In his exploration of plant domestication, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan chooses four plants that match up with the four human desires that brought about their domestication: sweetness for apples, beauty for tulips, intoxication for marijuana, and control for potatoes. While the first three are more or less straight forward, Pollan takes a bit of a leap with potatoes as a representation of control. Although he does deal with their role in providing the Irish with control over their food supply, he mainly uses potatoes as the example crop for control as expressed through genetic modification.
After taking environmental science for a year, this was the part of the book that piqued my interest the most. We had talked about GMOs briefly in class, but I thought that I really did not have the whole picture. I was less interested in the potential health risks of GMOs, which we had covered in class, and more in how they contributed to the American agricultural system. I ended up focusing on the idea of monoculture, growing a single crop variety, and how GMOs are particularly suited to monocultures both in the field, and in the societal conception of them. I tried to balance my explorations of both the real and the metaphorical monoculture in my various genres. The poem in two voices and the painting focus on monoculture in agriculture, while the limericks and the creation myth layer the perception of GMOs on top of that.
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