The Botany of Desire by Pollen

Ref: Michael Pollen (2001). The Botany of Desire. Random House. 

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Summary

• The question arose in my mind one day while gardening: Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it? ...All these plants, which I’d always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn’t do for themselves…This book tells the story of four familiar plants—the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato—and the human desires that link their destinies to our own. Its broader subject is the complex reciprocal relationship between the human and natural world, which I approach from a somewhat unconventional angle: I take seriously the plant’s point of view…I call this book The Botany of Desire because it is as much about the human desires that connect us to these plants as it is about the plants themselves… The four desires I explore here are sweetness, broadly defined, in the story of the apple; beauty in the tulip’s; intoxication in the story of cannabis; and control in the story of the potato. 

• Wilderness might be reducible, acre by acre, but wildness is something else again. So, the freshly hoed earth invites a new crop of weeds, the potent new pesticide engenders resistance in pests, and every new step in the direction of simplification—toward monoculture, say, or genetically identical plants—leads to unimagined new complexities…Everything affecting everything else” is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem.

• One theory of the origins of agriculture holds that domesticated plants first emerged on dump heaps, where the discarded seeds of the wild plants that people gathered and ate—already unconsciously selected for sweetness or size or power—took root, flourished, and eventually hybridized. In time people gave the best of these hybrids a place in the garden, and there, together, the people and the plants embarked on a series of experiments in coevolution that would change them both forever. 

• Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the 10c observed that their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans or Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them “jaguar eyes.” 

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Ch. 1 The Apple (Malus domestica)

• John Chapman (‘Johnny Appleseed’): A man with no fixed address his entire adult life, Chapman preferred to spend his nights out of doors; one winter he set up house in a hollowed-out sycamore stump outside Defiance, OH, where he operated a pair of nurseries. A vegetarian living on the frontier, he deemed it a cruelty to ride a horse or chop down a tree; he once punished his own foot for squashing a worm by throwing away its shoe. He liked best the company of Indians and children—and rumors trailed him to the effect that he’d once been engaged to marry a 10-yo girl, who’d broken his heart. Chapman had come west from Longmeadow, MA, in 1797, at the age of 23. He had shied away from settled places, for reasons of both temperament and business. To people in Brilliant, Chapman explained that he preferred to get out ahead of the settlers moving west, and this would become the pattern of his life: planting a nursery on a tract of wilderness he judged ripe for settlement and then waiting. By the time the settlers arrived, he’d have apple trees ready to sell them. In time he would find a local boy to look after his trees, move on, and start the process all over again. By the 1830s John Chapman was operating a chain of nurseries that reached all the way from western PA through central OH and into IN. It was in Fort Wayne that Chapman died in 1845—wearing the infamous coffee sack, some say, yet leaving an estate that included some 1,200 acres of prime real estate. The barefoot crank died a wealthy man. 

• 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. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in OH: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.

• 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. Americans began to eat rather than drink their apples, thanks in part to a PR slogan: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” 

• Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple—at least five per apple, several thousand per tree—that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree’s adopted home. 

• The ancestor of Malus domestica is a wild apple that grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan. In some places there, Malus sieversii,  is the dominant species in the forest, growing to 20m and throwing off each fall a cornucopia of odd, applelike fruits ranging in size from marbles to softballs, in color from yellow and green to red and purple. 

• Sometime in the 2M BCE, the Chinese discovered that a slip of wood cut from a desirable tree could be notched into the trunk of another tree; once this graft “took,” the fruit produced on new wood growing out from that juncture would share the characteristics of its more desirable parent. This technique is what eventually allowed the Greeks and Romans to select and propagate the choicest specimens. 

• A land grant in the NW Territory required a settler to “set out at least 50 apple or pear trees” as a condition of his deed. The purpose of the rule was to dampen real estate speculation by encouraging homesteaders to put down roots. Since a standard apple tree normally took 10y to fruit, an orchard was a mark of lasting settlement. 

• The Bible never names “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden,” and that part of the world is generally too hot for apples (some scholars think it was a pomegranate). 

