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

by Michael Pollan

The species that have spent the last ten thousand or so years figuring out how best to feed, heal, clothe, intoxicate, and otherwise delight us have made themselves some of nature’s greatest success stories.

What is much less obvious, at least to us, is that these plants have, at the same time, been going about the business of remaking us.

By the same token, intoxication is a human desire we might never have cultivated had it not been for a handful of plants that manage to manufacture chemicals with the precise molecular key needed to unlock the mechanisms in our brain governing pleasure, memory, and maybe even transcendence.

Plants are nature’s alchemists,

The same great existential fact of plant life explains why plants make chemicals to both repel and attract other species: immobility.

That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint—that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus.

Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression.

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.

Northern Lights, Skunk #1, Big Bud, and California Orange—are regarded as the benchmarks of modern marijuana breeding;

without the Dutch to safeguard and disseminate these strains, the important genetic work done by American breeders would probably have been lost by now, scattered to the winds by the drug war.

Reagan administration was chagrined to discover that the amount of domestic marijuana being seized was actually a third higher than its official estimate of the total American crop.

During this period, 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.

For cannabis, the drug war is what global warming will be for much of the rest of the plant world, a cataclysm that some species will turn into a great opportunity to expand their range.

meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information.

He contends that cannabis does not itself create but merely triggers the mental state we identify as “being high.”

purpose of THC could be to protect cannabis plants from ultraviolet radiation; it seems that the higher the altitude at which cannabis grows, the more THC it produces. THC also exhibits antibiotic properties, suggesting a role in protecting cannabis from disease. Last, it’s possible that THC gives the cannabis plant a sophisticated defense against pests.

“the most obvious evolutionary advantage THC conferred on Cannabis was the psychoactive properties, which attracted human attention and caused the plant to be spread around the world.”

Ma, the ancient Chinese character for “hemp,” depicts a male and a female plant under a roof—cannabis inside the house of human culture. Cannabis was one of the earliest plants to be domesticated (probably for fiber first, then later as a drug); it has been coevolving with humankind for more than ten thousand years,

“we don’t yet understand consciousness scientifically, so how can we hope to explain changes in consciousness scientifically?”

THC in cannabis is only mimicking the actions of the brain’s own cannabinoids. What a curious thing this is for a brain to do, to manufacture a chemical that interferes with its own ability to make memories—and not just memories of pain, either. So I e-mailed Raphael Mechoulam to ask him why he thought the brain might secrete a chemical that has such an undesirable effect.

“Do you really want to remember all the faces you saw on the New York City subway this morning?”

we’re to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.* Much depends on forgetting.

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive—it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true—that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.

The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don’t merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry—the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt of swallowing a pill containing nothing but sugar and belief.

Even so, the use of drugs for spiritual purposes feels cheap and false. Perhaps it is our work ethic that is offended—you

Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.

One theory of the origins of agriculture holds that domesticated plants first emerged on dump heaps, where the discarded seeds of the wild plants that people gathered and ate—already unconsciously selected for sweetness or size or power—took root, flourished, and eventually hybridized.

The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome, voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight, starving the tubers in the process. Supposedly, any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of a NewLeaf leaf is doomed, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in every part of these plants.

The not-so-distant future will, we’re told, bring us potatoes genetically modified to absorb less fat when fried, corn that can withstand drought, lawns that don’t ever have to be mowed, “golden rice” rich in Vitamin A, bananas and potatoes that deliver vaccines, tomatoes enhanced with flounder genes (to withstand frost), and cotton that grows in every color of the rainbow.

By “opening and using this product,” the card informed me, I was now “licensed” to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I would dig come September would be mine to eat or sell, but their genes would remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under several U.S. patents, including 5,196,525; 5,164,316; 5,322,938; and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of these spuds to plant next year—something I’ve routinely done with my potatoes in the past—I would be breaking federal law. (I had to wonder, what would be the legal status of any “volunteers”—those plants that, with no prompting from the gardener, sprout each spring from tubers overlooked during the previous harvest?) The small print on the label also brought the disconcerting news that my potato plants were themselves registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474).

The company defines the word biotechnology so broadly as to take in the brewing of beer, cheese making, and selective breeding: all are “technologies” that involve the manipulation of life-forms.

the Irish had discovered that a diet of potatoes supplemented with cow’s milk was nutritionally complete. In addition to energy in the form of carbohydrates, potatoes supplied considerable amounts of protein and vitamins B and C (the spud would eventually put an end to scurvy in Europe); all that was missing was vitamin A, and that a bit of milk could make up. (So it turns out that mashed potatoes are not only the ultimate comfort food but all a body really needs.) And as easy as they were to grow, potatoes were even easier to prepare: dig, heat—by either boiling them in a pot or simply dropping them into a fire—and eat.

Harmful as chemical pollution can be, it eventually disperses and fades, but biological pollution is self-replicating.

Monsanto is acknowledging that, in the case of Bt, it plans on simply using up not just another patented synthetic chemical but a natural resource, one that, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to everyone. The true cost of this technology is being charged to the future—no new paradigm there. Today’s gain in control over nature will be paid for by tomorrow’s new disorder, which in turn will become simply a fresh problem for science to solve. We can cross that bridge when we come to it.

Typically it begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes and certain diseases in the soil, potato farmers douse their fields before planting with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Next Forsyth puts down an herbicide—Lexan, Sencor, or Eptam—to “clean” his field of all weeds. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide—such as Thimet—is applied to the soil. This will be absorbed by the young seedlings and kill any insect that eats their leaves for several weeks. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, a second herbicide is sprayed on the field to control weeds.

Pesticides and fertilizer are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth’s farm draws water from (and returns it to) the nearby Snake River.

ten weekly sprayings of chemical fertilizer.

when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next—he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, the same fung...

Forsyth will hire a crop duster to spray for aphids at fourteen-day intervals.

Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect, yet because McDonald’s believes—with good reason—that we don’t like to see brown spots in our french fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals now in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

In March 1998, patent number 5,723,765, describing a novel method for the “control of plant gene expression,” was granted jointly to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a cottonseed company called Delta & Pine Land. The bland language of the patent obscures a radical new genetic technology: introduced into any plant, the gene in question causes the seeds that plant makes to become sterile—to no longer do what seeds have always done. With the “Terminator,” as the new technique quickly became known, genetic engineers have discovered how to stop on command the most elemental of nature’s processes, the plant-seed-plant-seed cycle by which plants reproduce and evolve. The ancient logic of the seed—to freely make more of itself ad infinitum, to serve as both food and the means of making more food in the future—has yielded to the modern logic of capitalism. Now viable seeds will come not from plants but from corporations.

There was this, too: I’d called some of the government agencies in Washington that had signed off on the NewLeaf, and what they said didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. The Food and Drug Administration told me that, because it operates on the assumption that genetically modified plants are “substantially equivalent” to ordinary plants, the regulation of these foods has been voluntary since 1992. Only if Monsanto feels there is a safety concern is it required to consult with the agency about its NewLeafs. I’d always assumed the FDA had tested the new potato, maybe fed a bunch of them to rats, but it turned out this was not the case. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even officially regard the NewLeaf as a food. What? It seems that since the potato contains Bt, it is, at least in the eyes of the federal government, not a food at all but a pesticide, putting it under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency.

All of them had ventured into the garden—into Darwin’s Ever-Expanding Garden of Artificial Selection—for the purpose of marrying powerful human drives to the equally powerful drives of plants; all were practitioners of the botany of desire.