The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the WorldRandom House Publishing Group, 12.06.2001 - 304 Seiten The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant—though this time the obsessions revolves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds’s most basic yearnings—and by doing so made themselves indispensable. For, just as we’ve benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. So who is really domesticating whom? Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature. |
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... grown these four plants at one time or another in my own garden, I'm on fairly intimate terms with them. But the real reason I chose these plants and not another four is simpler than that: they have great stories to tell. Each of the ...
... grown these four plants at one time or another in my own garden, I'm on fairly intimate terms with them. But the real reason I chose these plants and not another four is simpler than that: they have great stories to tell. Each of the ...
Seite
... grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible—“sour enough,” Thoreau once wrote, “to set a ...
... grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible—“sour enough,” Thoreau once wrote, “to set a ...
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... grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan. In some places there, Malus sieversii, as it's known to botanists, is the dominant species in the forest, growing to a height of sixty feet and throwing off each fall a cornucopia of odd, applelike ...
... grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan. In some places there, Malus sieversii, as it's known to botanists, is the dominant species in the forest, growing to a height of sixty feet and throwing off each fall a cornucopia of odd, applelike ...
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... grown from seeds: they were grafted trees. In fact, his nursery offered a selection of the well-known eastern varieties—the Roxbury Russets, Newtown Pippins, and Early Chandlers that had already made their names in colonial New England ...
... grown from seeds: they were grafted trees. In fact, his nursery offered a selection of the well-known eastern varieties—the Roxbury Russets, Newtown Pippins, and Early Chandlers that had already made their names in colonial New England ...
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Inhalt
Beauty Plant The Tulip | |
Intoxication Plant Marijuana | |
Control Plant The Potato | |
Epilogue | |
Acknowledgments | |
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Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
agriculture American animals Apollonian apple trees apple’s artificial selection beauty bees bloom brain bulb called cannabinoid cannabis century chemical cider civilization clones color Colorado potato beetle consciousness crop culture Dionysian Dionysus discovered domesticated drug Dutch evolutionary experience fact farm farmers field flowers Forsline Forsyth frontier fruit garden genes genetic engineering genetically modified green grow growers happened hashish Heath human desire hybrids imagination indica insects intoxication John Chapman Johnny Appleseed landscape least look magic marijuana McDonald’s Mechoulam memes metaphor MICHAEL POLLAN Mike Heath monoculture Monsanto natural selection nature’s never NewLeafs Ohio one’s orchard peony pesticide petals pollen potato probably psychoactive plants Queen of Night Raphael Mechoulam rose Russet Burbanks scientists seedling seeds Semper Augustus sense sexual simply sinsemilla soil species spuds Steve Young story sweetness taste there’s things tulip tulipomania turn wild apples wilderness