• There was an old tradition in N. Europe linking the grape, which flourished throughout Latin Christendom, with the corruptions of the Catholic Church, while casting the apple as the wholesome fruit of Protestantism. Wine figured in the Eucharist; also, the Old Testament warned against the temptations of the grape. 

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Ch. 2 The Tulip

• Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals. 

• Most flowers are bisexual, containing both male and female organs. A flower can avoid self-pollination chemically (by making its ovule and pollen grain incompatible), architecturally (by arranging stamen and pistil in the flower so as to avoid contact), or temporally (by staggering the times when their stamens produce pollen and their pistils are receptive). 

• ~200 Ma there were no flowers. There were plants then- ferns and mosses, conifers and cycads, but these plants didn’t form true flowers or fruit. Some of them reproduced asexually, cloning themselves by various means. Sexual reproduction was a relatively discreet affair usually accomplished by releasing pollen onto the wind or water; by sheer chance some of it would find its way to other members of the species, and a tiny, primitive seed would result. 

• Tulipomania (Turkish: tulip- ‘turban’, ‘Greater Fool Theory’)

• Semper Augustus: The intricate red-and-white tulip. One bulb changed hands for 10K guilders at the height of tulip mania, a sum that at the time would have bought one of the grandest canal houses in Amsterdam. What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip. 

• The color of a tulip 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, 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. 

• 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 W. from Constantinople soon after arriving there in 1554. 

• 1608: A French miller exchanges his mill for a bulb of the Mère Brune tulip. Around the same time a bridegroom accepts a single tulip as the whole of his dowry (the variety became “Mariage de ma fille”). 

• 1620s: Dutch farmer Dr. Pauw is bombarded with wildly escalating offers to sell his Semper Augustus bulbs, but he would not part with them at any price.

• 1635: The trade in tulips in Holland turns from actual bulbs to a trade in promissory notes (slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price). Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground, and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers. Now began the windhandel (the wind trade). Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair.

• Met de Borden (‘with the boards’): A seller and buyer who wanted to do business were handed slates on which they wrote an opening price for the tulip in question. The slates were then passed to a pair of proxies who would then settle on a price somewhere between the two opening bids; this they would scribble on the slates before passing them back to the principals. The traders could either let the number stand, signifying agreement, or rub it out. If both rubbed out the price, the deal was off; but if only one party declined, that florist had to pay a fine to the college—an incentive to close the deal. When a deal did close, the buyer had to pay a small commission, called the wijnkoopsgeld: wine money. In keeping with the carnival atmosphere, these fines and commissions were used to buy wine and beer for everyone—another incentive to make deals. 

• 2 Feb, 1637: Crash of Holland’s tulipomania; the florists of Haarlem gathered as usual to auction bulbs in one of the tavern colleges. A florist sought to begin the bidding at 1,250 guilders for a quantity of tulips—Switsers, in one account. Finding no takers, he tried again at 1,100, then 1,000…and all at once every man in the room—men who days before had themselves paid comparable sums for comparable tulips—understood that the weather had changed. Haarlem was the capital of the bulb trade, and the news that there were no buyers to be found there ricocheted across the country. Within days tulip bulbs were unsellable at any price. 

• Bees

• Vision: Bees see in color (though differently than humans); green appears gray, a background hue against which red—which bees perceive as black—stands out most sharply. Bees can also see UV; a garden in this light must look like a big-city airport at night, lit up and color-coded to direct circling bees to landing zones of nectar and pollen. 

• “Flying penises” is what one botanist called bees. 

• The flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom. 

• Before the English arrived, and for some time after, there were no honeybees in N. America, therefore no honey to speak of; for a sweetener, Indians in the north had relied on maple sugar instead.

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Ch. 3 Marijuana (Cannabis sativa x indica)

• More drug arrests are for crimes involving marijuana than any other drug: nearly 700K in 1998, 88% of them for possession. Marijuana cases account for most of the asset forfeitures that law enforcement budgets have come to rely on. Marijuana is the primary focus of drug prevention efforts in the schools, drug testing in the workplace, and public service advertising about drugs…Remove the 20M or so Americans who use marijuana, and we are left with a “drug abuse epidemic” involving ~2M regular heroin and cocaine users—a public health problem, to be sure, but serious enough to justify spending $20B a year (or modifying the Bill of Rights)?

