Michael Pollan and The Botany of Desire

Monday night I finished The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire looks at four specific plants; the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato, and how their cultivation has influenced and been influenced by cultural history. Pollan chooses these plants as he believes they capture the "four fundamental human desires -- sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control" (Botany, n.p.). This well researched book masterfully blends history with science and reads like a novel. I simply love his writing style. His work is interesting and intelligent but approachable. You can see Pollan's English literature background in his writing, not only his style but what caught me was his use of literary forms such as the literary conceits (a literary conceit* is like a metaphor or simile in that it compares two items but conceits pair two unlikely things together in a complex manner, something Pollan does well) and the use of the pastoral to describe food.

I love books that make me think about things in a different way and The Botany of Desire achieves this as Pollan moves the plant from the object position to the subject position in that rather than the action occurring only to the plant, in Pollan's argument the plant is creating the action; "[a]ll 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"(Botany, n.p.).

I also love writing that introduces me to new words, there is nothing I love more than to have to look up the meaning of a word. The Botany of Desire fits this to a tee as it is filled with words like "concatenation," "pomocentrically," and "heterozygosity".

My introduction to Pollan's work was in Food Rules: An Eater's Manual. It's a smallish book that outlines 64 rules for eating better. Within his humor, Pollan posits some poignant rules for eating better such as "don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk" and "it's not food if it's called by the same name in every language (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles)" (p. 79 and 45). None of this is rocket science but it serves a good reminder.

Later I tripped across Pollan again in my graduate classes, in his TED Talk, A Plant's Eye View. Very much like and based off of The Botany of Desire, Pollan's talk looks at gardening, soil, animals, and bees from a different perspective -- you guessed it, the plant's perspective. What causes us to choose to plant grass over trees, potatoes over another type of plant? He suggests it is the plants that are manipulating us rather than people manipulating the plants. And he does it very convincingly. Later in graduate school, when teaching Writing and Communication Skills, I used one of Pollan's essays, "Supermarket Pastoral" as a great example of how to write descriptively without using cliche. In the essay, Pollan shows how organic food is sold with a narrative and how that narrative is often pastoral. The use of the pastoral in literature highlights the serene, idyllic, simple, and beautiful life and was often used as a juxtaposition to the Industrial Revolution. It is an apt way to describe the organic food market. The trick with the pastoral though, and this is something, Pollan wants us to recognize, is that the pastoral often purposely overlooks or focuses our attention away from the reality of harshness or the dirtier side of the serene. The other lesson I wanted my students to take away from Pollan's writing is his straightforward writing style that doesn't pander to the reader but also doesn't write in a complicated way to simply sound intelligent. His intelligence shines through in this analysis and criticism, his ability to ask interesting questions and then attempt to search out the answers. I've always believed that to become a better writer requires a good measure of reading good writing.

If you want to read a snippet of The Botany of Desire, it is available from the website and I have linked to the excerpt here.

I will leave you with a quotation from the book:

"There are flowers, and then there are flowers, I mean, around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers with an empire's worth of history behind them, flowers whose form and color and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people's ideas and desires through time like great books" (Botany, n.p.)

*The Flea by John Donne is illustrative of the literary conceit in which Donne compares love to the flea -- something beautiful with something ugly.