Avail Yourself The Botany Of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View Of The World Originated By Michael Pollan Displayed As Copy

schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers genes far and wide.
In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship.
He masterfully links four fundamental human desiressweetness, beauty, intoxication, and controlwith the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato.
In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankinds most basic yearnings, And just as weve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them, So who is really domesticating whom Michael Pollan's book is certainly an interesting one, It germinates pun intended in Pollan's mind, one day, as he was working in his garden, He thought what if human beings were similar to bumblebees It is an interesting take on "coevolution", which stipulates that two parties can act on each other to advance their individual interests but end up producing a mutually beneficial outcome.


What if plants were able to develop traits that would cause other animals to help them in their goal to reproduce As plants are immobile, they tend to rely on wind and rain to spread their pollen.
But with the evolution of angiosperms, plants with flowers and seeds, animals had a new reason to eat those plants and they spread the seeds for the plant, or pollen in the case of the bee.


He then stipulates that the four plants he covers have also evolved in such a way as to appeal to the human animal and, by doing so, have been able to spread their seed all across the world.
The four plants he looks at are perfect examples of how they have managed to "attract" human beings, Pollan also links each of these plants to a specific desire, They are as follows:

The apple, which utilizes the sense of sweetness,
The Tulip, which utilizes the sense of beauty,
The potato, which utilizes the sense of control,
The marijuana plant, which utilizes the sense of intoxication,

Each of these plants gets a detailed history, You will learn where they came from, how they were modified and how they entered into the human world, The stories are interesting, though I could have done with less of the personal ruminations, it is the history and the science behind these four plants that make this an interesting book to read.


It is hardly overly technical and quite easy for a science dunce to comprehend, If you are looking for something more scienceheavy, I'd pass on this, This is a book that tells the tale of science through the prism of human desire, Pollan does a good job of explaining things like the Diyonisian concepts and how they melded into how humans view intoxication and their views on marijuana.


An interesting book that will make you think and while not scienceheavy, this is a book that will interest science and nonscience people alike.
Interesting anecdotes and some cool history make this a rather unique book, Michael Pollan has convinced me to buy only organic potatoes from now on,

The Botany of Desire is a book which presages two of Pollans later books, The Omnivores Dilemma, and How to Change Your Mind the other two books were written later, and are better books, in my opinion.
That said, there is much to learn in reading the Botany of Desire BoD, hereinafter, Pollan, like me, is a gardener, so I have common beliefs on many issues touching land use and food anyone who has gardened for a long time comes to understand soil and ecology, and Pollan clearly does.


BoD is divided in four sections: Apples, Tulips, Marijuana, and Potatoes, The section on potatoes was clearly the basis for, or dry run for The Omnivores Dilemma, but Omnivores Dilemma is a better treatment of modern agriculture in general, as well as organic farming and its uses.
I will say the recitation of pesticides and herbicides that get dumped on standard potato crops is scary one farmer said that after application of one of the more potent pesticides, he does not go into the fields for five days for any reason, and he does not allow his employees to do so.
Also, the use of GMO plants with builtin pesticides like bt bacillus thuringiensis engineered into their DNA is frightening, especially given the now widely known worldwide decline of insects.
Pollans point, which is perhaps better made in Omnivores Dilemma, is that it doesnt have to be this way for a slightly higher price we could have organic produce, or at least we could have far less chemically treated produce.


The other point Pollan makes, both with regard to potatoes and apples is that clones which is what all the varieties of spuds and apples are are more susceptible to insect pests and eventually lose vigor.
Remember the term, “hybrid vigor” Clones dont have it, because, well, theyre clones, not hybrids,

The section on marijuana is interesting, but Pollan covered the same ground much more comprehensively in How to Change Your Mind,

The section on tulips mostly was uninteresting to me because it was more about the tulip “bubble” in Holland in thes than about gardening or plants, and I could have learned all I wanted to know about “tulipmania” in three or four paragraphs, versus the twenty or more pages spent on it.
Also, Ill admit that as a gardener I dislike tulips, One could create a plastic replica of a tulip that has as much interest to me I dont like formal gardens, There was some interesting stuff in this section about how plants have evolved to attract pollinators bees, mostly,

As for apples, that part was interesting, and I learned some things I did not know, though perhaps a bit more than I wanted to about Johnny Appleseed.


So my recommendation is to read The Omnivores Dilemma to learn about food, and How to Change Your Mind to learn about psychoactive drugs both are excellent books.
If you read those two, you can decide for yourself whether you would like the added information available in BoD, As always, Pollans prose is engaging, and he clearly has studied in depth the subjects he is writing about, though sometimes he tells the reader a bit more than is absolutely necessary.
Three and a half,

This may be my favorite Pollan book of all time, It's so beautifully written and full of wonder at the plant world, The section on tulips as a flower embodying Apollo and Dionysus and about the apple were just brilliant,

