*The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan
I was introduced to this text as a letdown. I scanned briefly the section on the tulip, which seemed immediately paltry and dry compared to Anna Pavor’s The Tulip. I went to a Pollan reading at Black Oak’s with the Berkeley crowd wearing sandals, hemming, healthy, and terrifically pleased with themselves to confront their two favorite topics in one setting: advocacy and organics. So I was doubtful of the seriousness of the writing, and expecting mere fasciculation of the old, pro-, hippyish themes. The book is divided into four sections, or, as Pollan puts them, Desires. He explores the idea that plants have adapted themselves to meet our desires for reasons of self-propagation, or, another way of looking at it, is that certain plants have taken advantage of our desires, have, in the same way we use plants to gratify ourselves, used us to “gratify” their own unyielding desire for life. So Johnny Appleseed wasn’t delivering healthy teeth and Red Delicious to the Midwest, it was instead eccentric evangelism and applejack that came from his makeshift canoe of seeds. Basically, bringing liquor to the thirsty. Similarly, Pollan combines anecdote and the unmystification of botany and history concerning the Tulip, Marijuana, and the Potato. He shines most clearly, or, perhaps the potato does, in the last section, explaining away the human desire for control.
“Banality depends on memory…”
“Memory is the enemy of wonder.”