The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

"Michael Pollan is an American journalist, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and a bestseller in the States. He was an amateur gardener who has turned into a food and plant writer, focusing in particular on where the American diet is going. This is a fairly simple book, a biography of four plants: the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato. The traditional view is that human beings have hybridised and selected plants for their own devices, and the human being is doing the manipulation. Pollan’s premise is essentially that of The Selfish Gene, although he doesn’t credit Richard Dawkins. He’s saying plants find ways of ingratiating themselves to humans to ensure their genetic material is perpetuated. With apples it’s sweetness, with potatoes their ability to stave off famine, with marijuana, getting high, with tulips their flamboyant colours. The plants may really be more in control of the process than we think. Yes, this is the same argument. I’m not sure Pollan’s theory is scientifically correct or more of a hunch, but it’s a tour de force. If he’d been an academic this would have been a rather tedious book, but he’s a journalist and because he comes to this as a professional writer, it’s a fun read. He delves out the most amazing information."

"Pollan gives us a witty insight into a plant-centered view of evolution and ecology, flipping the usual human-focused narrative of the interaction between people and plants. Through the stories of four familiar plant species – apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes – he demolishes the “erroneous impression that we’re in charge”. We did not “domesticate” these species. Rather, the plants’ evolutionary nimbleness allowed them to insinuate themselves into human desire and so thrive. Human minds, emotions, and tastes are part of the environment to which plants adapt. Like bees guided to the work of pollination by petals and nectar, we’ve been willing and industrious servants of some plants’ needs. Pollan’s account of the reciprocal web of relationships among plants and people takes our understanding of coevolution out of the specialized world of evolutionary theorists and into our everyday experience of orchard, forest, garden, and kitchen. In learning how apples spread from Kazakhstan, we understand how the fates of people and plants are conjoined across the world. In the interplay between plant evolution and human desire we see the future of forests: Humans have become world-changing bees. Plant evolution in the future will be largely a matter of adapting to and exploiting – or not, for many species – the proclivities of a hyper-abundant Great Ape."