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

by Michael Pollan

I call this book The Botany of Desire because it is as much about the human desires that connect us to these plants as it is about the plants themselves. My premise is that these human desires form a part of natural history in the same way the hummingbird’s love of red does, or the ant’s taste for the aphid’s honeydew. I think of them as the human equivalent of nectar. So while the book explores the social history of these plants, weaving them into our story, it is at the same time a natural history of the four human desires these plants evolved to stir and gratify.

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 different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple—at least five per apple, several thousand per tree—that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree’s adopted home.

It takes a leap of the historical imagination to appreciate just how much the apple meant to people living two hundred years ago. By comparison, the apple in our eye is a fairly inconsequential thing—a popular fruit (second only to the banana) but nothing we can’t imagine living without. It is much harder for us to imagine living without the experience of sweetness, however, and sweetness, in the widest, oldest sense, is what the apple offered an American in Chapman’s time, the desire it helped gratify. 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.

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.

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.

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. In 1900 the horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote that “the eating of the apple (rather than the drinking of it) has come to be paramount,”

Forsline has devoted a career to preserving and expanding the apple’s genetic diversity. He’s convinced that 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. Forsline explained why this is so. 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. Put another way, the domestication of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species’ fitness for life in nature (where it still has to live, after all) has been dangerously compromised. Reduced to the handful of genetically identical clones tha...

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.

Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.

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 the beginning, domestic marijuana was grossly inferior to the imported product. Part of the problem was that most early growers did what I did: plant seeds picked out of pot that had been grown in tropical places. Invariably these were the seeds of Cannabis sativa, an equatorial species poorly adapted to life in the northern latitudes. Sativa can’t withstand frost and, as I discovered, usually won’t set flowers north of the thirtieth parallel. Working with such seeds, growers found it difficult to produce a high-quality domestic crop (and especially sinsemilla) outside places such as California and Hawaii. The search was on for a type of marijuana that would flourish, and flower, farther north, and by the end of the decade, it had been found. American hippies traveling “the hashish trail” through Afghanistan returned with seeds of Cannabis indica, a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been grown for centuries by hashish producers in the mountains of central Asia. The species looks quite unlike the familiar marijuana plant (a distinct advantage to its early growers): it rarely grows taller than four or five feet (as compared to fifteen for the stateliest sativas), and its purplish green leaves are shorter and rounder than the long, slender fingers of sativa. Indica also proved to be exceptionally potent, although many people will tell you that its smoke is harsher and its high more physically debilitating than that of sativa. Even so, the introduction of indica to Ame...

Until the early 1980s, almost all the marijuana grown in America was grown outdoors: in the hills of California’s Humboldt County, in the cornfields of the farm belt (cannabis and corn thrive under similar conditions), in backyards just about everywhere—and

Though the government’s campaign failed to eradicate marijuana farming, it did change the rules of the game, forcing both the plant and its growers to adapt: “The government pushed us all indoors,” a grower from Indiana told me. And it was there, under the blazing metal halide lights, that Cannabis sativa X indica attained a kind of perfection.

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.

Wilderness might be reducible, acre by acre, but wildness is something else again. So the freshly hoed earth invites a new crop of weeds, the potent new pesticide engenders resistance in pests, and every new step in the direction of simplification—toward monoculture, say, or genetically identical plants—leads to unimagined new complexities.

it is true that genes occasionally move between species; the genome of many species appears to be somewhat more fluid than scientists used to think. Yet for reasons we don’t completely understand, distinct species do exist in nature, and they exhibit a certain genetic integrity—sex between them, when it does occur, doesn’t produce fertile offspring. Nature presumably has some reason for erecting these walls, even if they are permeable on occasion. Perhaps, as some biologists believe, the purpose of keeping species separate is to put barriers in the path of pathogens, to contain their damage so that a single germ can’t wipe out life on Earth at a stroke. The deliberate introduction into a plant of genes transported not only across species but across whole phyla means that the wall of that plant’s essential identity—its irreducible wildness, you might say—has been breached, not by a virus, as sometimes happens in nature, but by humans wielding powerful new tools. For the first time the genome itself is being domesticated—brought under the roof of human culture.

At a certain point, a point already long past, the farmer’s attempt at the perfect control of nature evolved into the control of the farmer by the corporations that promoted that dream in the first place. It is only because that dream is so elu-sive that the control of farmers by its merchants became so inescapable.

Organic farmers like Mike Heath have turned their backs on what is unquestionably the greatest strength—and still greater weakness—of industrial agriculture: monoculture and the economies of scale it makes possible. Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring nature as a machine, yet nothing else in agriculture is so poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a vast field of identical plants will always be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds, and disease—to all the vicissitudes of nature. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and from which virtually every agricultural product is designed to deliver him.

“We need a new silver bullet,” an entomologist with the Oregon Extension Service told me, “and biotech is it.” Yet a new silver bullet is not the same thing as a new paradigm. Rather, it’s something that will allow the old paradigm to survive. That paradigm will always construe the problem in Danny Forsyth’s field as a Colorado beetle problem, rather than what it is: a problem of potato monoculture.

I wanted and fully expected to find precisely the same Platonic french fry here in Nowhere, Idaho, that I’d had countless times at home and could expect to find anytime I wanted to in Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, even Azerbaijan or the Isle of Man. What is that, if not a control thing?—and not just on the part of McDonald’s. But whatever is behind it, this expectation can’t be fulfilled unless McDonald’s has seen to it that millions of acres of Russet Burbanks are planted all over the world. The global desire can’t be gratified without the global monoculture, and that global monoculture now depends on technologies like genetic engineering. It just may be that we can’t have the one without the other.

it was not the potato so much as potato monoculture that sowed the seeds of Ireland’s disaster.

Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, but they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper. Potatoes, like apples, are clones, which means that every Lumper was genetically identical to every other Lumper, all of them descended from a single plant that just happened to have no resistance to Phytophthora infestans. The Incas too built a civilization atop the potato, but they cultivated such a polyculture of potatoes that no one fungus could ever have toppled it. In fact, it was to South America that, in the aftermath of the famine, breeders went to look for potatoes that could resist the blight. And there, in a potato called the Garnet Chile, they found it.

Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt. In Ireland under British rule the logic of economics dictated a monoculture of potatoes; in 1845, the logic of nature exercised its veto, and a million people—many ...