However, I do think the goes a little nuts about GMOs at the end, I'm tempted to go with him into skepticism, but I am not sure it's warranted, I think the dangers of monoculture are real, but I am not as concerned about the GMOs as he is I couldn't get into this book at all and gave up reading it after the first chapter.
The premise was a good one, but Pollan's writing style drove me up the wall, I called it quits when he started analogizing Johnny Appleseed and Dionysius, Too much navelgazing and not enough substance, As beguiling as the plants this book enlightened me about Four common plants and I didn't know they each held such a rich history.
Well, I was kind of familiar with marijuana's development not from personal toking, honest Asian, but from being surrounded by tokers hey, it was Oregon and that it was completely villified in the "just say no" era of drug awareness education.
The chapters on the apple, tulip, and potato offer cautionary evidence on the danger of destroying diversity in the name of commerce, Dratted industry and their shipping lives, appearance over taste, money over environmental responsibility dratted consumers and our being trapped in busy schedules, cheap produce, the quickampeasy, the short range.


Even though I'm probably being manipulated by the plants, I still want a garden in which to spread their genetic material, Plant pimp If only.

On the subject of plants causing us to help them multiply by being appealing to us: I view this language as couching the concept in terms that we might understand, finding a common thread and expounding.
I don't imagine Mr. Pollan meant plants as willfully selecting the characteristics that would cause us to replant and increase year after year, It's supposed to be a mutually beneficial interaction, If they could effect deliberate change in us, would they let us spray potatoes like that or make the mealy Red Delicious, I'm sure it was once actually delicious, the most common apple in US supermarkets I wonder what it would be like if plants could fight us.
Or maybe our dependence on the few varieties that now have weaknesses engendered by continuous cloning/inbreeding will result in a plantrevenge, My second book by Michael Pollanthe first was really an essay on Caffeine that I heard on Audibleand he is such a good writer, his personality and ideas really engaging.
Pollan shares examples here from the plant world to show how plants have evolved alongside humans, Mutual desire, plants and humans relationship, where plants evolve to make themselves more useful to humans or other creatures,

Pollan divides the book this way:

Applesthe desire for sweetness
Tulipsthe desire for beauty
Cannabisthe desire for intoxication/transformation of mind
Potatoesthe desire for fundamentally useful food, and order

In each section you get as you might expect interesting information about the evolution of each plant.
Abook, it doesnt feature much about climate change, but nor does it highlight what I see throughout, is that the development of these plants has as much to do with greed/capitalism as almost anything else.


Apples: “Johnny Appleseed” was pretty crazy, and less a contributor to the spread of healthyappleadaymakesthedoctor go awayapplesthan booze:

“Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.
Thats why he was so popular, Thats why he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio, He was the American Dionysus, ”

I learned that apples grown from seeds are not as sweet as those developed from grafting:

“Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider.
“Hard” cider is a twentiethcentury term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.
”

Tulips: “All the guests of the Sultan Ahmed were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips, At the appointed moment a cannon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan's mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches.
The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.
”

The Sultan bankrupted his kingdom, buying millions of tulip plants, Then there is the grafting to create all the crazy colors:

“Queen of Night a much desired and thus expensive tulip color is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple.
Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole.
In the garden, depending on the the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.
”

Cannabis: This is the most outofdate section in that several states have legalized marijuana, though he has lots of stuff to say about the desire to alter consciousness through this and other drugs, much derided by Christianity,

though the evolution of many world religions is also tied to drugs.
Gettiny to mystical states without the sacraments!

I am eager but then again hesitant to tell you how some witches reportedly got to the point of exotic, ecstatic, mystical frenzy, but the “ingestion” of cannabis was involved.
. .

One interesting thing says about cannabis is that it can temporarily alter shortterm memory, but Pollan comes to think this may not also be a bad thing:

“For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.
”

Altered states can slow you down, stop all that daily anxiety, . sorry, just went to take his advice!,

Potatoes: We learn of the EnglishIrish conflicts and the potato famine and then, of the “frankenfoods” via Monsanto, One corporate farmer raises his own organic good and won't eat the genetically modified food he raises for others and for profit, “Trust us,” a Monsanto manager says to Pollan, ha, As if. But now we are most of us eating genetically modified foods which we still do not have to be informed about on food labels.
Thats one way money talks, in silence about genetic modification,

Pollan is a good writer:

“Plants are natures alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture.
”
I love books that open my eyes, teach me something, and even go so far as to reeducate me on the fallacies foisted upon me by illinformed elementary school teachers.
To that last end, I found the chapter on Johnny Appleseed very enlightening as well as highly entertaining,

Michael Pollan is more humorous and, let's just say, more adventurous than one might expect from a journalist/botanist see his passages on hallucinogenic plants.
I appreciate his willingness to "go first" in the same way I tip my hat to daring bastard who first tried, say, lobster, I assume it went down like this: "What's this A giant, saltwater, armorclad cockroach Definitely looks poisonous, Fuck it, I'm hungry. " Trying new, unknown food must have been done on a dare or at least with starvation lurking close athand,

Farmers on any scale will enjoy and find use in The Botany of Desire, As a pallid yellowthumb aspiring to green, I know I learned a few things, For one, I've finally transitioned over to organic apples, I don't know who would eat another kind after reading this book, Why with the chemicals already! Good lord!,