• Marijuana (‘Cannabis’, ‘Hashish’, ‘Hemp’, ‘Sinsemilla’): Introduced to the Americas by African slaves. 

• Hemp: A distinct, non-psychoactive form of cannabis widely grown for its fibers before prohibition. 

• Cannabis sativa: An equatorial species of marijuana poorly adapted to life in the northern latitudes. Sativa can’t withstand frost and usually won’t set flowers north of 30d latitude. Working with such seeds, growers find it difficult to produce a high-quality domestic crop (and especially sinsemilla) outside places such as CA and HI. 

• Cannabis indica: A marijuana species discovered by American hippies traveling “the hashish trail” through Afghanistan; a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been grown for centuries by hashish producers in the mountains of central Asia. 

• Cannabis sativa X indica: A Cannabis indica-sativa hybrid created by Cannabis breeders in the Pacific NW. 

• Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC): Purportedly protects cannabis plants from UV radiation (the higher the altitude at which cannabis grows, the more THC it produces), exhibits antibiotic properties, suggesting a role in protecting cannabis from disease, and gives the cannabis plant a sophisticated defense against pests; discovered in the mid. THC was discovered by Israeli neuroscientist Raphael Mechoulam in the mid 1960s. 

• Sinsemilla: Unpollinated female marijuana flowers that have a high concentration of psychoactive agents. 

• Evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good. Bring the first of these faculties to bear on the second, and you wind up with a creature who has figured out how to use plants to artificially trip the brain’s reward system (How the Mind Works by Pinker). 

• Consciousness: The frontier where our materialistic understanding of the brain stops. If you imagine consciousness as a kind of lens through which we perceive the world, the drastic constricting of its field of vision seems to heighten the vividness of whatever remains in the circle of perception, while everything else (including our awareness of the lens itself) simply falls away. Some of our greatest happinesses arrive in such moments, during which we feel as though we’ve sprung free from the tyranny of time—clock time, of course, but also historical and psychological time, and sometimes even mortality. 

• Anandamide: The human brains own endogenous cannabinoid. Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life “so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again.” It is the brain’s own drug for coping with the human condition. 

• Scientists cite short-term memory loss as one of the key neurological effects of the cannabinoids. 

• Psychoactive Plants: Amanita muscaria among the Indo-Europeans, peyote among the American Indians, cannabis among the Hindus, Scythians, and Thracians, wine among the Greeks and early Christians. A select group of psychoactive plants and fungi (among them the peyote cactus, the Amanita muscaria and psilocybin mushrooms, the ergot fungus, the fermented grape, ayahuasca, and cannabis) were present at the creation of several of the world’s religions. 

• With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn’t a people on Earth who doesn’t use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. 

• Mescaline: A psychoactive drug derived from peyote (the flower of a desert cactus).

• Aldous Huxley’s conclusion in The Doors of Perception, his 1954 account of his experiments with mescaline. In Huxley’s view, the drug—which is derived from peyote, the flower of a desert cactus—disables what he called “the reducing valve” of consciousness, his name for the conscious mind’s everyday editing faculty. The reducing valve keeps us from being crushed under the “pressure of reality,” but it accomplishes this at a price, for the mechanism prevents us from ever seeing reality as it really is. The insight of mystics and artists flows from their special ability to switch off the mind’s reducing valve. 

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Ch. 4 The Potato (Solanum tuberosum)

• On average, an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed 100 people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus, the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities. 

• The typical gardener is not in the least bit romantic about the wildlife that assaults his plants, not the bugs or the woodchucks or the deer, and in his heart of hearts he believes that all is fair in war—even if organic principles (sort of like the Geneva Convention) do sometimes prevent him from heeding his heart’s desire. 

• 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. 

