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

by Michael Pollan

evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events,

about a hundred million years ago plants stumbled on a way—actually a few thousand different ways—of getting animals to carry them, and their genes, here and there. This was the evolutionary watershed associated with the advent of the angiosperms, an extraordinary new class of plants that made showy flowers and formed large seeds that other species were induced to disseminate. Plants began evolving burrs that attach to animal fur like Velcro, flowers that seduce honeybees in order to powder their thighs with pollen, and acorns that squirrels obligingly taxi from one forest to another, bury, and then, just often enough, forget to eat.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

Partly by default, partly by design, all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated—of coming, or finding itself, under the (somewhat leaky) roof of civilization. Indeed, even the wild now depends on civilization for its survival.

apples don’t “come true” from seeds—that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible—“sour enough,” Thoreau once wrote, “to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples, but most of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider—and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition. Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.

Slice an apple through at its equator, and you will find five small chambers arrayed in a perfectly symmetrical starburst—a pentagram. Each of the chambers holds a seed (occasionally two) of such a deep lustrous brown they might have been oiled and polished by a woodworker. Two facts about these seeds are worth noting. First, they contain a small quantity of cyanide, probably a defense the apple evolved to discourage animals from biting into them; they’re almost indescribably bitter. The second, more important fact about those seeds concerns their genetic contents, which are likewise full of surprises. Every seed in that apple, not to mention every seed riding down the Ohio alongside John Chapman, contains the genetic instructions for a completely new and different apple tree, one that, if planted, would bear only the most glancing resemblance to its parents. If not for grafting—the ancient technique of cloning trees—every apple in the world would be its own distinct variety, and it would be impossible to keep a good one going beyond the life span of that particular tree. In the case of the apple, the fruit nearly always falls far from the tree. The botanical term for this variability is “heterozygosity,” and while there are many species that share it (our own included), in the apple the tendency is extreme. More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness—that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as diff...

Sugar was a rarity in eighteenth-century America. Even after cane plantations were established in the Caribbean, it remained a luxury good beyond the reach of most Americans. (Later on, cane sugar became so closely identified with the slave trade that many Americans avoided buying it on principle.) Before the English arrived, and for some time after, there were no honeybees in North America, therefore no honey to speak of; for a sweetener, Indians in the north had relied on maple sugar instead. It wasn’t until late in the nineteenth century that sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to enter the lives of very many Americans (and most of them lived on the eastern seaboard); before then the sensation of sweetness in the lives of most people came chiefly from the flesh of fruit. And in America that usually meant the apple.

Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end there. Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain kind of perfection. When writers like Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold used the expression “sweetness and light” to name their highest ideal (Swift called them “the two noblest of things”; Arnold, the ultimate aim of civilization), they were drawing on a sense of the word sweetness going back to classical times, a sense that has largely been lost to us. The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole, as when Shakespeare calls spring the “sweet o’ the year.” Lent by the tongue to all the other sense organs, “sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment. Since then sweetness has lost much of its power and become slightly…well, saccharine. Who now would think of sweetness as a “noble” quality? At some point during the nineteenth century, a hint of insincerity began to trail the word through literature, and in our time it’s usually shadowed by either irony or sentimentality. Overuse probably helped to cheapen th...

Anthropologists have found that cultures vary enormously in their liking for bitter, sour, and salty flavors, but a taste for sweetness appears to be universal. This goes for many animals, too, which shouldn’t be surprising, since sugar is the form in which nature stores food energy.

The fact that the apple was generally believed to be the fateful tree in the Garden of Eden might also have commended it to a religious people who believed America promised a second Eden. In fact, the Bible never names “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden,” and that part of the world is generally too hot for apples, but at least since the Middle Ages northern Europeans have assumed that the forbidden fruit was an apple. (Some scholars think it was a pomegranate.) This mistake strikes me as yet another example of the apple’s gift for insinuating itself into every sort of human environment, even, apparently, a biblical one.

