The odds are good that I never would have picked up this book if I hadn't joined a new book club - and that would have been a true pity because The Botany of Desire is a fascinating read. It took me a little while to get into it - people kept telling me to at least read until I got to marijuana - and indeed by then, I was hooked.Author Michael Pollan chose four different types of domesticated plants - the apple tree, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato - and gave each of them their own section to look at how the plants have evolved to gratify human desires and how we have made them evolve to gratify our desires. Throughout, Pollan combines history, travel, and research with his own experiences as a gardener.
In Apple, Pollan primarily looks at the myth of Johnny Appleseed, the American hero who may actually have been bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontiersmen. Along the way, he also discovers how big (apple) business has whittled down a consumers' choices down to just a few types of apples - out of all the millions of possible varities, since apple seeds produce independent trees that don't resemble their parents - and how this narrowness might actually endanger the apple's future.
In Tulip, my second-favorite section, Pollan mostly talked about how, for a short period of time in 19th-century Holland, a tulip became the most valuable thing in the world. In Marijuana - which was actually my least-favorite part, despite the promises - Pollan remembers his own short-lived attempt to grow his own crop while also investigating the motives behind the U.S. drug war, how the purpose of gardens has changed over time, and maybe even how great creativity and the world's great religions have sprung from this sort of intoxication. (Summarizing it, this section sounds fascinating, but for some reason, I just got bogged down here.)
The last section - the most fascinating and the scariest - was devoted to the potato. Pollan looks at the ordinary spud from two perspectives, from the Irish potato famine and the new genetically engineered crop. How is this scary, you ask? Monoculture, or the farming of a single crop. In both situations, monoculture - whether from necessity or corporate pressure - leads to a situation where one event (be it a bug infestation or frost) can kill the entire yield. In Ireland, an eighth of the population died because they relied on a single type of potato. Today, farmers generally either grow a single type of potato for the McDonalds crowd and flood their fields with pesticides or they opt for the predator-resistant NewLeafs, whose true cost in the end may be much higher than their value. I found this section so interesting that I've already repeated the details to someone - and I just finished the book yesterday.
There's no way I'll be able to remember all of the factoids and anecdotes, since The Botany of Desire is just chock full of them. So the main lesson I'll take away is this: Plant your own food. (And if that fails, eat organic.)
As Michael Pollan writes, at the end of the book: “The NewLeaf marks an evolutionary turn that may or may not take us somewhere we want to be. Just in case it doesn’t, though, we’d be wise to follow Chapman’s example, to save and seed all manner of plant genes: the wild, the unpatentable, even the seemingly useless, patently ugly, and just plain strange. Next year in place of the NewLeaf I plan to plant a great many different Old Leafs; instead of one perfect potato, I’ll make Chapman’s bet on the field. To shrink the sheer diversity of life, as the grafters and monoculturists and genetic engineers would do, is to shrink evolution’s possibilities, which is to say, the future open to all of us.”
