The botany of desire

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The botany of desire. Four plants look at the world (English original title: The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World ) is a book on ethnobotany and plant breeding published in 2001 by Michael Pollan , a US journalist . He uses the example of the growth of four plant human desires, giving priority to the tulip , the beauty , the hemp plant the noise , the apple , the sweetness and the potato , the control maps.

content

As described above, the book is divided into four sections:

Chapter one: the apple

In the first chapter, Pollan describes the story of Johnny Appleseed , who traveled from Pennsylvania to Ohio with lots of apple pits and planted many apple trees. He was America's first environmentalist and campaigned for America's future favorite fruit, the apple. The apple replaces beer, wine and also tea and water on the American frontier.

Chapter two: the tulip

In the second chapter of the book, Pollan describes the grace and vulnerability of the tulip, the youngest of the canonical flowers, which he sees as the likely reason the Dutch took a liking to it. The chapter tells of the theft of one of the first tulips in Holland and then moves on to the tulip mania.

Chapter three: marijuana

The third chapter uses Pollan to describe the cravings for intoxication that marijuana can satisfy. Michael Pollan begins with the fact that all animals can evolutionarily perceive the difference between edible and poisonous plants, so that some plants have learned to cloud the consciousness of animals through their ingredients. Pollan therefore also describes catnip, opium poppy and marijuana. He goes on to explain that the penalties for people who grow mariuhanna had tightened dramatically by the time the book was made.

At the end of the chapter, Pollan describes how the magicians, shamans and alchemists got to know and understood the psychoactive plants and finally goes into the discovery of the tetrahydrocannabinol and the endocannabinoid system .

Chapter four: the potato

Pollan explains in the last chapter that the history of the potato is not only a story of reliable harvests and orderly fields, but also of the unpredictability of the plant:

The potato's willingness to grow in even the most inhospitable soils has given mankind some degree of control over their fate, but the tuber's occasional abrupt disappearance has also led to devastating social breakdowns. The Great Famine in Ireland is a warning example of the dangers of a growing monoculture :

Hence, Pollan asks questions about food safety:

Will the fields of the future continue to become monocultures that can only be protected against pests and diseases by means of large quantities of pesticides or genetic modification of the plants? Or can we reduce the risk of a bad harvest by maintaining the diversity of crops?

expenditure

  • The Botany of Desire. 2001
    • The botany of desire. Four plants look at the world. Claassen, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-546-00309-8

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See also