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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... never occurred to me that our catalog encounter was of any evolutionary consequence whatsoever. Yet evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events, and in the evolution of the potato my reading of a particular seed ...
... never occurred to me that our catalog encounter was of any evolutionary consequence whatsoever. Yet evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events, and in the evolution of the potato my reading of a particular seed ...
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... never have cultivated had it not been for a handful of plants that manage to manufacture chemicals with the precise molecular key needed to unlock the mechanisms in our brain governing pleasure, memory, and maybe even transcendence ...
... never have cultivated had it not been for a handful of plants that manage to manufacture chemicals with the precise molecular key needed to unlock the mechanisms in our brain governing pleasure, memory, and maybe even transcendence ...
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... never have foreseen; indeed, even the weather itself is in some sense an artifact now, its temperatures and storms the reflection of our actions. For a great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in ...
... never have foreseen; indeed, even the weather itself is in some sense an artifact now, its temperatures and storms the reflection of our actions. For a great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in ...
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... never have become a home. What did the apple get in return? A golden age: untold new varieties and half a world of new habitat. As an emblem of the marriage between people and plants, the design of Chapman's peculiar craft strikes me as ...
... never have become a home. What did the apple get in return? A golden age: untold new varieties and half a world of new habitat. As an emblem of the marriage between people and plants, the design of Chapman's peculiar craft strikes me as ...
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... never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us. The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the ...
... never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us. The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the ...
Inhalt
Beauty Plant The Tulip | |
Intoxication Plant Marijuana | |
Control Plant The Potato | |
Epilogue | |
Acknowledgments | |
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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