Alcohol is, of course, the other great beneficence of sugar: it is made by encouraging certain yeasts to dine on the sugars manufactured in plants. (Fermentation converts the glucose in plants into ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide.) The sweetest fruit makes the strongest drink, and in the north, where grapes didn’t do well, that was usually the apple. Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (“Hard” cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

Corn liquor, or “white lightning,” preceded cider on the frontier by a few years, but after the apple trees began to bear fruit, cider—being safer, tastier, and much easier to make—became the alcoholic drink of choice. Just about the only reason to plant an orchard of the sort of seedling apples John Chapman had for sale would have been its intoxicating harvest of drink, available to anyone with a press and a barrel. Allowed to ferment for a few weeks, pressed apple juice yields a mildly alcoholic beverage with about half the strength of wine. For something stronger, the cider can then be distilled into brandy or simply frozen; the intensely alcoholic liquid that refuses to ice is called applejack. Hard cider frozen to thirty degrees below zero yields an applejack of 66 proof.

Cider became so indispensable to rural life that even those who railed against the evil of alcohol made an exception for cider, and the early prohibitionists succeeded mainly in switching drinkers over from grain to apple spirits. Eventually they would attack cider directly and launch their campaign to chop down apple trees, but up until the end of the nineteenth century cider continued to enjoy the theological exemption the Puritans had contrived for it. It wasn’t until this century that the apple acquired its reputation for wholesomeness—“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” was a marketing slogan dreamed up by growers concerned that temperance would cut into sales.

the stubborn, possibly miraculous seedling that kept coming up in between the rows of Jesse Hiatt’s orchard in Peru, Iowa, mowing after mowing, until the Quaker farmer decided it must be a sign. So he let the little tree live and fruit, only to discover its apples were far and away the best he’d ever tasted. Hiatt named it the Hawkeye and in 1893 mailed four of them off to a contest at the Stark Brothers Nurseries in Louisiana, Missouri, where C. M. Stark awarded the Hawkeye first prize and a shiny new name: the Delicious. (Stark, a born marketer, had been carrying that name on a slip of paper in his pocket for years, waiting for just the right apple to come along and claim it.) Alas, Jesse Hiatt’s entry card was somehow misplaced amid the hoopla, setting off a frantic yearlong search for what would eventually become the world’s most popular apple.

A far more brutal winnowing of the apple’s prodigious variability took place around the turn of the century. That’s when the temperance movement drove cider underground and cut down the American cider orchard, that wildness preserve and riotous breeding ground of apple originality. Americans began to eat rather than drink their apples, thanks in part to a PR slogan: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Around the same time, refrigeration made possible a national market for apples, and the industry got together and decided it would be wise to simplify that market by planting and promoting only a small handful of brand-name varieties. That market had no use for the immense variety of qualities the nineteenth-century apple embodied. Now just two of these qualities counted: beauty and sweetness. Beauty in an apple meant a uniform redness, by and large; russeting now doomed even the tastiest apple.

the modern history of the apple—particularly the practice of growing a dwindling handful of cloned varieties in vast orchards—has rendered it less fit as a plant, which is one reason modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop.

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight—unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.

In the case of the apple, the “center of diversity,” as botanists call such a place, lies in Kazakhstan,

It was Nikolai Vavilov, the great Russian botanist, who first identified the wild apple’s Eden in the forests around Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan, in 1929.

domestication can be overdone, the human quest to control nature’s wildness can go too far. To domesticate another species is to bring it under culture’s roof, but when people rely on too few genes for too long, a plant loses its ability to get along on its own, outdoors. Something like that happened to the potato in Ireland in the 1840s, and it may be happening to the apple right now.

What saved the potato from that particular blight was genes for resistance that scientists eventually found in wild potatoes growing in the Andes, the potato’s own center of diversity.

It is possible to be indifferent to flowers—possible but not very likely. Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.

Let’s say we are born with such a predisposition—that humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people? Some evolutionary psychologists have proposed an interesting answer. Their hypothesis can’t be proven, at least not until scientists begin to identify genes for human preferences, but it goes like this: Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy, is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers, and who further could distinguish among them and then remember where in the landscape they’d seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance. According to the neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who outlines this theory in How the Mind Works, natural selection was bound to favor those among our ancestors who noticed flowers and had a gift for botanizing—for recognizing plants, classifying them, and then remembering where they grow. In time the moment of recognition—much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape—would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals. In order to achieve their objectives, many flowers rely not just on simple chemical signals but on signs, sometimes even on a kind of symbolism. Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not at all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower’s rancid scent reinforces this effect.)

