Top Quotes: “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World” — Michael Pollan
Introduction
“The oak tree’s highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. Evidently the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel — which obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so — that the tree has never needed to enter into any kind of formal arrangement with us.”
The Apple
“An apple tree 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 squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples, but most of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider — and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition. Apples were something people drank. The reason people in Brilliant wanted John Chapman to stay and plant a nursery was the same reason he would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio: Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.
The identification of the apple with notions of health and wholesomeness turns out to be a modern invention, part of a public relations campaign dreamed up by the apple industry in the early 1900s to reposition a fruit that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on. Carry Nation’s hatchet, it seems, was meant not just for saloon doors but for chopping down the very apple trees John Chapman had planted by the millions.”
“Two facts about these seeds are worth noting. First, they contain a small quantity of cyanide, probably a defense the apple evolved to discourage animals from biting into them; they’re almost indescribably bitter.
The second, more important fact about those seeds concerns their genetic contents, which are likewise full of surprises. Every seed in that apple, not to mention every seed riding down the Ohio alongside John Chapman, contains the genetic instructions for a completely new and different apple tree, one that, if planted, would bear only the most glancing resemblance to its parents. If not for grafting — the ancient technique of cloning trees — every apple in the world would be its own distinct variety, and it would be impossible to keep a good one going beyond the life span of that particular tree. In the case of the apple, the fruit nearly always falls far from the tree.
The botanical term for this variability is “heterozygosity,” and while there are many species that share it (our own included), in the apple the tendency is extreme. More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability — its ineluctable wildness — that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand and Kazakhstan and California. Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple — at least five per apple, several thousand per tree — that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree’s adopted home.”
“Exactly where the apple started out from has long been a matter of contention among people who have studied these things, but it appears that the ancestor of Malus domestica — the domesticated apple — is a wild apple that 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 fruits ranging in size from marbles to softballs, in color from yellow and green to red and purple. I’ve tried to imagine what May in such a forest must look-and smell!-like, or October, with the forest floor a nubby carpet of reds and golds and greens.
The silk route traverses some of these forests, and it seems likely that travelers passing through would have picked the biggest and tastiest of these fruits to take with them on their journey west. Along the way seeds were dropped, wildlings sprouted, and Malus hybridized freely with related species, such as the European crab apples, eventually producing millions of novel apple types all through Asia and Europe. Most of these would have yielded unpalatable fruit, though even these trees would have been worth growing for cider or forage.
True domestication had to await the invention of grafting by the Chinese. Sometime in the second millennium B.c, the Chinese discovered that a slip of wood cut from a desirable tree could be notched into the trunk of another tree; once this graft “took,” the fruit produced on new wood growing out from that juncture would share the characteristics of its more desirable parent. This technique is what eventually allowed the Greeks and Romans to select and propagate the choicest specimens. At this point the apple seems to have settled down for a while. According to Pliny, the Romans cultivated twenty-three different varieties of apples, some of which they took with them to England.”
“The fact that the apple was generally believed to be the fateful tree in the Garden of Eden might also have commended it to a religious people who believed America promised a second Eden. In fact, the Bible never names ‘the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden,’ and that part of the world is generally too hot for apples, but at least since the Middle Ages northern Europeans have assumed that the forbidden fruit was an apple. (Some scholars think it was a pomegranate.)”
“Alcohol is, of course, the other great beneficence of sugar: it is made by encouraging certain yeasts to dine on the sugars manufactured in plants. (Fermentation converts the glucose in plants into ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide.) The sweetest fruit makes the strongest drink, and in the north, where grapes didn’t do well, that was usually the apple. Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (“Hard” cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.) Corn liquor, or “white lightning,” preceded cider on the frontier by a few years, but after the apple trees began to bear fruit, cider — being safer, tastier, and much easier to make — became the alcoholic drink of choice.”
“Virtually every homestead In America had an orchard from which literally thousands of gallons of cider were made every year. In rural areas cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water. Indeed, in many places cider was consumed more freely than water, even by children, since it was arguably the healthier — because more sanitary — beverage. Cider became so indispensable to rural life that even those who railed against the evil of alcohol made an exception for cider, and the early prohibitionists succeeded mainly in switching drinkers over from grain to apple spirits. Eventually they would attack cider directly and launch their campaign to chop down apple trees, but up until the end of the nineteenth century cider continued to enjoy the theological exemption the Puritans had contrived for it.
It wasn’t until this century that the apple acquired its reputation for wholesomeness- “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” was a marketing slogan dreamed up by growers concerned that temperance would cut into sales.”
“Everyone knows that the settlement of the West depended on the rifle and the ax, yet the seed was no less instrumental in guaranteeing Europeans’ success in the New World. (The fact that John Chapman is remembered today along with frontier heroes such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett suggests that maybe we knew this before we completely understood it.) The Europeans brought with them to the frontier a kind of portable ecosystem that allowed them to re-create their accustomed way of life — the grasses their livestock needed to thrive, herbs to keep themselves healthy, Old World fruits and flowers to make life comfortable. This biological settlement of the West often went on beneath the notice of the settlers themselves, who brought along weed seeds in the cracks of their boot soles, grass seeds in the feed bags of their horses, and microbes in their blood and gut. (None of these introductions passed beneath the notice of the Native Americans, however.)”
