The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

Actually, the apples and the man have suffered a similar fate in the years since they journeyed down the Ohio together in Chapman’s double-hulled canoe. Both then had the tang of strangeness about them, and both have long since been sweetened beyond recognition. Figures of tart wildness, both have been thoroughly domesticated—Chapman transformed into a benign Saint Francis of the American frontier, the apple into a blemish-free plastic-red saccharine orb. “Sweetness without dimension” is how one pomologist memorably described the Red Delicious; the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children’s book writers. In both cases a cheap, fake sweetness has been substituted for the real thing,

Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.

There it is, right in the middle of the word intoxication, hidden in plain sight: toxic. The bright line between food and poison might hold, but not the one between poison and desire.