Beauty in nature often shows up in the vicinity of sex—think of the plumage of birds or mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom. “Sexual selection”—that is, evolution’s favoring of features that increase a plant’s or animal’s attractiveness and therefore its reproductive success—is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers, maybe also sports cars and bikinis. In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by sex.

There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms, is the good.) Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another.

Gorgeous plumage, lustrous hair, symmetrical features are “certificates of health,” as one scientist puts it, advertisements that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites* and is not otherwise under stress. A fabulous tail is a metabolic extravagance only the healthy can afford. (In the same way, a fabulous car is a financial extravagance only the successful can afford.) In our own species, too, ideals of beauty often correlate with health: when lack of food was what usually killed people, people judged body fat to be a thi...

(Bees can also see at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we’re blind; a garden in this light must look like a big-city airport at night, lit up and color-coded to direct circling bees to landing zones of nectar and pollen.)

the appearance of symmetry is a reliable expression of formal organization—of purpose, even intent. Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place. That’s because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us. The shortlist of nature’s symmetricals includes other creatures, other people (most notably the faces of other people), human artifacts, and plants—but especially flowers. Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.

For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.

Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.

(Very often traits that commend plants and animals to people render them less fit for life in the wild.)

According to Joseph Schumpeter, it is not at all unusual for the birth of a new business to be attended by a speculative bubble as capital rushes in, dazzled by the young industry’s wildly exaggerated promise.

Once upon a time, there were no flowers—two hundred million years ago, to be only slightly more precise. There were plants then, of course, ferns and mosses, conifers and cycads, but these plants didn’t form true flowers or fruit. Some of them reproduced asexually, cloning themselves by various means. Sexual reproduction was a relatively discreet affair usually accomplished by releasing pollen onto the wind or water; by sheer chance some of it would find its way to other members of the species, and a tiny, primitive seed would result.

With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

How does one tell the dangerous plants from the ones that merely nourish? Taste is the first tip-off. Plants that don’t wish to be eaten often manufacture bitter-tasting alkaloids; by the same token, plants that do wish to be eaten—like the apple—often manufacture a superabundance of sugars in the flesh around their seeds. So as a general rule, sweet is good, bitter bad. Yet it turns out that it is some of the bitter, bad plants that contain the most powerful magic—that can answer our desire to alter the textures and even the contents of our consciousness. 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.

some of the toxins that kill in large doses turn out in smaller increments to do interesting things—things that are interesting to animals as well as people. According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. Siegel suggests that some of these adventurous animals served as our Virgils in the garden of psychoactive plants. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed that their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans or Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them “ja...

Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells”—in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.

When the natural history of cannabis is written, the American drug war will loom as one of its most important chapters, on a par with the introduction of cannabis to the Americas by African slaves, say, or the ancient Scythians’ discovery that hemp could be smoked.* For the modern prohibition against marijuana led directly to a revolution in both the genetics and the culture of the plant. It stands as one of the richer ironies of the drug war that the creation of a powerful new taboo against marijuana led directly to the creation of a powerful new plant.

Most of the marijuana smoked in America was grown in Mexico until the mid-1970s, when the Mexican government, at the behest of the United States, began spraying the crop with the herbicide paraquat. About the same time, the U.S. government began cracking down on pot smugglers. With foreign supplies contracting and the safety of Mexican marijuana in doubt, a large market for domestically grown marijuana suddenly opened up. In a sense, the rapid emergence of a domestic marijuana industry represents a triumph of protectionism.

In a wave of innovative breeding performed around 1980, most of it by amateurs working in California and the Pacific Northwest, the modern American marijuana plant was born. Even today the sativa X indica hybrids developed during this period—including Northern Lights, Skunk #1, Big Bud, and California Orange—are regarded as the benchmarks of modern marijuana breeding; they remain the principal genetic lines with which most subsequent breeders have worked.

cannabis genetics improved to the point where it was no longer unusual to find sinsemilla with concentrations of THC, marijuana’s principal psychoactive compound, as high as 15 percent. (Before the crackdown on marijuana growers, THC levels in ordinary marijuana ranged from 2 to 3 percent, according to the DEA; for sinsemilla, 5 to 8 percent.) Nowadays THC levels upward of 20 percent are not unheard of.

