This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Perched somewhat crookedly on the steep slope of one of these caffeine mountains, my main thought was, You really have to give this plant a lot of credit. In less than a thousand years it has managed to get itself from its evolutionary birthplace in Ethiopia all the way here to the mountains of South America and beyond, using our species as its vector. Consider all we’ve done on this plant’s behalf: allotted it more than 27 million acres of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth. This astounding success is owing to one of the cleverest evolutionary strategies ever chanced upon by a plant: the trick of producing a psychoactive compound that happens to fire the minds of one especially clever primate, inspiring that animal to heroic feats of industriousness, many of which ultimately redound to the benefit of the plant itself. For coffee and tea have not only benefited by gratifying human desire, as have so many other plants, but these two have also assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilization in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism, and dominated by a species that by now can barely get out of bed without their help.