On “The Botany of Desire”
Submitted by Animal Person
This is coming very, very late, but part of why “Food Inc.” wasn’t impressive for me is because I’m not the target audience. I’d already read Pollan and Schlosser and seen “The Future of Food” and “King Corn.” And though The Omnivore’s Dilemma definitely promotes the eating of animals if those animals were “farmed” a certain way (and locally), there’s so much helpful information in it about the food supply, in general, that it’s tough to tell people not to read it.
Because The Botany of Desire doesn’t address animals (Pollan discusses four plants: apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes), there’s no way for it to promote their consumption. I read this book over a year after The Omnivore’s Dilemma, despite it having been published first, and I feel strongly about recommending it because of what it teaches about culture, greed, history, and . . . plants.
From John Chapman (Johny Appleseed) not eating animals or using horses in his travels (and the fact that apples originated in the forests of Kazakhstan) to the dotcom-like frenzy over the tulip in Holland to the evolution of cannabis to convincing me to never eat french fries at a restaurant (that’s the only potato product I eat when I go out, and of course I inquire about what it is fried in), Pollan does a wonderful job of making the stories of the most ordinary plants sound like exotic adventures.
And of course, the entire book is a commentary on what happens when humans decide that a plant, for whatever reason, is desirable (or perhaps, as Pollan suggests, we have been set up by the plants to desire them).