With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn’t a people on Earth who doesn’t use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn’t use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. (As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimo to fermented grain, he immediately joined the consciousness changers.) What this suggests is that the desire to alter one’s experience of consciousness may be universal.

the human penchant for drugs may be the accidental by-product of two completely different adaptive behaviors. This at least is the theory Steven Pinker proposes in How the Mind Works. He points out that evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good. Bring the first of these faculties to bear on the second, and you wind up with a creature who has figured out how to use plants to artificially trip the brain’s reward system.

Ronald Siegel, the animal intoxication expert, has shown that animals who get high on plants tend to be more accident prone, more vulnerable to predators, and less likely to attend to their offspring. Intoxication is dangerous. But this only deepens the mystery: Why does the desire to alter consciousness remain powerful in the face of these perils? Or, put another way, why hasn’t this desire simply died out, a casualty of Darwinian competition: the survival of the soberest? The Greeks understood that the answer to most either/or questions about intoxicants (and a great many other of life’s mysteries) is “Both.” Dionysus’s wine is both a scourge and a blessing. Used with care and in the proper context, many drug plants do confer advantages on the creatures that consume them—fiddling with one’s brain chemistry can be very useful indeed. The relief of pain, a blessing of many psychoactive plants, is only the most obvious example. Plant stimulants, such as coffee, coca, and khat, help people to concentrate and work. Amazonian tribes take specific drugs to help them hunt, enhancing their endurance, eyesight, and strength. There are psychoactive plants that uncork inhibitions, quicken the sex drive, muffle or fire aggression, and smooth the waters of social life. Still others relieve stress, help people sleep or stay awake, and allow them to withstand misery or boredom. All these plants are, at least potentially, mental tools; people who know how to use them properly may be able...

What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi.

on the place of the opium poppy and cannabis in the romantic imagination. It’s well known that many English romantic poets used opium, and several of the French romantics experimented with hashish soon after Napoleon’s troops brought it back with them from Egypt. What’s harder to know is precisely what role these psychoactive plants may have played in the revolution in human sensibility we call romanticism. The literary critic David Lenson, for one, believes it was crucial. He argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” an idea whose reverberations in Western culture haven’t yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium.

many of the important thinkers of classical Greece (including Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Aeschylus, and Euripides) had participated in the “Mysteries of Eleusis.” Nominally a harvest festival in honor of Demeter, the goddess of cultivated grains, the Mysteries were an ecstatic ritual during which participants consumed a powerful hallucinogenic potion. The precise recipe remains part of the mystery, but scholars speculate that the active ingredient was probably ergot, an alkaloid produced by a fungus (Claviceps purpurea) that infects cultivated grains and that closely resembles LSD in its chemical makeup and effects. Under the influence of this drug potion, the lights of classical civilization participated in a communal shamanic ritual of such mystery and transformative power that all who took part in it were sworn never to describe it. There is no way to know what, if anything, a philosopher or poet might have brought back from such a journey. But is it outlandish to ask whether such an experience might have helped inspire Plato’s supernatural metaphysics—the belief that everything in our world has its true or ideal form in a second world beyond the reach of our senses?

advances in cannabis breeding that make it possible to develop strains eliciting distinctly different mental effects. At the top end of the market this has led to a connoisseurship of cannabis—not just of its taste or aroma, but of the specific psychological texture of its high. Some strains (typically those with a higher proportion of indica genes) are narcotic in their effects, tending to stupefy. Others (often the ones with more sativa genes) leave the mind clear and fluent and the body unimpaired. Some of the growers I met spoke in terms of “white-collar” and “blue-collar” pot. The strains I found personally sympathetic were stimulating and, evidently, conducive to mental speculation.

Researchers speak of “set and setting” as crucial factors shaping one’s experience of any drug, and marijuana in particular almost unfailingly fulfills one’s expectation of it, for better and worse. Lenson calls it “the great yea-sayer, supporting whatever is going on anyway, and introducing little or nothing of its own.” In my experience, cannabis can’t reliably be used to change one’s mood, only to intensify it. Smoking in a comfortable coffee shop with a dozen other people doing the same thing, I had no reason to feel paranoid, which is probably why I didn’t.