It’s more like a chemical factory process than something you would connect with a garden. His description of what goes into growing a potato on a typical Idaho potato farm is an eye-opener. My favorite, however, was the concluding essay on the potato. Pollan is an amiable guide and the book is an entertaining read. Apples fulfill a wish for sweetness, tulips for beauty, marijuana for intoxication and potatoes satisfy the desire to have control over a food source.Įach of the four sections is interesting. Pollan looks at four different plants that owe much of their success to their ability to satisfy a human desire. The idea behind The Botany of Desire is simply this: perhaps we are not, as we think, controlling plants for our own purposes but rather they are using our tastes to forward their own agenda, which is to extend their own range and numbers.
I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it if you have a chance to view it. My interest in his earlier book was piqued by a recent PBS special based on The Botany of Desire. There’s even an Omnivore’s Dilemma for Kids. In recent years, Michael Pollan has spent a considerable amount of time at the top of the best-seller list with his books The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature.Ī documentary film based on The Botany of Desire premiered on PBS in October 2009.The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. For, just as we’ve benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds’s most basic yearnings - and by doing so made themselves indispensable. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant - thought this time the obsessions revolves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visua. In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam.
0 kommentar(er)
