The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Michael Pollan
258 pages
Read in 24 days

Recently, Michael Pollan has become a voice to the slow-food movement. Slow-food, as the name implies, is the antithesis to fast-food; the focus being on foods that are organic, free of pesticides and grown in a setting far from the factory farm systems.

Pollan has authored such books as The Omnivores Dilemma and In Defense of Food that discuss his views further. Before all of this, there was The Botany of Desire where you can see the seeds (non-genetically modified, I'm sure) being planted in his brain to help form his core beliefs. Newsweek says that "before Pollan became a food-world demigod, he wrote this insightful, engaging account explaining our appetites by tracing the evolution of four plants: potato, tulip, marijuana, and apple tree."

The basic premise of the book is looking at our relationship with nature from the viewpoint of the plant. Through the examination of these different plants, he discovers that we humans are in the web of nature, not outside of it. Pollan writes, "seeing these plants instead as willing partners in an intimate and reciprocal relationship with us means looking at ourselves a little differently, too."

Each chapter covers a different plant and the relationship that humans have with it. The first plant covered is the apple. It is the source of our desire for sweetness. However, as he discovers, it wasn't always that way. The apple, though it originated in Kazakhstan, has evolved into a truly American fruit. He looks at John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman as the eccentric who planted orchards ahead of the pace from people headed west rather than the Disney-manufactured character that we have come to know. Pollan writes:

Chapman had a sixth sense for exactly where the next wave of development was about to break. There he would go and plant his seeds on a tract of waterfront land (sometimes paid for, sometimes not), confident in the expectation that a few years hence a market for his trees would appear at his doorstep. By the time the settlers came, he'd have two-to three-year-old trees ready for sale.

The second plant that he discusses is the tulip and how its beauty created a desire in humans that was so great that trading in 1635 for futures of the bulb in Holland reached limits that were 15 times the normal price. The irony of the story is that the most treasured Tulip at the time was actually caused by a virus in the flower.

The next chapter goes into human's desire for intoxication with the marijuana plant. After Pollan goes into a history of the plant with shamans and alchemists, he talks about marijuana’s place as the poster-child in the “War against Drugs” and how this took the drug underground. With the crackdown by law enforcement, the plants were taken from fields outside to indoor locations where, because of the ideal controlled growing conditions, the drug has increased its potency; the THC that was normally 2 to 3% is now at 20%. So, I guess thank you “War on Drugs”. Good job. Pollan does make an effort to try to understand why the plant exists in the first place:

What is harder to comprehend is why virtually all people, and more than a few animals, should have acquired such a desire in the first place. What good, from an evolutionary standpoint, could it do a creature to consume psychoactive plants?

Pollan ends the chapter discussing the effects of marijuana on consciousness. I love how he ends the chapter saying that “letting nature have her way with us now and again still seems like a useful thing to do, if only to bring our abstracted gaze back down to Earth for a time.”

The first three chapters are very good, but I feel this book was included on Newsweek’s list solely for the last chapter. It’s a chapter on human’s desire for control and talks about the potato. Not just any potato, rather, the genetically modified potato called “Newleaf” that came from the agricultural biotechnical company, Monsanto. They have altered the seeds so that it produces its own insecticide to combat a common enemy to the potato called the Colorado potato beetle (versus the farmer applying insecticides on his fields throughout the growing season).

As I said before, Pollan has become one of the harsher critics of genetically modified foods. In this chapter, he is one of us. As he grows the Newleafs in his own garden, discusses the genetically modified seeds with farmers (both organic and industrial) and even discusses with the scientists and management at Monsanto, you can see his mind start comprehending the potential impact on our lives and ecosystems. As he simply states in the chapter, “Monsanto’s aim, it would appear, is to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary ‘operating systems’ to run this new generation of plants.” What bothers him and continues to bother scientists (Atlantic Monthly just discussed Monsanto and genetically modified corn effects http://food.theatlantic.com/nutrition/how-safe-is-gm-corn.php) is that Johnny Appleseed or the pot growers all have manipulated (by selection or cloning, etc.) what they were growing, the “species themselves never lost their evolutionary say in the matter…(however,) with genetically modified seeds the wildness has been reduced. Whether this is a good or bad thing for the plants (or for us), it is unquestionably a new thing.”

Pollan ends up asking a molecular biologist whether there was any scientific evidence on whether the Newleafs were unsafe to eat. She admits that there is no scientific proof, but she talks about genetic instability which “suggests that a biotech plant is not simply the sum of its old and new genes, and she talked about the fact we know nothing about the effect of the insecticide in the human diet, a place it has never been before.” When he presses if there was any reason not to eat the potatoes, she replies, “Why would you want to?”

What worries me most, and Pollan makes the connection, is that organic farming fights the beetle by consistently rotating crops in their fields or they just won’t plant the potato that has the greatest incidence of the beetle. With industrial farms, however, they are at the mercy of their customers’ demands. The largest customer of the industrial farmed Russet Burbank potato is a small company called McDonalds. Apparently to make the “perfect” French fry at McDonalds you can only use this potato which the organic farms just don’t plant. The key of the industrialized farm system and what the genetically modified seed ends up promoting is a monoculture for crops. They get high yield but are not at the whimsy of nature (as organic farmers are) but rather are susceptible to the nuances specific to the monoculture. Another famous example of a monoculture crop? The potato in the Irish Famine of 1845.

There still is a lot of research that needs to be done to understand the effect of eating genetically modified crops. I look forward to reading Pollan’s other books to see how his thoughts have been further honed to where they are today. I think Pollan has seen the future and he is frightened by what he sees. It will also be interesting to read The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry and its views on the industrial farm system.

Up next, the plague novel, Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.