---I never found that he fully developed a convincing proof of it. Rather, he just gently threads a tangential narrative about his subjects, as if he were having a conve...more

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Ken-ichi rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

08/26/07

bookshelves: learning

Read in December, 2006

Wonderful, wonderful book, full of fantastic info and insights. My main critique of the book is Pollan's central conceit, and the language used to express it: plant species have domesticated humanity just as much as humanity has domesticated them. My problem is his constant insertion of agency into the process of evolution and mixing metaphors of individuals and of species. Flowers are not individually clever, and neither are species of flowers. Flowers do not manipulate bees in the same way th...more Wonderful, wonderful book, full of fantastic info and insights. My main critique of the book is Pollan's central conceit, and the language used to express it: plant species have domesticated humanity just as much as humanity has domesticated them. My problem is his constant insertion of agency into the process of evolution and mixing metaphors of individuals and of species. Flowers are not individually clever, and neither are species of flowers. Flowers do not manipulate bees in the same way that a botanist manipulates a flower species through artificial selection or genetic modification. Species do not have agency, the will to act. Only individuals have that, and individuals bees, potatoes, or water buffalo do not (to our knowledge), have the will to offer themselves up as willing partners to humanity.

Pollan draws an interesting distinction that I haven't encountered in my amateur meanderings between "wilderness" and "wildness." He uses "wilderness" in the sense of the Wilderness Act of 1964, "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." "Wildness," on the other hand, is anything that humans cannot control. As Bill McKibben famously pointed out, the atmosphere of our planet is no longer a wilderness, tainted as it is by the byproducts of our industry, but as every hurricane and tornado reminds us, it is still profoundly wild.

Pollan uses this distinction to emphasize that while all domestication is a destruction of wilderness, it is almost never an abolition of wildness. The gardener uses his sense of order not to control his plants absolutely, but to guide and shape their wildness in certain ways. He goes on to suggest that genetic engineering may violate this pact, that by attempting to guide evolution on such a basic level is a powerful new way to write wildness out of the equation. He also offers the counterpoint that current techniques for gene insertion are (sometimes literally) so scattershot as to yield results that are even less predictable that conventional breeding.

The topic of wilderness feeds into another interesting point, which is that "memory is the enemy of wonder" (168). He argues that cannabinoids like THC help us experience awe and wonder but forcing constant short term memory loss, and that meditation or physical exertion probably induce the same effect, making the view from a mountain peak infinitely more profound after having hiked to it instead of having driven.

Another insight he had about marijuana is that drugs could be considered the mutagens of culture. If one assumes a meme is like a gene, then a culture is like a genome. Memes are constantly recombining through thought and discourse (intercourse in both culture and biology), but genuinely new ideas are rare. At the risk of spreading a metaphor too thin, Pollan suggests that drugs could be thought of as mutagens, radiation nuking the genetic fundaments of culture, producing mostly irrelevant or deleterious nonsense, but now and again creating viable gems (149). Kind of a fun thought....less

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Sharon rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

09/01/07

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in September, 2007

Really interesting (if at times stretched to fit) hypothesis that plants have exerted their own influence on humans to propagate the species.

The book was uneven at times, and the best chapters in my mind were the apple (sweetness) and the potato (control). Who knew that all modern apple trees are descendants of a single tree of their type, grafted an infinite number of times – that if planted from seed each apple tree would produce its own distinct variety? The chapter on the potato wa...more

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Luke rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

12/10/07

bookshelves: ecology-philosophy-and-ethics

Read in November, 2007

The Botany of Desire was written in language that made it obvious that Michael Pollan likes to hear himself write. His ideas were interesting, following four plants, the potato, cannabis, the apple, and the tulip through their journey with mankind. I like how he approaches the topic, observing not only what people have done to the plants to develop them to our own use, but also how the plants have in some ways used us for their own ends. It is true that we, while we think we are masters of our o...more

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kate rated it:

(review of isbn 0375501290)

07/14/07

Read in July, 2007

I found this book very interesting. I don't normally like reading nonfiction, but The Botany of Desire blends history, memoir, and science with an easy conversational tone. I never felt like I was being talked down to (my complaint for other popular science/nonfiction books); instead, it was as though author Michael Pollan had sat down to talk with me and had really cool things to say. The book associates four plants with the...more

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Drew rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

06/15/07

bookshelves: relaxingnon-fiction

Read in January, 2007

recommends it for: people with an interest in history, food, and plants.

I am a big fan of Michael Pollan, and would recommend his works to any friend who enjoys a mix of history, politics, food, and the natural world. This is not his best work, but it is still pretty good. The book follows four plants and discusses how they reflect human desires, and vice versa. The plants/desire combinations, if I remember them correctly, included: beauty/tulip, sweetness/apple, intoxication/marijuana, and control/potato.

While some of Mr. Pollan's arguments occasionally re...more

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Meg rated it:

(review of isbn 0375760393)

10/14/07

bookshelves: nonfiction

The author adds a wrinkle to our thoughts about domestication by arguing that plants have selected for a preference for their qualities in humans, leading to their cultivation, ensuring their survival. Rather than us manipulating the traits of our crops, we've been manipulated by them!

Though I disagree with this premise (you can never determine an evolutionary reason for something, and it's hardly parsimonious to think of organisms acting as agents of selection on our perceptions of them (a...more