Book 16: "The Botany of Desire"

Food is... 

Introduction

• Coevolution: In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors. Consciousness needn't enter into it on either side and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless. 
• Evolution doesn't depend on will or intention to work; it is an unconscious, unwilled process. Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.
• Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive subjects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object is a subject. 
• Fitness: the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force. Artificial selection has become a much more important chapter in natural history as it has moved into the space once ruled exclusively by natural selection.
• Nature's success stories from now...if species have a future, it will be because of human desire; strangely enough, their survival now depends on what amounts to a form of artificial selection. 

Sweetness / The Apple

• The Red Delicious has been described as "sweetness without dimension."
• Apples were something people drank--hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition.
• Every seed in an apple contains the genetic instructions for a completely new and different apple tree...If not for grafting (cloning), every apple in the world would be its own distinct variety.
• Heterozygosity: genetic variability accounts for its ability to make itself at home anywhere. 
• Much like the Puritans, who regarded their crossing to America as a kind of baptism or rebirth, the apple couldn't cross the Atlantic without changing its identity--a fact that encouraged generations of Americans to hear echoes of their own story in the story of this fruit. The apple in America became a parable.
• Before [sugar and honeybees arrived in the late 19th century] the sensation of sweetness in the lives of most people came chiefly from the flesh of the fruit . And in America that usually meant the apple. 
• The word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire; it stood for fulfillment. 
• Anthropologist have found that cultures vary enormously in their liking for bitter, sour and salty flavors, but a taste for sweetness appears to be universal. 
• The fact that the apple was generally believed to be the fateful tree in the Garden of Eden might also have commended it to a religious people who believed America promised a second Eden
• It wasn't until this century that the apple acquired its reputation for wholesomeness--"An apple a day keeps the doctor away" was a marketing slogan dreamed up by growers concerned that temperance would cut into sales.
• In Swedenborg's philosophy there is no rift between the natural world and the divine. Much like Emerson...Swedenborg claimed that there were one to one correspondences between natural and spiritual facts, so that close attention and devotion to the former would advance one's understanding of the latter.
• For Chapman the natural world even at its wildest was never a falling away or a distraction from the spirit world; it was continuous with it. 
• Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint--that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus...Under Dionysus and his wine, all nature answers to our desires...Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.Some such principle may have underwritten Dionysian revelry in ancient Athens--and the impulse to invite someone like John Chapman into one's home in nineteenth-century Ohio.
• The American orchard, or at least Johnny Appleseed's orchard, is a blossoming, fruiting meritocracy, in which every apple seed roots in the same soil and any seedling has an equal chance at greatness, regardless of origin or patrimony.
• Thousands of apple traits, and the genes that code those traits, have become extinct as the vast flowering of apple diversity that Johnny Appleseed sponsored has been winnowed down to the small handful of varieties that can pass through the needle's eye of our narrow conceptions of sweetness and beauty.
• The domestication of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species' fitness for life in nature has been dangerously compromised. Reduced to the handful of genetically identical clones that suit our taste and agricultural practice, the apple has lost the crucial variability--the wildness--that sexual reproduction confers.
• The best technology in the world can't create a new gene or re-create one that's been lost.
• "In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau once wrote; a century later, when many of the wild places are no more. Wendell Berry has proposed this necessary corollary: "In human culture is the preservation of wildness."
• There can be no civilization without wildness, such a tree would remind us, no sweetness absent its astringent opposite. 

