Four plants, four human desires, and the argument runs backward: The apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato didn’t get domesticated by us so much as they figured out what we wanted and got us to plant them everywhere. Sweetness gets the apple, and Johnny Appleseed turns out to have been spreading cider trees across the frontier rather than eating apples. Beauty gets the tulip and the Dutch mania. Intoxication gets cannabis and a detour into the brain’s own cannabinoids. Control gets the potato, the Irish famine, and a Monsanto field Pollan plants himself.
The Botany of Desire