Johnnyweed

Michael Pollan's excellent "Botany of Desire", a Christmas gift that I am only now getting a chance to enjoy, is a work that immediately leaves you wet in the mouth and burning to start-up a garden. However doomed that latter enterprise would be, for me personally, it does not distract for what is ultimately Pollan's thesis, that humans are much more domesticated by the plants we enjoy than the other way around. Pollan gives us an eye-opening reductionist survey of illusion of human control, and begs essential questions about our own adaptability and coevolutionary fitness.

Up against the apple, a being of wonderful genetic diversity, our own germline makes all of us look like inbred jackasses. That every conserved variety of apple can trace it's lineage back to a single tree that had the luck of making itself delicious to humans speaks to the inexorable way in which specie interdependence plays out. Otherwise, apples would proliferate in varieties that we would find alien - it is only the varieties that we desire that make it to cultivation.

Pollan then examines the tulip and how a fairly ordinary flower brought the 17th Century global economy to its knees. His full account of the cultivation and speculation into the flower are masterful, from it's diversity of bright and hardy colors to the inflationary froth that halted global commerce once the tulip-bubble collapsed.

Likewise, with the cultivation of marijuana, and Pollan's own white-knuckled gardening adventure with the weed, we see how a hemp regulation and the constant desire for altered states has consumed thousands of man-hours in regulation and lost time over what was once considered a miracle fiber.

But Pollan's opus concludes on a high note when he looks at the humble potato. Well, humble might not fit - glorious, rainbow shades of potato, home grown with nutty and explosive flavors that most Americans will never taste. Instead, we eat a genetically modified potato that holds several patents and is grown exclusively for mass consumption in fried form, devoid of all the properties that make potatoes so nutritious. They stand as witness to the mass cultivation and marketing that goes into so much of the food we eat every day. With the potato as microcosm, we get a larger look into how we eat everyday.

This is a splendid book, and I've now picked up The Omnivore's Dilemma which I am really looking forward to. Without writers like Pollan, we risk losing the last remaining threads to the earth that tolerates us, and to not read him is to further our species peril.