The Botany of Desire

In his nonfiction book, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan turns traditional views of the difference between natural and artificial selection on their head by considering whether the human domestication of plants is really any different than the mutualistic relationship between a bee and a flower. He chooses four different plants, and traces how they have evolved to satisfy four basic human desires, in order to further the spread of their genes. These plants are the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. Respectively, they satisfy the basic human desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. Almost as much philosophy as biology, in each section Pollan explores the definition of each desire as well as its relationship to the domestication of each given plant.

No matter which plant he focuses on, Pollan ties his ideas together with his own “golden thread”: the balancing act between agriculture and wilderness as symbolized by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the “god of clear boundaries, order, and light, of man’s firm control over nature” while Dionysus is a “able to dissolve ‘all the rigid and hostile barriers’ between nature and culture” (37). With the apple, Pollan mostly focuses on Dionysus. He calls John Chapman, the real basis for the folk hero Johnny Appleseed, the “American Dionysus”. Chapman lived alone in the wilderness, but spoke effortlessly with all people, and brought the American settlers the gift of the cider orchard just as Dionysus was said to have given the ancient Greeks wine (36).

Moving on to tulips and marijuana, Pollan explains how the combination of order and spontaneity create a greater whole than one quality on its own. Tulips are an iconic flower. Pollan describes them as “so many blobs of pigment on a stick” and says that a real tulip matches the idea of a tulip that people carry in their heads more than any other flower (62). At the same time, the most beautiful tulips are those that are “broken”, the word growers use for the beautiful feathering effect that contrasts with the main tulip color. It is this combination of orderly expectation and sudden contrast that makes the tulip so beautiful: “Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance,when our dreams of order and abandon come together” (106). Likewise, Pollan discusses the improvements to marijuana growing in the last few years. He visits a greenhouse in Amsterdam where he sees dozens of dwarf clones packed together with precise allocations of soil and light and thinks “ There was also something bizarrely anomalous about this totalitarian hothouse, with its strict monoculture of genetically identical plants growing in lockstep-- such ferocious Apollonian control in a garden ostensibly devoted to Dionysus” (137). In this case, the balance is temporal. Strict order during growing results in a greater breaking of boundaries later on.

According to Pollan, the genetically engineered potato is the closest humans have come to escaping that Dionysian wilderness altogether, and he does not think that is a good thing: “Apollo is the god, then, of monoculture, whether of plants or of people. And thought Apollo has surely had many more exalted manifestations that this one, he is here too, in every bag of McDonald’s french fries” (229). How far is too far, when it comes to the control humans have over their food, is the most fascinating question The Botany of Desire asks, in my opinion. For my research I want to continue to learn about genetically modified crops and what the effects are of so much control.