• Industrial Farming: Begins in early spring with 1) a soil fumigant to control nematodes and certain diseases in the soil- the field is doused with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Next 2) an herbicide- Lexan, Sencor, or Eptam is used to “clean” the field of all weeds. Then, at planting 3) a systemic insecticide- such as Thimet- is applied to the soil- this will be absorbed by the young seedlings and kill any insect that eats their leaves for several weeks. When the potato seedlings are 15cm tall, 4) a second herbicide is sprayed on the field to control weeds. Each circle, defined by the radius of the irrigation pivot, typically covers an area of 135 acres. 5) Pesticides and fertilizer are simply added to the irrigation system (which can draw and return water to human sources like lakes or rivers)- most fields receive ~10 weekly sprayings of chemical fertilizer. Just before the rows close- when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next- 6) a fungicide- Bravo, is used to control blight, the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famine (today, the most worrisome threat to potato growers as a single spore can infect a field overnight). 7) A crop duster sprays for aphids at 14-day intervals (the aphids are harmless, but they transmit the leaf roll virus, which causes “net necrosis” in Russet Burbanks potatoes, a brown spotting of the potatoes flesh that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. 

• Cost: High; ~$1950 per acre potatoes (mainly on chemicals, electricity, and water).

• Yield: ~$2000 per acre potatoes (wholesale for ~20-tons). 

• Clean Field: A farmers field cleansed of all weeds and insects and disease- of all life, except the monoculture crop intended to be planted. 

• Pesticides

• Monitor: A deadly organophosphate chemical that damages the human nervous system. “I wont go into a field for 4-5 days after it’s been sprayed- not even to fix a broken pivot.”-Forsyth, (Farmer). 

• Organic Farming: Natural farming without pesticides, fertilizers, or GMOs and, instead, using cow manure and, in some farms, spraying liquefied seaweed as a fertilizer. 

• Crop Rotation: Long & complex (to avoid a crop-specific pest) with a wide variety of a single crop plants as a defense against nature’s inevitable surprises. 

• Permaculture: Organic farmers plant strips of flowering plants on the margins of potato fields (usually peas or alfalfa) to attract the beneficial insects that dine on beetle larvae and aphids. In the absence of these plants, farmers can use ladybugs. 

• Green Manures: Growing cover crops and plowing them under. 

• Yield: ~300-400 bags potatoes per acre (the same as industrial farms). 

• Cost: Small; seed, manure, ladybugs, 

• Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs): There are two ways of splicing foreign genes into a plant: by infecting it with agrobacterium, a pathogen whose modus operandi is to break into a plant cell’s nucleus and replace its DNA with some of its own, or by shooting it with a gene gun. For reasons not yet understood, the agrobacterium method seems to work best on broadleaf species such as the potato, the gene gun better on grasses, such as corn and wheat. The gene gun is a strangely high-low piece of technology, but the main thing you need to know about it is that the gun here is not a metaphor: a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells’ nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place—and no one yet knows where, that place is—the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. 

• Technicians sit at lab benches before petri dishes in which fingernail-sized sections of potato stem have been placed in a clear nutrient jelly. Into this medium they squirt a solution of agrobacteria, which have already had their genes swapped with the ones Monsanto wants to insert (specific enzymes can be used to cut and paste precise sequences of DNA). In addition to the Bt gene being spliced, a “marker” gene is also included—typically this is a gene conferring resistance to a specific antibiotic. This way, the technicians can later flood the dish with the antibiotic to see which cells have taken up the new DNA; any that haven’t simply die. The marker gene can also serve as a kind of DNA fingerprint, allowing Monsanto to identify its plants and their descendants long after they’ve left the lab. By performing a simple test on any potato leaf in my garden, a Monsanto agent can prove whether or not the plant is the company’s intellectual property…After several hours the surviving slips of potato stem begin to put down roots; a few days later, these plantlets are moved upstairs to the potato greenhouse on the roof. 

• NewLeaf: Created by Monsanto; a genetically engineered potato that produces its own insecticide designed to resist attack from the CO potato beetle due to the insertion of Bt toxin produced genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis.

