## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Pollan]] - Full Title: The Botany of Desire - Category: #books ## Highlights - Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonishing trick of converting sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry. ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=141)) - Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees. ([Location 173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=173)) - Try as they might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel—which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so (admittedly, the estimate is Beatrix Potter’s)—that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us. ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=270)) - 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. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible—“sour enough,” Thoreau once wrote, “to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples, 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. ([Location 320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=320)) - The identification of the apple with notions of health and wholesomeness turns out to be a modern invention, part of a public relations campaign dreamed up by the apple industry in the early 1900s to reposition a fruit that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on. ([Location 326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=326)) - More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness—that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. ([Location 345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=345)) - Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end there. Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain kind of perfection. When writers like Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold used the expression “sweetness and light” to name their highest ideal (Swift called them “the two noblest of things”; Arnold, the ultimate aim of civilization), they were drawing on a sense of the word sweetness going back to classical times, a sense that has largely been lost to us. The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole, as when Shakespeare calls spring the “sweet o’ the year.” Lent by the tongue to all the other sense organs, “sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=438)) - Jones was silent for a time and then worked himself into a denunciation of “the sort of people who feel compelled to take our heroes down a peg.” And then, pulling tensely on the corners of his mouth, he confided his deepest, darkest fear about Chapman, a charge about his hero’s sexuality that, though baseless—though never in fact even alleged by anyone—nevertheless stood “to ruin everything we’re trying to do.” I’m sorry to say that the price of hearing this rumor was a promise not to tell. ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=622)) - As I thought about the scattering of settlers along these streams who would welcome Chapman into their homes, offering a meal and a bed to this strange man in rags, I was reminded of how the gods of classical mythology would sometimes appear at people’s doors dressed as beggars. Just to be on the safe side, the Greeks would shower hospitality on even the most dubious stranger, because you never knew when the ragged fellow on your doorstep might turn out to be Athena in disguise. ([Location 702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=702)) - I saw Chapman now as clearly as I could hope to. Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint—that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus. ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=717)) - Nothing better captures the paradox of Dionysus’s double role, as a force for domestication and wildness, than his involvement with grapes and wine. Wine itself is a peculiarly liminal substance, poised on the edge of nature and culture as well as civility and abandon. It is truly an extraordinary thing, this artful transformation of raw nature—a fruit!—into a substance with the power to alter human perception. ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=744)) - one of the wonders of alcohol is that it suffuses the world around us, this cold indifferent planet, with the warm glow of meaning. ([Location 775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=775)) - meal. Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite. Some such principle may have underwritten Dionysian revelry in ancient Athens—and the impulse to invite someone like John Chapman into one’s home in nineteenth-century Ohio. ([Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=784)) - “A century ago there were several thousand different varieties of apples in commerce; now most of the apples we grow have the same five or six parents: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, Macintosh, and Cox’s Orange Pippin. Breeders keep going back to the same well, and it’s getting shallower.” ([Location 931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=931)) - modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=936)) - Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554. (The word tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word for “turban.”) ([Location 1299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1299)) - Up until the Renaissance, most of the flowers in cultivation had been useful as well as beautiful; they were sources of medicine, perfume, or even food. In the West flowers have often come under attack from various Puritans, and what has always saved them has been their practical uses. It was utility, not beauty, that earned the rose and lily, the peony and all the rest a spot in the gardens of monks and Shakers and colonial Americans who would otherwise have had nothing to do with them. ([Location 1389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1389)) - When the tulip first arrived in Europe, people set about fashioning some utilitarian purpose for it. The Germans boiled and sugared the bulbs and, unconvincingly, declared them a delicacy; the English tried serving them up with oil and vinegar. Pharmacists proposed the tulip as a remedy for flatulence. None of