Christine Khong

Duncan
APES- Period 2
25 December 2010
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan Book Review

The Botany of Desire explores the interplay of relationships between humans and plants

and how the two have coevolved throughout generations to what we know of them today.

Michael Pollan, the book’s author, captures the simple human desires including sweetness,

beauty, intoxication, and control with plants that are able to fulfill those desires including the

apple, tulip, marijuana, and the potato. The main focus of the book is to shift the vantage point of

humans to those of plants, highlighting the question of who is in control.

Starting out with the apple, Pollan focuses on the story of John Chapman, or as we may

know as Johnny Appleseed and how his spread of apple trees into the western frontier led to the

transformation of “the apple into a blemish-free plastic-red saccharine orb” (7). He explains that

the apple plant has provided humans with a refuge for sweetness and how the desire has been a

force of evolution. Without their appealing substances, apples may not have been domesticated,

eventually leading to the selective breeding of apples humans are doing today. The author then

looks at the desire for beauty and how the tulip started what was known as “tulipomania” a craze

across Europe, but more particularly in Holland (85). During that craze, the tulip had the ability

to marvel humans with its dazzling color varieties and to receive the praise of many people and

was even used as currency. But when the tulip craze died out, many of the Dutch people fell into

bankruptcy. The remaining chapters focus on intoxication, fulfilled by the marijuana plant and

control which is fulfilled by potatoes. During its time, both the marijuana plant and the potato

have a relationship with humans using their own unique characteristics. The marijuana plant has

the ability to veer the mind and highlight one’s senses in a way that humans, during the plant’s
rise, found magical. By producing “a chemical so mysterious in its effects on human

consciousness”, eventually overtime, the plant became a “sacrament” (144). During 1970s when

marijuana was “pushed indoors” by the federal government, many growers risked their lives to

continue growing their plants in their underground basements (131). The potato, especially those

in Ireland acted as an important staple food that fed entire populations. The Irish then began the

practice of monoculture eventually leading to a disease which caused potatoes to rot leading to a

“potato famine” which was “the worst catastrophe to befall Europe since the Black Death of

1348” (230). So who really was in control?

The audience that would most likely appreciate this text would be those interested in

botany and how it has altered history itself or how humans have altered the chemical make ups

of plants. This book would be fairly suitable to people of the teenage years and older, who are

open for a new outlook on life, perhaps in a more natural rather than philosophical way.

I feel that this book does an amazing job of giving examples of larger environmental

subjects such as natural selection, the Gaia hypothesis, and biodiversity mentioned in class. In

this book, readers are placed in the point of view of a plant, rather than a human, to journey

through the coevolution of people and plants. Humans have engaged in artificial selection and

have genetically altered the DNA of plants to essentially fit their desires. Examples of

manipulating natural selection include the apple, (breeding apples of the sweetest species), and

the potato by altering the genetic make-up of a potato to make its own insecticide or to become

the perfect potatoes for producing French fries. The Gaia Hypothesis’s idea that life on Earth has

coevolved, changing each other reciprocally is highlighted by the chapter on marijuana and how

people have allowed the plant to thrive and spread by crossbreeding. At the same time, the plant

has led to psychoactive effects on the human mind, rendering a new age of transcendence with
the rise of different music, art, and philosophy, and culture. The topic of biodiversity comes into

play with the domestication of plants. The domestication eventually leads to a decrease in

biodiversity which is explored with the apple and potato examples. Both species two are now

extremely susceptible to diseases due to the low diversity of species as a product of cloning and

monoculture. These same ideas are included in the study of environmental science thus making

this book a great and worthy read for students and teachers.

The biodiversity preservation theme in The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan also

relates to the article in TIME Magazine, “Wildlife: Protecting Biodiversity Might Just Protect Us

From Disease” by Bryan Walsh. According to the article, “as biodiversity decreases, in many

cases there's an increase in pathogens—and more risk for human beings”, suggesting that we are

ultimately hurting ourselves (Walsh). The book also mentions potatoes are being grown as clones

to produce perfect french-fries, and with such low genetic diversity, the potatoes are extremely

susceptible to disease and pests. The potato’s natural defenses to diseases become useless as the

plant is cloned because the disease can eventually develop immunity through natural selection.

This leads to the use of immense amounts of harsh chemicals to protect the potatoes, some of

which are still toxic to humans. But without the chemicals, theses diseases would lead to crop

failures or could transfer to humans through the food. Also by destroying forests or wildlife to

simplify an ecosystem, “the plants that contain the raw materials of future medicines” when

they’re lost, “they’ll be lost forever” which is an idea mentioned both in the article and the book,

featuring the benefits of wild plant species (Walsh). The article gives a kind of overview of

biodiversity, whereas the book explores the idea with specific plants and historical examples,

giving it a more in-depth look.