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

by Michael Pollan

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.

In the case of the apple, the fruit nearly always falls far from the tree.

I’m thinking of my son’s first experience of sugar: the icing on the cake at his first birthday. I have only the testimony of Isaac’s face to go by (that, and his fierceness to repeat the experience), but it was plain that his first encounter with sugar had intoxicated him—was in fact an ecstasy, in the literal sense of that word. That is, he was beside himself with the pleasure of it, no longer here with me in space and time in quite the same way he had been just a moment before. Between bites Isaac gazed up at me in amazement (he was on my lap, and I was delivering the ambrosial forkfuls to his gaping mouth) as if to exclaim, “Your world contains this? From this day forward I shall dedicate my life to it.” (Which he basically has done.)

(Come to think of it, Chapman did sponsor sex orgies—but only among apple trees.)

I spent the better part of a morning browsing the leafy aisles, tasting all the famous old varieties I’d read about—the Esopus Spitzenberg and Newtown Pippin, the Hawkeye and the Winter Banana.

“I’ll send seeds to anybody who asks, just so long as they promise to plant them, tend to the trees, and then report back someday.” The wild apples had found their Johnny Appleseed.

Botanists call the resultant behavior on the part of the male insect “pseudocopulation”; they call the flower that inspires this behavior the “prostitute orchid.”

Green appears gray, a background hue against which red—which bees perceive as black—stands out most sharply. (Bees can also see at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, where we’re blind;

What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. The color of a tulip actually consists of two pigments working in concert—a base color that is always yellow or white and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the underlying color to show through. It wasn’t until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that scientists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens.

A horticulturally inclined mathematician would no doubt be able to represent the stem of my tulip in a differential equation.

Beauty did not yet exist. That is, the way things looked had nothing to do with desire.

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.

Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.

If the New Milford police chief happened to find marijuana growing in my garden today, he would have the power to seize my house and land, regardless of whether I was ultimately convicted of a crime. That’s because, according to the somewhat magical reasoning of the federal asset-forfeiture laws, my garden can be found guilty of violating the drug laws even if I am not.

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.

A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be as small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day’s Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony, “Where’s the beef?,” and of course the notion of the meme itself.

Cultural change occurs whenever a new meme is introduced and catches on. It might be romanticism or double-entry bookkeeping, chaos theory or Pokémon. (Or the notion of memes itself, which seems to be catching on today.)

You couldn’t design a more perfect drug for getting Eve through the pain of childbirth or helping Adam endure a life of physical toil.” She noted that cannabinoid receptors had been found in the uterus, of all places, and speculated that anandamide may not only dull the pain of childbirth but help women forget it later. (The sensation of pain is, curiously, one of the hardest to summon from memory.) Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life “so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again.” It is the brain’s own drug for coping with the human condition.

Ten thousand years later, hemp and cannabis are as different as night and day: hemp produces negligible amounts of THC and cannabis a worthless fiber. (In the eyes of the U.S. government, however, there is still only one plant, so that the taboo on the drug plant has, pointlessly, doomed the fiber.)

Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.

There is another word for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is wonder. • • • Memory is the enemy of wonder,

The notion that spirit might turn out in some sense to be matter (and plant matter, no less!) is a threat to our sense of separateness and godliness. Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.

the notion that, by severing the link between acts and their consequences, marijuana unleashes human inhibitions, thereby endangering Western civilization.

The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form—that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature.

Europe’s center of political gravity had always been anchored firmly in the hot, sunny south, where wheat grew reliably; without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

This is, of course, how chemical companies have always handled the problem of pest resistance: by simply introducing a new and improved pesticide every few years. With any luck, the effectiveness of the last one will expire around the same time its patent does.

McDonald’s is one of the largest buyers of potatoes in the world.* You know, their fries really are gorgeous: slender golden rectangles long enough to overshoot their trim red containers like a bouquet. A farmer had told me that only the Russet Burbank will give you a fry quite that long and perfect. To look at them is to appreciate that these aren’t just french fries: they’re Platonic ideals of french fries, the image and the food rolled into one, and available anywhere in the world for somewhere around a dollar a bag. You can’t beat it.