• Instead of quickly breaking down in nature, as it usually does, genetically modified Bt toxin seems to be building up in the soil…We also don’t know what effect all this new Bt in the environment may have on the insects we don’t want to kill.

• In laboratory experiments scientists have found that the pollen from Bt corn is lethal to monarch butterflies. Monarchs don’t eat corn pollen, but they do eat, exclusively, the leaves of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), a weed that is common in American cornfields. When monarch caterpillars eat milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen, they sicken and die. 

• Working with government regulators, Monsanto has developed a “Resistance Management Plan” to postpone Bt resistance. Farmers who plant Bt crops must leave a certain portion of their land planted in non-Bt crops in order to create “refuges” for the targeted bugs. The goal is to prevent the first Bt-resistant Colorado potato beetle from mating with a second resistant bug and thereby launching a new race of superbugs. The theory is that when that first Bt-resistant insect does show up, it can be induced to mate with a susceptible bug living on the refuge side of the tracks, thereby diluting the new gene for resistance. The plan implicitly acknowledges that if this new control of nature is to last, a certain amount of no-control, or wildness, will have to be deliberately cultivated. 

• Introduction of the Potato to Europe

• Bread Root: Potato (English).  

• Even after people recognized that the potato could produce more food on less land than any other crop, most of European culture remained inhospitable to the potato. Why? Europeans hadn’t eaten tubers before; the potato was a member of the nightshade family (along with the equally disreputable tomato); potatoes were thought to cause leprosy and immorality; potatoes were mentioned nowhere in the Bible; potatoes came from America, where they were the staple of an uncivilized and conquered race. 

• The Irish had discovered that a diet of potatoes supplemented with cow’s milk was nutritionally complete. In addition to energy in the form of carbs, potatoes supplied considerable amounts of protein and vitamins B and C (the spud eventually put an end to scurvy in Europe); the missing vitamin A was found in milk. (So it turns out that mashed potatoes are not only the ultimate comfort food but all a body really needs.) 

• In Germany, Frederick the Great had to force peasants to plant potatoes; so did Catherine the Great in Russia. Louis XVI took a subtler tack, reasoning that if he could just lend the humble spud a measure of royal prestige, peasants would experiment with it and discover its virtues. So, Marie Antoinette took to wearing potato flowers in her hair, and King Louis ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, however, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly convinced of the crop’s value, made off in the night with the royal tubers. 

• Europe’s center of political gravity had always been anchored firmly in the hot, sunny south, where wheat grew reliably; without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north. 

• The cultural, political, and biological environment of Ireland could not have better suited the new plant. Cereal grains grow poorly on the island (wheat hardly at all), and, in the 17c, Cromwell’s Roundheads seized what little arable land there was for English landowners, forcing the Irish peasantry to eke out a subsistence from soil so rain-soaked and stingy that virtually nothing would grow in it. The potato, miraculously, would, managing to extract prodigious amounts of food from the very land the colonial English had given up on…The Irish discovered that a few acres of marginal land could produce enough potatoes to feed a large family and its livestock. The Irish also found they could grow these potatoes with a bare minimum of labor or tools, in something called a “lazy bed.” 

• Irish Potato Famine: The potato famine was the worst catastrophe to befall Europe since the Black Death of 1348. 1 in 8 Irishmen (~1M people)- died of starvation in 3y; thousands of others went blind or insane for lack of the vitamin’s potatoes had supplied…Disease followed on famine: typhus, cholera, and purpura raced unchecked through the weakened population. 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. 

• William Cobbett argued that while it was true that the potato fed the Irish, it also impoverished them, by driving up the country’s population—from 3M to 8M in less than a century—and driving down its wages. The prolific potato allowed young Irishmen to marry earlier and support a larger family; as the labor supply increased, wages fell. The bounty of the potato was its curse. 

• Malthusian logic started from the premise that people are driven by the desires for food and sex; only the threat of starvation keeps the population from exploding. The danger of the potato, Malthus believed, was that it removed the economic constraints that ordinarily kept the population in check. This in a nutshell was Ireland’s problem: “the indolent and turbulent habits of the lower Irish can never be corrected while the potato system enables them to increase so much beyond the regular demand for labour.” 