Beauty / The Tulip

• The boy's-eye view has the wintry weight of rationality on its side: all this useless beauty is impossible to justify on cost-benefit grounds. But isn't that always how it is with beauty?
• Sexual selection--evolution's favoring of features that increase a plant's or animal's attractiveness and therefore its reproductive success--is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers...the expense of beauty is usually paid for by sex. 
• Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. 
• Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stress can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.
• Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited us and our desires--even our most idiosyncratic notions of beauty--to advance their own interests.
• Shame seems to be the going price of achievement, particularly the achievement of knowledge or beauty.
• "The tulip remained itself, the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign," Herbert. The tulip is a thing of beauty, no more, no less.
• "Beauty always takes place in the particulars, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down," Elaine Scarry. 
• The tulip is all Apollonian clarity and order. It's a linear, left-brained flower, in no way occult, explicit and logical in its formal rules and arrangements, and conveying all this rationality the only way conceivable: through the eye. 
• The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of Apollo form and Dionysus ecstasy held in balance, where our dreams of ecstasy and abandon come together. 
• With the advent of the flower, whole new levels of complexity come into the world: more interdependence, more information, more communication, more experimentation.
• Beauty has emerged as a survival strategy.
• Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.
• Apollo and Dionysus were names the Greeks gave to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing.

Intoxication / Marijuana

• There it is, right in the middle of the word "intoxication," hidden in plain sight: toxic. The bright line between food and poison might hold, but not the one between poison and desire.
• A powerful, death-dealing toxin can exert such a strong selective pressure for resistance in its target population that it is quickly rendered ineffective: a better strategy might be to repel, disable or confound.
• To succeed in North America, cannabis had to do two things: it had to prove it could gratify a human desire so brilliantly that people would take extraordinary risks to cultivate it, and it had to find the right combination of genes to adapt to a most peculiar and thoroughly artificial new environment.
• Entheogens--"the god within"
• In a sense, the rapid emergence of a domestic marijuana industry represents a triumph of protectionism. 
• The reason for drawing the bright line here and not there [regarding mind-altering plants] generally make more sense within the culture itself, rooted as they are in its values and traditions, than they do outside it. 
• Steve Pinker proposes that evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good. Bring the first of these faculties to bear on the second, and you wind up with a creature who has figured out how to use plants to artificially trip the brain's reward system.
• Allen Ginsberg suggested that the negative feelings marijuana sometimes provokes, such as anxiety, fear, and paranoia, are "traceable to the effects on consciousness not of the narcotic but of the law."
• The sensation of pain is, curiously, one of the hardest to summon from memory. Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life "so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again." It is the brain's own drug for coping with the human condition.
• Forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation--indeed, that it is a mental operation, rather than, as I'd always assumed, strictly the breakdown of one. Forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering.Think of how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn't quickly forget a great deal more it than we remember.
• Nietzsche on drug transcendence: "All is so palpable, close, highly colored, resounding, as though he apprehended it with all his senses at once." Some of our greatest happinesses arrive when we feel as though we've sprung free from the tyranny of timeThis thoroughgoing absorption in the present is (as both Western and Eastern religious traditions tell us) as close as we mortals ever get to an experience of eternity.
• Boethius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving was "to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come." 
• Likewise, in the Eastern tradition: "Awakening to this present instant," a Zen master has written, "we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant." 
• Very often, the conclusions or concepts come first, allowing me to dispense with the sensory data altogether or to notice in it only what fits. It's a form of impatience with lived life, and though it might appear to be a symptom of an active mind, I suspect it's really a form of laziness.
• "Nature always wears the colors of the spirit," Emerson. We never see the the world plainly, only through the filter of prior concepts or metaphors.
• Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
• Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present...wonder depends on forgetting...[drugs] work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world. 
• The reducing value keeps us from being crushed under the "pressure of reality," but it accomplishes this at a price, for the mechanism prevents us from ever seeing reality as it really is.
• The workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.
• Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.
• Paracelsus's grand project, which arguably is still going on today, represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan faith it set out to uproot. (Pharmaceuticalize marijuana, find a way to harness its easily accessible benefits, synthesizing the active ingredients in plant drugs, allowing medicine to dispense with the plant itself--and any remainders of its pagan past.)
• Friedrich Nietzsche once described Dionysian intoxication as "nature overpowering mind"--nature having her way with us.

Control / The Potato

• "Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are," Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.
• "Man does not actually produce variability," Charles Darwin.
• Perhaps, as some biologists believe, the purpose of keeping species separate is to put barriers int he path of pathogens, to contain their damage so that a single germ can't wipe out life on Earth at a stroke. 
• One way to look at genetic engineering is that it allows a larger portion of human culture and intelligence to be incorporated into the plants themselves. So while my genetically engineered plants might at first seem like alien beings, that's not quite right; they're more like us than other plants because there's more of us in them. 
• Political economists framed their arguments in somewhat more scientific terms, their rhetoric betrayed deep anxieties about nature's threat to civilization's control. Malthusian logic started from the premise that people are driven by the desires for food and sex; only the threat of starvation keeps the population from exploding. The danger of the potato, Malthus believed, was that it removed the economic constraints that ordinarily kept the population in check. This in a nutshell was Ireland's problem: "the indolent and turbulent habits of the lower Irish can never be corrected while the potato system enables them to increase so much beyond the regular demands for labor."
• Political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo regarded the market as a sensitive mechanism for adjusting the size of the population to the demand for labor. The problem with the "potato system" is that, under it, the Homo economicus who adjusts his behavior to the algebra of need is replaced by a far less rational actor--Homo appetitus, as Gallagher calls him.
• In the eyes of the political economists, without the discipline of commodity markets, man is thrown back on its instincts: unlimited food and sex leading inexorably to overpopulation and misery.
• Uncertainty is the theme that unites most of the questions now being raised about agricultural biotechnology by environmentalists and scientists. By planting millions of acres of genetically engineered plants, we're introducing something novel into the environment and the food chain, the consequences of which are not completely understood. 
• Jumping genes and superweeds point to a new kind of environmental problem: "biological pollution," which some environmentalists believe will be the unhappy legacy of agriculture's shift from a chemical to a biological paradigm. Harmful as chemical pollution can be, it eventually disperses and fades, but biological pollution is self-replicating. 
• NewLeaf potato biological pollution leads to the evolution of insects resistance to Bt, an insecticide that organic farmers depend on. 
• The true cost of this technology is being charged to the future--no new paradigm there. Today's gain in control over nature will be paid for by tomorrow's new disorder, which in turn will become simply a fresh problem for science to solve.
• Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and from which virtually every agricultural product is designed to deliver him.
• Whether in evolutionary terms a monoculture really represents long-term success for a species is an open question. 
• With the "Terminator," as the new technique quickly became known, genetic engineers have discovered how to sop on command the most elemental of nature's processes, the plant-seed cycle by which plants reproduce and evolve. Now viable seeds will come not from plants but from corporations.
• The Food and Drug Administration operates on the assumption that genetically modified plants are "substantially equivalent" to ordinary plants, the regulation of these foods have been voluntary since 1992...the FDA doesn't even officially regard the NewLeaf as a food...since the potato contains Bt, it is nota  food at all but a pesticide, putting it under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Michael Pollan has already established himself as an author with a fascinating way of making food alluring and interesting. After having read three previous works by Pollan, it took me all of the first line to slip right back into his signature style, which I can now categorize as West Coast intellectual (suitable since he lives in Berkely). The Botany of Desire was published in 2002, and it isolates itself in that time period with its references to NewLeaf and marijuana. The early 2000's was also before the Global Warming revelation, as well as California's legalization of marijuana, which could probably add width to this book should Pollan ever consider an update. And, so, I consider this somewhat of a history book. The mythology and anthropology are everlasting, and Pollan is at his philosophical best in considering whether we change (and continue to change) plants, or they changed (and continue to change) us. Attached to those musings is an avalanche of ethical considerations about how the natural and human world is changing. Of course, all of that is worth considering, but there's a lot of artistic, romantic language to wade through, which can be a bit distracting. (I imagine if Jonathan Safran Foer wrote this book it would be 50 pages shorter, but much more depressing and fatalistic in tone. Some would argue that it would be more likely to incite change, as well.)

All in all, I learned a lot about apples, tulips, marijuana and genetically modified potatoes. Part of me wonders why Pollan never considered a sequel to this book, instead taking his investigative journalism in other directions. If he wrote a whole encyclopedia about the history of our food, I'd buy (and read) it. 

Rating: B+