The botany of desire a plant's-eye view of the world summary

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan (Author). The guide that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Occasions bestselling creator of Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the crucial trusted food experts in America.

Every schoolchild learns concerning the mutually helpful dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Want, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how individuals and domesticated crops have fashioned a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully hyperlinks four fundamental human desires-sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and management-with the vegetation that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the vegetation has evolved to fulfill humankind’s most elementary yearnings. And simply as we’ve benefited from these vegetation, we’ve got also completed effectively with them. So who is actually domesticating whom?

Learn this guide and you could by no means eat a conventionally grown potato again. I do know I won’t. If I hadn’t been a devoted natural gardener for over 40 years, I’d turn out to be one after studying THE BOTANY OF DESIRE. I discover it extremely puzzling that more people haven’t bitten the natural bullet. I really imagine a weight loss plan of conventionally grown meals can shorten your life and productivity of all types of aches, pains, and illnesses you might not otherwise suffer. Natural gardening works and the stuff you grow is healthier for you. If you can’t develop it, for goodness sakes, hustle on down to your closest Whole Meals retailer and purchase it. Natural meals could also be costlier than typical foods, but in the long term you’ll save on medical bills.

Michael Pollen’s ebook is just the most effective set of gardening essays I’ve learned in a protracted while, possibly ever. And that’s saying rather a lot as a result of I’m a big fan of gardening books (I’ve reviewed over one hundred of them for Amazon). I have not read something so pleasant since Henry Mitchell’s columns and books. It isn’t typically an ebook of garden essays could make you snicker (misadventures with Mary Jane), make you cry (one million Irish lifeless of starvation), make you angry (one million Irish lifeless), and make you smile (is there any tulip so lovely as the Queen of the Evening?’

Pollan covers 4 vegetation, Apples, Tulips, Marijuana, and Potatoes. His first chapter on apples, disabused me of all my notions about Johnny Appleseed. I had learned Anna Pavord’s guide THE TULIP, so the tulip section of Pollan’s e book was the least attended-grabbing for me, although he added some fascinating anecdotal information.

The perfect section of this guide so far as I’m involved is the chapter on Marijuana. My husband is a substance abuse counselor and I beneficial the chapter to him. It may have been titled, “All the things you ever wanted to know about Marijuana that they did not let you know in medical college or criminology class.” If you haven’t yet decided the U.S. government officials who devised the warfare on medication are nuts, learn this chapter and you’ll develop into convinced. Drug battle certainly!!! Haven’t we taught anything with Al Capone??

The part of the potato plant is downright scary. Pollan’s adventures with Monsanto are illuminating. Once again, the feds come out as the dumb bunnies. Or, maybe it is the elected officials and their appointees who won’t let the EPA and USDA do it’s job. The fabric on evolution on this part nicely complements Steve Jones’ DARWIN’S GHOST. Monsanto is in the technique of obtaining patents on natural substances and evolutionary processes that will affect the whole meal chain-and the CEO says “believe me”. Yeah, right.

Do yourself a favor, in the course of the chilly weather ahead. Curl up in a simple chair with a cup of tea and browse this book. Whether your backyard or not, you’ll love it.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

Michael Pollan (Author)

271 pages

Random House Trade Paperbacks; 1 edition (May 28, 2002)

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