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

by Michael Pollan

One of the world’s earliest known religions was the cult of Soma, practiced by the ancient Indo-Europeans of central Asia; according to its sacred text, the Rig Veda, Soma was an intoxicant with the powers of a god. People worshiped the drug itself—which ethnobotanists now think was Amanita muscaria, the mushroom sometimes called fly agaric—as a path to divine knowledge.

No entheogenic plant or fungus ever set out to make molecules for the express purpose of inspiring visions in humans—combating pests is the far more likely motive. But the moment humans discovered what these molecules could do for them, this wholly inadvertent magic, the plants that made them suddenly had a brilliant new way to prosper. And from that moment on this is exactly what the plants with the strongest magic did.

This, at least, was my first thought upon learning that many of the important thinkers of classical Greece (including Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Aeschylus, and Euripides) had participated in the “Mysteries of Eleusis.”

When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture—the critical role they’ve played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and music (think of jazz or rock improvisation), of poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen, not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, after all, chemicals with the power to alter mental constructs—to propose new metaphors, new ways of looking at things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs.

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.

The cannabinoid receptors Howlett found showed up in vast numbers all over the brain (as well as in the immune and reproductive systems), though they were clustered in regions responsible for the mental processes that marijuana is known to alter: the cerebral cortex (the locus of higher-order thought), the hippocampus (memory), the basal ganglia (movement), and the amygdala (emotions). Curiously, the one neurological address where cannabinoid receptors didn’t show up was in the brain stem, which regulates involuntary functions such as circulation and respiration. This might explain the remarkably low toxicity of cannabis and the fact that no one is known to have ever died from an overdose.

In 1992, some thirty years after his discovery of THC, Raphael Mechoulam (working with a collaborator, William Devane) found it: the brain’s own endogenous cannabinoid. He named it “anandamide,” from the Sanskrit word for “inner bliss.”

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.)

The 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. Cannabinoid receptors have been found in animals as primitive as the hydra, and researchers expect to find them in insects. Conceivably, cannabis produces THC to discombobulate the insects (and higher herbivores) that prey on the plant; it might make a bug (or a buck or a rabbit) forget what it’s doing or where in the world it last saw that tasty plant.

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, to the point where the aboriginal form of the plant may no longer exist. By now cannabis is as much the product of human desire as a Bourbon rose, and we have scant idea what the plant might have been like before it linked its destiny to our own.

muntins

The THC in marijuana and the brain’s endogenous cannabinoids work in much the same way, but THC is far stronger and more persistent than anandamide, which, like most neurotransmitters, is designed to break down very soon after its release. (Chocolate, of all things, seems to slow this process, which might account for its own subtle mood-altering properties.)

Yet this thoroughgoing absorption in the present is (as both Eastern and Western religious traditions tell us) as close as we mortals ever get to an experience of eternity. Boethius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving was “to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come.” Likewise in the Eastern tradition: “Awakening to this present instant,” a Zen master has written, “we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant.” Yet we can’t get there from here without first forgetting.

For what is a sense of the banality of something if not a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of that thing experienced freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

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.

in the decades after Pope Innocent’s fiat against witchcraft, cannabis, opium, belladonna, and the rest were simply transferred from the realm of sorcery to medicine, thanks largely to the work of a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician named Paracelsus. Sometimes called the “Father of Medicine,” Paracelsus established a legitimate pharmacology largely on the basis of the ingredients found in flying ointments. (Among his many accomplishments was the invention of laudanum, the tincture of opium that was perhaps the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia until the twentieth century.)

The garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena—at once as common as any room and as special as a church—where we can go not just to witness but to enact in a ritual way our abiding ties to the natural world. Abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. But in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols.

Plants with the power to revise our thoughts and perceptions, to provoke metaphor and wonder, challenge the cherished Judeo-Christian belief that our conscious, thinking selves somehow stand apart from nature, have achieved a kind of transcendence.

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 plant in its wildness proposes new qualities, and then man (or, in the case of natural selection, nature) selects which of those qualities will survive and prosper. But about one rule Darwin was emphatic; as he wrote in The Origin of Species, “Man does not actually produce variability.” Now he does. For the first time, breeders can bring qualities at will from anywhere in nature into the genome of a plant: from fireflies (the quality of luminescence), from flounders (frost tolerance), from viruses (disease resistance), and, in the case of my potatoes, from the soil bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis.