these uses caught on, however. “The tulip remained itself,” Herbert writes, “the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.” ([Location 1393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1393)) - Generally bereft of scent, the tulip is the coolest of floral characters. In fact, the Dutch counted the tulip’s lack of scent as a virtue, a proof of the flower’s chasteness and moderation. Petals curving inward to hide its sexual organs, the tulip is an introvert among flowers. It is also somewhat aloof—one bloom per stem, one stem per plant. “The tulip allows us to admire it,” Herbert observes, “but does not awaken violent emotions, desire, jealousy or erotic fevers.” ([Location 1401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1401)) - What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. The color of a tulip actually consists of two pigments working in concert—a base color that is always yellow or white and a second, laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the underlying color to show through. It wasn’t until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that scientists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens. ([Location 1427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1427)) - tulipomania was nothing if not a vast and precarious edifice poised on the finest points of botanical rarity. ([Location 1486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1486)) - A carnival is a social ritual of sanctioned craziness and release—a way for a community to temporarily indulge its Dionysian urges. For its duration, the identity of everyone swept into its vortex is up for grabs: the village idiot is made king, the poor man suddenly rich, the rich man just as suddenly a pauper. Everyday roles and values are suddenly, thrillingly, suspended, and astounding new possibilities arise. ([Location 1604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1604)) - Etymologically, the word extravagant means to wander off a path or cross a line—orderly lines, of course, being Apollo’s special domain. In this may lie a clue to the abiding power of the tulip, as well as, perhaps, to the nature of beauty. The tulip is a flower that draws some of the most exquisite lines in nature and then, in spasms of extravagance, blithely oversteps them. On the same principle, syncopation enlivens a regular, four-four measure of music, enjambment the stately line of iambic pentameter. So here is a third constituent of beauty to add to the desiderata offered to us by the flower: first came contrast, then pattern (or form), and finally variation. ([Location 1665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1665)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be. ([Location 1708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1708)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - For look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature’s double nature—that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiring toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were names the Greeks gave to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life? ([Location 1721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1721)) - Most of the ingenuity of plants—that is, most of the work of a billion years of evolutionary trial and error—has been applied to learning (or rather, inventing) the arts of biochemistry, at which plants excel beyond all human imagining. (Even now a large part of human knowledge about making medicines comes directly from plants.) While we animals were busy nailing down things like locomotion and consciousness, the plants, without ever lifting a finger or giving it a thought, acquired an array of extraordinary and occasionally diabolical powers by discovering how to synthesize remarkably complicated molecules. ([Location 1750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=1750)) - When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture—the critical role they’ve played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and music (think of jazz or rock improvisation), of poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen, not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, after all, chemicals with the power to alter mental constructs—to propose new metaphors, new ways of looking at things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs. Anyone who uses them knows they also generate plenty of mental errors; most such mistakes are useless or worse, but a few inevitably turn out to be the germs of new insights and metaphors. (And the better part of Western literature, if literary theorist Harold Bloom’s idea of “creative misreading” is to be believed.) The molecules themselves don’t add anything new to the stock of memes resident in a human brain, no more than radiation adds new genes. But surely the shifts in perception and breaks in mental habit they provoke are among the methods, and models, we have of imaginatively transforming mental and cultural givens—for mutating our inherited memes. ([Location 2219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2219)) - Ma, the ancient Chinese character for “hemp,” depicts a male and a female plant under a roof—cannabis inside the house of human culture. ([Location 2331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2331)) - “If we could hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar,” George Eliot once wrote. Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. ([Location 2392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2392)) - I am not by nature one of the world’s great noticers. Unless I make a conscious effort, I won’t notice what color your shirt is, the song playing on the radio, or whether you put one sugar in your coffee or two. When I’m working as a reporter I have to hector myself continually to mark the details: checked shirt, two sugars, Van Morrison. Why this should be so, I have no idea, except that I am literally absentminded, prone to be thinking about something else, something past, when I am ostensibly having a fresh experience. Almost always, my attention can’t wait to beat a retreat from the here and now to the abstract, frog-jumping from the data of the senses to conclusions. Actually, it’s worse than that. Very often the conclusions or concepts come first, allowing me to dispense with the sensory data altogether or to notice in it only what fits. It’s a form of impatience with lived life, and though it might appear to be a symptom of an active mind, I suspect it’s really a form of laziness. My lawyer father, once complimented on his ability to see ahead three or four moves in a negotiation, explained that the reason he liked to jump to conclusions was so he could get there early and rest. I’m the same way in my negotiations with reality. ([Location 2443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2443)) - “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit,” Emerson wrote, by which he meant we never see the world plainly, only through the filter of prior concepts or metaphors. (“Colors,” in classical rhetoric, are tropes.) ([Location 2455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2455)) - freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished. ([Location 2483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2483)) - It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment. ([Location 2485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2485)) - 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. ([Location 2487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2487)) - Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. ([Location 2494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2494)) - While the potato is simply thrown into a pot or fire, wheat must be harvested, threshed, milled, mixed, kneaded, shaped, baked, and then, in a final miracle of transubstantiation, the doughy lump of formless matter rises to become bread. This elaborate process, with its division of labor and suggestion of transcendence, symbolized civilization’s mastery of raw nature. A mere food thus became the substance of human and even spiritual communion, for there was also the old identification of bread with the body of Christ. If the lumpish potato was base matter, bread in the Christian mind was its very opposite: antimatter, even spirit. ([Location 2926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=2926)) - Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring nature as a machine, yet nothing else in agriculture is so poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a vast field of identical plants will always be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds, and disease—to all the vicissitudes of nature. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and from which virtually every agricultural product is designed to deliver him. ([Location 3228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=3228)) - The potato famine was the worst catastrophe to befall Europe since the Black Death of 1348. Ireland’s population was literally decimated: one in every eight Irishmen—a million people—died of starvation in three years; thousands of others went blind or insane for lack of the vitamins potatoes had supplied. Because the poor laws made anyone who owned more than a quarter acre of land ineligible for aid, millions of Irish were forced to give up their farms in order to eat; uprooted and desperate, the ones with the energy and wherewithal emigrated to America. Within a decade, Ireland’s population was halved and the composition of America’s population permanently altered. ([Location 3292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=3292)) - Indeed, Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, but they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper. ([Location 3305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=3305)) - The Food and Drug Administration told me that, because it operates on the assumption that genetically modified plants are “substantially equivalent” to ordinary plants, the regulation of these foods has been voluntary since 1992. Only if Monsanto feels there is a safety concern is it required to consult with the agency about its NewLeafs. I’d always assumed the FDA had tested the new potato, maybe fed a bunch of them to rats, but it turned out this was not the case. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even officially regard the NewLeaf as a food. What? It seems that since the potato contains Bt, it is, at least in the eyes of the federal government, not a food at all but a pesticide, putting it under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency. Feeling a bit like Alice in a bureaucratic wonderland, I phoned the EPA to ask about my potatoes. As the EPA sees it, Bt has always been a safe pesticide, the potato has always been a safe food, so put the two together and you’ve got something that should be safe both to eat and to kill bugs with. Evidently the machine metaphor has won the day in Washington too: the NewLeaf is simply the sum of its parts—a safe gene added to a safe potato. ([Location 3374](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=3374)) - Whenever I hear or read the word garden, I always picture something so much less wild than this, probably because in common usage garden stands as the opposite of wilderness. The gardener knows better than to believe this, though. He knows that his garden fence and path and cherished geometries hold in their precarious embrace, if not a wilderness in any literal sense, then surely a great, teeming effulgence of wildness—of plants and animals and microbes leading their multifarious lives, proposing so many different and unexpected answers to the deep pulse of their genes and the wide press of their surroundings—of everything affecting everything else. ([Location 3438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=3438)) - To shrink the sheer diversity of life, as the grafters and monoculturists and genetic engineers would do, is to shrink evolution’s possibilities, which is to say, the future open to all of us. “This is the assembly of life that it took a billion years to evolve,” the zoologist E. O. Wilson has written, speaking of biodiversity. “It has eaten the storms—folded them into its genes—and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.” ([Location 3479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1H14&location=3479))