FOR THE LOVE OF POTATOES

The author explains how flowering plants have prospered by exploiting human
desires

THE BOTANY OF DESIRE
A Plant's-Eye View of the World.
By Michael Pollan.
271 pp. New York:
Random House. $24.95.

Before there were roses and lilies and sprays of lavender on the hills,
before there were marigolds and morning glories, peonies scented like women
and pitcher plants that smell like rotting flesh, before the landscape went
through its great primordial color shift, from green and green to every
shade of the spectrum, the world was a "slower, simpler, sleepier" place,
Michael Pollan writes in "The Botany of Desire" -- an Eden, perhaps, or
maybe just a plant factory.

Then came the angiosperms, and a new principle was loosed on the planet.

To reproduce, these flowering plants didn't just cast pollen to the wind or
clone themselves; they lured animals to their seed and paid them to carry
it away. Two hundred million years later, the lure is known as beauty, and
the payment is agriculture.

Just why plants gave up their sleepy, asexual ways isn't clear; Charles
Darwin called it "an abominable mystery." But natural selection now favored
the bold. The flashier the flower, the better its chance of enticing a
pollinator, and as fruits and seeds grew more nutritious, they fed a
scurrying multitude of warm-blooded mammals. "Without flowers, the
reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would
probably still rule," Pollan writes. "Without flowers, we would not be."

In that sly reversal lies this book's subject.

For too long, Pollan argues, flowers and food plants have been depicted as
passive participants in the grand parade of coevolution -- mere ornaments
on humanity's ever-gaudier floats. "We automatically think of domestication
as something we do to other species," Pollan writes. "But it makes just as
much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done
to us." The potato may have been a "tiny, toxic root node" before humans
got hold of it, but it went on to remake the economies of South America and
Europe. The tulip may have been retailored by Dutch botanists to suit the
fashions of the day, but it also drove them to the brink of madness (in the
1630's, a single bulb could sell for as much as a mansion on a canal in
Amsterdam). Of course, plenty of plants rejected this bargain -- oaks never
bothered to make their acorns edible to people, since squirrels liked them
fine as they were. But those that didn't have conquered the world.

"The Botany of Desire" is divided into four parts, each focused on a
different facet of human desire and its exploitation of and by domesticated
plants: sweetness and apples; beauty and tulips; intoxication and cannabis;
control and potatoes.

The book's opening image is also its defining metaphor: On a spring
afternoon in 1806, a two-hulled canoe drifts down the Ohio River. In one
hull sits a man, in the other a pile of appleseeds, each balancing the
other's weight, each an equal partner in the reinvention of the American
landscape.

The man's name is John Chapman, a k a Johnny Appleseed, but to Pollan he is
anything but the folksy puritan of Disney's devising. He is a man of
"unreconstructed strangeness," who kept a pet wolf and once punished his
foot for crushing a worm. He espouses Swedenborgian theology, falls in love
with a 10-year-old girl and floats a hundred miles down the Allegheny on a
block of ice. And he isn't all that interested in eating apples.

"The fact, simply, is this," Pollan writes. "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." A tree grown from Red Delicious
seed may bear fruit that's emerald or umber, golf-ball-size or big as a
grapefruit, cloyingly sweet or "sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth on
edge," as Thoreau put it -- anything, that is, except Red and Delicious.
"Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples," Pollan adds, "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." Johnny Appleseed was so beloved, in
other words, because he "was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier."

Pollan calls Chapman the American Dionysus, a title that seems to sit more
awkwardly on his pious, scraggly head than his saucepan hat. But as always
in this book, there are bigger themes afoot.

All plant breeding, Pollan goes on to say, is an interplay between control
and abandon, Apollonian and Dionysian impulses.

Apples now seem like the most blandly idealized of fruit, but all those
Jonathans and Baldwins probably owe their DNA to Chapman's random
plantings: European grafts took poorly to American soil, so the apple, like
any other pioneer, had to go primitive before it could progress, digging
deep in its genome for new capacities. Only one in 80,000 trees grown from
seed was a "pomological genius," but those that were redefined what an
apple can be.

It's an absorbing subject, and Pollan, like his hero, brings a clutch of
quirky talents to the task of exploring it. He has a wide-ranging
intellect, an eager grasp of evolutionary biology and a subversive streak
that helps him root out some wonderfully counterintuitive points.

His prose both shimmers and snaps, and he has a knack for finding perfect
quotes in the oddest places (George Eliot is somehow made to speak for the
sense-attenuating value of a good high). Best of all, Pollan really loves
plants. His first book described his education as a gardener, and that
hands-and-knees experience animates every one of his descriptions --
whether of hydroponic marijuana ("I don't think I've ever seen plants that
looked more enthusiastic") or of roses ("flung open and ravishing in
Elizabethan times, obligingly buttoned . . . up and turned prim for the
Victorians.")

Still, this can be a maddening book. Pollan is nothing if not a Dionysian
writer: he doesn't just walk us through this material, he swoons and
pirouettes his way through it, scattering ideas like so many seeds.

Never content to let simple statements stand, he splits them open with
interjections -- interjections! -- and garlands them in qualifiers and
dependent clauses.

The effect can be rich and allusive -- here underscoring a hidden subtext,
there subverting it -- or merely overdetermined. By the end, even
McDonald's French fries are said to be manifestations of the Apollonian
urge, and after a hundred pages or so I quit keeping track of all the
redundancies. True, circling the same ground sometimes leads him to
startling new ideas, but more often he simply overburdens his subjects:
"Could that be it -- right there, in a flower-the meaning of life?"

Ironically, the most clear-headed chapter is the one on marijuana.

Here, Pollan starts with some basic questions -- why do plants evolve
psychoactive compounds, and why do animals eat them? -- and then takes us
on a magical mystery tour of cultural and botanical history, weaving in his
own (very funny) experiences growing marijuana and opium poppies.

We learn how hallucinogens helped shape religion, medicine and even
philosophy (Plato, Aristotle and Socrates all supposedly took them). We
learn how the war on drugs fostered ever more potent pot by forcing
breeders to move indoors and cross Mexican and Afghan varieties.

And we learn that the body contains a network of cannabinoid receptors that
modulate pain, appetite and short-term memory. The allure of cannabis,
Pollan concludes, lies in its ability to turn the mind off rather than on.
"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," he writes. "Memory is the enemy of wonder."

"The Botany of Desire" is full of such moments -- moments when the thickets
of rhetoric and supposition clear, and the reader stumbles onto a thesis as
elegant and orderly as an apple orchard.

If the sum total isn't quite "a natural history of the human imagination,"
as Pollan hopes, it manages to deliver -- without threat of jail time --
what mind-altering plants have always promised: "New ways of looking at
things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs." It restores "a
kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world."