For 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.

He explained that there are two ways of splicing foreign genes into a plant: by infecting it with agrobacterium, a pathogen whose modus operandi is to break into a plant cell’s nucleus and replace its DNA with some of its own, or by shooting it with a gene gun. For reasons not yet understood, the agrobacterium method seems to work best on broadleaf species such as the potato, the gene gun better on grasses, such as corn and wheat.

In laboratory experiments scientists have found that the pollen from Bt corn is lethal to monarch butterflies. Monarchs don’t eat corn pollen, but they do eat, exclusively, the leaves of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), a weed that is common in American cornfields. When monarch caterpillars eat milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen, they sicken and die. Will this happen in the field? And how serious will the problem be if it does? We don’t know.

In the case of the NewLeaf potato, the most likely form of biological pollution is the evolution of insects resistant to Bt, a development that would ruin one of the safest insecticides we have and do great harm to the organic farmers who depend on it.*

I asked Forsyth to walk me through a season’s regimen, the state of the art in the control of a potato field. 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. Dryland farmers like Forsyth farm in the vast circles I’d seen from the sky; each circle, defined by the radius of the irrigation pivot, typically covers an area of 135 acres. 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. Along with their ration of water, Forsyth’s potatoes receive ten weekly sprayings of chemical fertilizer. Just before the rows close—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 fungus that caused the Irish potato famine and is once again today the potato grower’s most worrisome threat. A single spore can infect a field overnight,...

I began to understand that organic farming was a lot more complicated than simply substituting good inputs for bad. A whole different metaphor seemed to be involved. Instead of buying many inputs at all, Heath relies on a long and complex crop rotation to avoid a buildup of crop-specific pests. He’s found, for instance, that planting wheat in a field prior to potatoes “confuses” the potato beetles when they emerge from their larval stage. He also plants strips of flowering plants on the margins of his potato fields—peas or alfalfa, usually—to attract the beneficial insects that dine on beetle larvae and aphids. If there aren’t enough beneficial insects around to do the job, he’ll introduce ladybugs. Heath also grows a dozen different varieties of potatoes, on the theory that biodiversity in a field, as in the wild, is the best defense against nature’s inevitable surprises.

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.

The potato blight visited all of Europe, but only in Ireland did it produce a catastrophe. Elsewhere, people could turn to other staple foods when a crop failed, but Ireland’s poor, subsisting on potatoes and exiled from the cash economy, had no alternative. As is often the case in times of starvation, the problem was not quite so simple as a shortage of food. At the height of the famine, Ireland’s docks were heaped with sacks of corn destined for export to England. But the corn was a commodity, determined to follow the money; since the potato eaters had no money to pay for corn, it sailed for a country that did.

Yet this whole edifice of contingency rested at bottom upon a plant—or, more precisely, upon the relationship between a plant and a people. For it was not the potato so much as potato monoculture that sowed the seeds of Ireland’s disaster. Indeed, 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.

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 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.

fishmonger had told me about a Martha Stewart tip for keeping grilled fish from sticking to a barbecue: rub the grill with a raw potato sliced down the middle. It works, by the way.

*Though many flowers, like the lilies, possess both male and female organs, they go to great lengths to avoid pollinating themselves. That would defeat the floral point, which is the mixing of genes that cross-pollination ensures. A flower can avoid self-pollination chemically (by making its ovule and pollen grain incompatible), architecturally (by arranging stamen and pistil in the flower so as to avoid contact), or temporally (by staggering the times when their stamens produce pollen and their pistils are receptive).

*Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.

*David Lenson draws a useful distinction between drugs of desire (cocaine, for example) and drugs of pleasure, such as cannabis. “Cocaine promises the greatest pleasure ever known in just a minute more . . . But that future never comes.” In this respect the cocaine experience is “a savage mimicry of consumer consciousness.” With cannabis or the psychedelics, on the other hand, “pleasure can come from natural beauty, domestic tasks, friends and relatives, conversation, or any number of objects that do not need to be purchased.”