• The problem with “the potato system” is that, under it, the Homo economicus who adjusts his behavior to the algebra of need is replaced by a far less rational actor—Homo appetitus, as Gallagher calls him. 

• Summer, 1845: Phytophthora infestans arrive in Europe, probably on a ship from America. Within weeks the spores of this fungus, borne on the wind, overspread the continent, dooming potatoes and potato eaters alike. The arrival of the blight was announced by the stench of rotting potatoes. The fungus would appear in a field literally overnight: a black spotting of the leaves followed by a gangrenous stain spreading down the plant’s stem; then the blackened tubers would turn to evil-smelling slime. It took but a few days for the fungus to scorch a green field black; even potatoes in storage succumbed. The potato blight visited all of Europe, but only in Ireland did it produce a catastrophe. Elsewhere, people could turn to other staple foods when a crop failed, but Ireland’s poor, subsisting on potatoes and exiled from the cash economy, had no alternative. 

• The Irish came to depend utterly on the Lumper potato. Potatoes, like apples, are clones, which means that every Lumper was genetically identical to every other Lumper, all of them descended from a single plant that just happened to have no resistance to Phytophthora infestans. The Incas too built a civilization atop the potato, but they cultivated such a polyculture of potatoes that no one fungus could ever have toppled it. In fact, it was to South America that, in the aftermath of the famine, breeders went to look for potatoes that could resist the blight. And there, in a potato called the Garnet Chile, they found it. 

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Misc Quotes

“For a great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.”

“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by,” Friedrich Nietzsche begins a brilliant, somewhat eccentric 1876 essay he called “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” “They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. “A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’—but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.” The first part of Nietzsche’s essay is a moving and occasionally hilarious paean to the virtues of forgetting, which he maintains is a prerequisite to human happiness, mental health, and action. Without dismissing the value of memory or history, he argues (much like Emerson and Thoreau) that we spend altogether too much of our energy laboring in the shadows of the past—under the stultifying weight of convention, precedent, received wisdom, and neurosis. Like the American transcendentalists, Nietzsche believes that our personal and collective inheritance stands in the way of our enjoyment of life and accomplishment of anything original. “Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future—all of them depend on one’s being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember.” Nietzsche admonishes us to cast off “the great and ever-greater pressure of what is past” and live instead rather more like the child (or the cow) that “plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future.” Nietzsche acknowledges that there are perils to inhabiting the present (one is liable to “falsely suppose all his experiences are original to him”), but any loss in knowingness or sophistication is more than made up for by the gain in vigor.

DDT in its time was thoroughly tested and found to be safe and effective—until it was discovered that this unusually long-lived chemical travels through the food chain and happens to thin out the shells of birds’ eggs. The question that led scientists to this discovery wasn’t even a question about DDT, it was a question about birds: Why is the world’s population of raptors suddenly collapsing? DDT was the answer. 

“There is a myth about such (narcotic) highs, the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved while high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say, ‘Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!’”-Carl Sagan (attributed to Mr. X).

Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells”—in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel. 

“The goal of our spiritual striving is to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come.”-Boethius, 6c Neoplatonist. 

“Awakening to this present instant, we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant.”-Unk Zen Master. 

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Terminology

• Alcohol: Made by encouraging certain yeasts to dine on the sugars manufactured in plants (fermentation converts the glucose in plants into ethyl alcohol and CO2). The sweetest fruit makes the strongest drink. 

• Angiosperms: Plants that form flowers and then encased seeds. 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; appeared during the Cretaceous. 

• Colorado Potato Beetle: The scourge of potatoes. 

• Cult of Soma: An early religion practiced by ancient Indo-Europeans of Central Asia. According to its sacred text, the Rig Veda, Soma was an intoxicant with the powers of a god. People worshiped the drug itself- which ethnobotanists now think was Amanita muscaria, the mushroom sometimes called fly agaric- as a path to divine knowledge.

• Entheogens: The god within. 

