Pubdate: Sun, 03 Jun 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Burkhard Bilger
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

FOR THE LOVE OF POTATOES

The author explains how flowering plants have prospered by exploiting human 
desires

THE BOTANY OF DESIRE
A Plant's-Eye View of the World.
By Michael Pollan.
271 pp. New York:
Random House. $24.95.

Before there were roses and lilies and sprays of lavender on the hills, 
before there were marigolds and morning glories, peonies scented like women 
and pitcher plants that smell like rotting flesh, before the landscape went 
through its great primordial color shift, from green and green to every 
shade of the spectrum, the world was a "slower, simpler, sleepier" place, 
Michael Pollan writes in "The Botany of Desire" -- an Eden, perhaps, or 
maybe just a plant factory.

Then came the angiosperms, and a new principle was loosed on the planet.

To reproduce, these flowering plants didn't just cast pollen to the wind or 
clone themselves; they lured animals to their seed and paid them to carry 
it away. Two hundred million years later, the lure is known as beauty, and 
the payment is agriculture.

Just why plants gave up their sleepy, asexual ways isn't clear; Charles 
Darwin called it "an abominable mystery." But natural selection now favored 
the bold. The flashier the flower, the better its chance of enticing a 
pollinator, and as fruits and seeds grew more nutritious, they fed a 
scurrying multitude of warm-blooded mammals. "Without flowers, the 
reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would 
probably still rule," Pollan writes. "Without flowers, we would not be."

In that sly reversal lies this book's subject.

For too long, Pollan argues, flowers and food plants have been depicted as 
passive participants in the grand parade of coevolution -- mere ornaments 
on humanity's ever-gaudier floats. "We automatically think of domestication 
as something we do to other species," Pollan writes. "But it makes just as 
much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done 
to us." The potato may have been a "tiny, toxic root node" before humans 
got hold of it, but it went on to remake the economies of South America and 
Europe. The tulip may have been retailored by Dutch botanists to suit the 
fashions of the day, but it also drove them to the brink of madness (in the 
1630's, a single bulb could sell for as much as a mansion on a canal in 
Amsterdam). Of course, plenty of plants rejected this bargain -- oaks never 
bothered to make their acorns edible to people, since squirrels liked them 
fine as they were. But those that didn't have conquered the world.

"The Botany of Desire" is divided into four parts, each focused on a 
different facet of human desire and its exploitation of and by domesticated 
plants: sweetness and apples; beauty and tulips; intoxication and cannabis; 
control and potatoes.

The book's opening image is also its defining metaphor: On a spring 
afternoon in 1806, a two-hulled canoe drifts down the Ohio River. In one 
hull sits a man, in the other a pile of appleseeds, each balancing the 
other's weight, each an equal partner in the reinvention of the American 
landscape.

The man's name is John Chapman, a k a Johnny Appleseed, but to Pollan he is 
anything but the folksy puritan of Disney's devising. He is a man of 
"unreconstructed strangeness," who kept a pet wolf and once punished his 
foot for crushing a worm. He espouses Swedenborgian theology, falls in love 
with a 10-year-old girl and floats a hundred miles down the Allegheny on a 
block of ice. And he isn't all that interested in eating apples.

"The fact, simply, is this," Pollan writes. "Apples don't 'come true' from 
seeds -- that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling 
bearing little resemblance to its parent." A tree grown from Red Delicious 
seed may bear fruit that's emerald or umber, golf-ball-size or big as a 
grapefruit, cloyingly sweet or "sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on 
edge," as Thoreau put it -- anything, that is, except Red and Delicious. 
"Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples," Pollan adds, "but most 
of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider -- and hard 
cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition. 
Apples were something people drank." Johnny Appleseed was so beloved, in 
other words, because he "was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier."

Pollan calls Chapman the American Dionysus, a title that seems to sit more 
awkwardly on his pious, scraggly head than his saucepan hat. But as always 
in this book, there are bigger themes afoot.

All plant breeding, Pollan goes on to say, is an interplay between control 
and abandon, Apollonian and Dionysian impulses.

Apples now seem like the most blandly idealized of fruit, but all those 
Jonathans and Baldwins probably owe their DNA to Chapman's random 
plantings: European grafts took poorly to American soil, so the apple, like 
any other pioneer, had to go primitive before it could progress, digging 
deep in its genome for new capacities. Only one in 80,000 trees grown from 
seed was a "pomological genius," but those that were redefined what an 
apple can be.

It's an absorbing subject, and Pollan, like his hero, brings a clutch of 
quirky talents to the task of exploring it. He has a wide-ranging 
intellect, an eager grasp of evolutionary biology and a subversive streak 
that helps him root out some wonderfully counterintuitive points.

His prose both shimmers and snaps, and he has a knack for finding perfect 
quotes in the oddest places (George Eliot is somehow made to speak for the 
sense-attenuating value of a good high). Best of all, Pollan really loves 
plants. His first book described his education as a gardener, and that 
hands-and-knees experience animates every one of his descriptions -- 
whether of hydroponic marijuana ("I don't think I've ever seen plants that 
looked more enthusiastic") or of roses ("flung open and ravishing in 
Elizabethan times, obligingly buttoned . . . up and turned prim for the 
Victorians.")

Still, this can be a maddening book. Pollan is nothing if not a Dionysian 
writer: he doesn't just walk us through this material, he swoons and 
pirouettes his way through it, scattering ideas like so many seeds.

Never content to let simple statements stand, he splits them open with 
interjections -- interjections! -- and garlands them in qualifiers and 
dependent clauses.

The effect can be rich and allusive -- here underscoring a hidden subtext, 
there subverting it -- or merely overdetermined. By the end, even 
McDonald's French fries are said to be manifestations of the Apollonian 
urge, and after a hundred pages or so I quit keeping track of all the 
redundancies. True, circling the same ground sometimes leads him to 
startling new ideas, but more often he simply overburdens his subjects: 
"Could that be it -- right there, in a flower-the meaning of life?"

Ironically, the most clear-headed chapter is the one on marijuana.

Here, Pollan starts with some basic questions -- why do plants evolve 
psychoactive compounds, and why do animals eat them? -- and then takes us 
on a magical mystery tour of cultural and botanical history, weaving in his 
own (very funny) experiences growing marijuana and opium poppies.

We learn how hallucinogens helped shape religion, medicine and even 
philosophy (Plato, Aristotle and Socrates all supposedly took them). We 
learn how the war on drugs fostered ever more potent pot by forcing 
breeders to move indoors and cross Mexican and Afghan varieties.

And we learn that the body contains a network of cannabinoid receptors that 
modulate pain, appetite and short-term memory. The allure of cannabis, 
Pollan concludes, lies in its ability to turn the mind off rather than on. 
"By disabling our moment-by-moment memory, which is ever pulling us off the 
astounding frontier of the present and throwing us back onto the mapped 
byways of the past, the cannabinoids open a space for something nearer to 
direct experience," he writes. "Memory is the enemy of wonder."

"The Botany of Desire" is full of such moments -- moments when the thickets 
of rhetoric and supposition clear, and the reader stumbles onto a thesis as 
elegant and orderly as an apple orchard.

If the sum total isn't quite "a natural history of the human imagination," 
as Pollan hopes, it manages to deliver -- without threat of jail time -- 
what mind-altering plants have always promised: "New ways of looking at 
things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs." It restores "a 
kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world."
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager