June 3, 2001
For the Love of Potatoes
The author explains how flowering plants have prospered by exploiting human desires.
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First Chapter: 'The Botany of Desire'
By BURKHARD BILGER
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THE BOTANY OF DESIRE
A Plant's-Eye View of the World.
By Michael Pollan.
271 pp. New York:
Random House. $24.95.
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efore 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.''
Burkhard Bilger is a writer for The New Yorker, an editor for Discover and author of ''Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts.''
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