• Genetic Instability: The catchall term used to describe the various unexpected effects that misplaced or unregulated foreign genes can have on their new environment. 

• Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURT): A technology that makes it possible to turn genetic traits on and off by applying certain proprietary chemicals to genetically modified plants in the field.

• Hard Cider: A 20c term- redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet. Allowed to ferment for a few weeks, pressed apple juice yields a mildly alcoholic beverage with about half the strength of wine. For something stronger, the cider can then be distilled into brandy or simply frozen; the intensely alcoholic liquid that refuses to ice is called applejack. Hard cider frozen to -30 F yields an applejack of 66 proof. 

• Meme: A unit of memorable cultural information. It can be as small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious concept. Dawkins’s theory is that memes are to cultural evolution what genes are to biological evolution. Memes are a culture’s building blocks, passed down from brain to brain in a Darwinian process that leads, by trial and error, to cultural innovation and progress. The memes that prove themselves best adapted to their “environment”—that is, the ones that are most helpful for people to keep in their brains—are the ones most likely to survive and replicate and become widely regarded as good, true, or beautiful. Culture at any given moment is the “meme pool” in which we all swim—or rather, that swims through us. Cultural change occurs whenever a new meme is introduced and catches on (The Selfish Gene by Dawkins).

• Net Necrosis: Brown spots on potatoes; although purely cosmetic, companies won’t buy potatoes with spots. 

• Panapathogen: The root of all evil. 

• Posse Comitatus: The doctrine that the armed forces of the US cannot be used to police US territory. 

• Supernatural Metaphysics: The belief that everything in our world has its true or ideal form in a second world beyond the reach of our senses (Plato).

• Swedenborgian Doctrine: Everything here on Earth corresponds directly to something in the afterlife. Swedenborg claimed that there were one-to-one “correspondences” between natural and spiritual facts, so that close attention and devotion to the former would advance one’s understanding of the latter. 

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Chronology

• 1995: Monsanto introduces the NewLeaf variety of potato, their first genetically modified crop, that produces its own insecticide designed to resist attack from the CO potato beetle due to the insertion of Bt toxin which produces genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1992: Israeli neuroscientist Raphael Mechoulam (working with William Devane) discovers the brain’s own endogenous cannabinoid. He names it “anandamide (‘inner bliss’- Sanskrit).-Botany by Pollen.

• Late 1980s: The USG escalates its campaign against marijuana; American refugees from the drug war begin moving to Amsterdam. Growers take their seeds and expertise, and this migration, matched with a Dutch genius for horticulture going back to the tulip craze makes Amsterdam the place to go for marijuana.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1983: SCOTUS argues Illinois v. Gates deciding in favor of broad new exceptions to the 4th amendment rights against unreasonable searches, as well as the 6th amendment rights to confront one’s accusers.-Botany by Pollen.

• ~1980: Amateur Cannabis breeders working in CA and the Pacific NW, create sativa X indica, a Cannabis indica-sativa hybrid, the modern American marijuana plant. Various hybrids developed after include Northern Lights, Skunk #1, Big Bud, and California Orange- regarded as the benchmarks of modern marijuana breeding.-Botany by Pollen.

• Mid-1960s: Israeli neuroscientist Raphael Mechoulam identifies the chemical compound responsible for the psychoactive effects of marijuana: delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).-Botany by Pollen.

• 1949: Redcliffe Salaman’s publishes “The History and Social Influence of the Potato.”-Botany by Pollen.

• 1929: Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov identifies the origin of the wild apple in the forests around Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1868: Discovery of the Granny Smith, a relatively tart green apple, in Australia by a Mrs. Smith.-Botany by Pollen.

• Summer, 1845: Potato blight, Phytophthora infestans, arrives in Europe, probably on a ship from America. Within weeks the spores of this fungus, borne on the wind, overspread the continent, dooming potatoes and potato eaters alike.-Botany by Pollen.

• Sep, 1812: The barefoot run; during the War of 1812, Chapman (‘Johnny Appleseed’) runs 30 miles through the forest from Mansfield to Mount Vernon to warn settlers of their approach. “Behold, the tribes of the heathens are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them.”-Botany by Pollen.

• 1794: Wheat harvests in the British Isles fall, sending the price of white bread beyond the reach of England’s poor. Food riots break out, and with them a great debate over the potato.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1789: Introduction of the China rose (R. chinensis) to Europe, an event that made it possible for the first time to breed roses that would flower more than once a season.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1703-1730: Reign of Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III during a period known in Turkey as the lale devri (tulip era).-Botany by Pollen.

• 2 Feb, 1637: Crash of Holland’s tulipomania; the florists of Haarlem gather as usual to auction bulbs in one of the tavern colleges. A florist sought to begin the bidding at 1,250 guilders for a quantity of tulips—Switsers, in one account. Finding no takers, he tried again at 1,100, then 1,000…and all at once every man in the room—men who days before had themselves paid comparable sums for comparable tulips—understood that the weather had changed. Haarlem was the capital of the bulb trade, and the news that there were no buyers to be found there ricocheted across the country. Within days tulip bulbs were unsellable at any price.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1635: The trade in tulips in Holland turns from actual bulbs to a trade in promissory notes (slips of paper listing details of the flowers in question, the dates they would be delivered, and their price). Before then, the tulip market followed the rhythm of the season: bulbs could change hands only between the months of June, when they were lifted from the ground, and October, when they had to be planted again. Frenzied as it was, the market before 1635 was still rooted in reality: cash money for actual flowers. Now began the windhandel (the wind trade). Suddenly the tulip trade was a year-round affair.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1620s: Dutch farmer Dr. Pauw is bombarded with wildly escalating offers to sell his Semper Augustus bulbs, but he would not part with them at any price.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1608: A French miller exchanges his mill for a bulb of the Mère Brune tulip. Around the same time a bridegroom accepts a single tulip as the whole of his dowry (the variety became “Mariage de ma fille”).-Botany by Pollen.

• 1554: Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, purportedly introduces the tulip (a corruption of the Turkish word for “turban”) to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1520s: Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus, sometimes called the “Father of Medicine,” establishes a pharmacology largely on the basis of the ingredients found in flying ointments. Among his accomplishments is the invention of laudanum- the tincture of opium that is perhaps the most important drug in pharmacopoeia until the 20c.-Botany by Pollen.

• 1484: Pope Innocent VIII issues a papal condemnation of witchcraft in which he specifically condemns the use of cannabis as an “antisacrament” in satanic worship.-Botany by Pollen.

• 11c: Formation of the Assassins (“Hashish”) sect, under the absolute control of Hassan ibn al Sabbah (‘the Old Man of the Mountain’), who terrorize Persia, robbing and murdering with brutal abandon. Hassan would begin his initiation of new recruits by giving them so much hashish that they passed out. Hours later the men would awaken to find themselves in the midst of a most beautiful palace garden, laid with sumptuous delicacies and staffed with gorgeous maidens to gratify their every desire. Scattered through this paradise, lying on the ground in pools of blood, are severed heads—actually actors buried to their necks. The heads speak, telling the men of the afterlife and what they will have to do if they hope ever to return to this paradise. The story was corrupted by the time Marco Polo retold it, so that the hashish was now directly responsible for the violence of the Assassins.-Botany by Pollen.

• 10c: Abyssinian herders observe that their goats would become particularly frisky after nibbling the bright red berries of the coffee shrub, possibly leading to the discovery of coffee.-Botany by Pollen.

• ~700 BCE: Scythian peoples learn to smoke hemp by, according to Herodotus, placing their heads into small tents designed to tramp the fumes from cannabis buds placed on red-hot rocks- “until they rise up to dance and betake themselves to singing.”-Botany by Pollen.

• ~7 Ka: Ancestors of the ancient Incans domesticate the potato (Solanum tuberosum) in the Andean altiplano.-Botany by Pollen.

• ~100 Ma: Evolution of angiosperms, plants that make showy flowers and form large seeds that other species are induced to disseminate.-Botany by Pollen.

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