“The sheer profusion of qualities that Americans discovered in the apple during its seedling heyday is something to marvel at especially since so many of those qualities have been lost in the years since. I found apples that tasted like bananas, others like pears. Spicy apples and sticky-sweet ones, apples sprightly as lemons and others rich as nuts. I picked apples that weighed more than a pound, others compact enough to fit in a child’s pocket. Here were yellow apples, green apples, spotted apples, russet apples, striped apples, purple apples, even a near-blue apple. There were apples that looked prepolished and apples that wore a dusty bloom on their cheeks. Some of these apples had qualities that were completely lost on me but had meant the world to people once: apples that tasted sweeter in March than October, apples that made especially good cider or preserves or butter, apples that held their own in storage for half a year, apples that ripened gradually to avoid a surfeit or all at once to simplify the harvest, apples with long stem or short, thin shin or thick, apples that tasted sublime only in Virginia and others that needed a hard New England frost to reach perfection, apples that reddened in August, others that held off till winter, even apples that could sit at the bottom of a barrel for the six weeks it took a ship to get to Europe, then emerge bright and crisp enough to command a top price in London.”
“Modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop. Forsline explained why this is so.
In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight — unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.”
“What saved the potato from that particular blight was genes for resistance that scientists eventually found in wild potatoes growing in the Andes, the potato’s own center of diversity. Yet we live in a world where wild places wild plants live are dwindling. What happens when the wild potatoes and wild apples are gone? The best technology in the world can’t create a new gene or recreate one that’s been lost.”
The Tulip
“Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. It seems that by the time singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.”
“Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not at all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower’s rancid scent reinforces this effect.)”
“Ophryus orchids look uncannily like insects, of all things — like bees or flies, depending on the orchid species in question. The Victorians believed this mimicry was intended to scare away insects so the flower could, chastely, pollinate itself. What the Victorians failed to consider was that the Ophryus might resemble an insect precisely in order to attract insects to it. The flower has evolved exactly the right pattern of curves and spots and hairiness to convince certain male insects that it is a female as viewed, tantalizingly, from behind. Botanists call the resultant behavior on the part of the male insect “pseudocopulation”; they call the flower that inspires this behavior the “prostitute orchid.” In his frenzy of attempted intercourse, the insect ensures the orchid’s pollination. That’s because the insect’s rising frustration compels him to rush around mounting one blossom after another, effectively disseminating the flower’s genes, if not his own.”
“Some perfectly good flowers simply are what they are, singular and, if not completely fixed in their identity, capable of ringing only a few simple changes on it: hue, say, or petal count. Prod it all you want, select and cross and reengineer it, but there’s only so much a coneflower or a lotus is ever going to do. Fashion is apt to pick up such a flower for a time and then drop it — think of the pink, or gillyflower, in Shakespeare’s day or the hyacinth in Queen Victoria’s — since it won’t let itself be remade in some new image once its first one is passé. By contrast, the rose, the orchid, and the tulip are capable of prodigies, reinventing themselves again and again to suit every change in the aesthetic or political weather. The rose, flung open and ravishing in Elizabethan times, obligingly buttoned herself.”
“Compared to the rose or the peony, flowers whose historical forms survive alongside their modern incarnations (both because the plants are so long-lived and because they can be cloned indefinitely), the only way we have any idea what made a tulip beautiful in Turkish or Dutch or French eyes is through those people’s paintings and botanical illustrations. That’s because a tulip that falls out of favor soon goes extinct, since the bulbs don’t reliably come back every year. In general a strain won’t last unless it is regularly replanted, so the chain of genetic continuity can be broken in a generation. Even when people do continue to plant a particular tulip, the vigor of that variety (which is propagated by removing and planting the bulb’s “offsets,” the little, genetically identical bullets that form at its base) eventually fades until it must be abandoned. Breeders today are busily seeking a new black tulip because they know the current standard-bearer Queen of Night — is probably on her way out. Tulips, in other words, are mortal.”
“Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, ambassador of the Austrian Hapsburgs to the court of Süleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending a consignment of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554. (The word tulip is a corruption of the Turkish word for “turban.”) The fact that the tulip’s first official trip west took it from one court to another — that it was a flower favored by royalty — may also have contributed to its quick ascendancy, for court fashions have always been especially catching.”
“For a time in the eighteenth century the bulbs of tulips that matched the Turkish ideal traded in Constantinople for quantities of gold. This was during the reign of Sultan Ahmed IlI, from 1703 to 1730, a period known to Turkish historians as the lale deuri, or Tulip Era. The sultan was ruled by his passion for the flower, so much so that he imported bulbs by the millions from Holland, where the Dutch, after the passing of their own tulipomania, had become masters of large-scale bulb production. The extravagance of the sultan’s annual tulip festivals ultimately proved his downfall; the conspicuous waste of national treasure helped fire the revolt that ended his rule.
Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed too wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. All the guests were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips. At the appointed moment a cannon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan’s mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches. The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.”
“For good reason, the Dutch have never been content to accept nature as they found it. Lacking in conventional charms and variety, the landscape of the Low Countries is spectacularly flat, monotonous, and swampy. “An universal quagmire” is how one Englishman described the place; “the buttock of the world.” What beauty there is in the Netherlands is largely the result of human effort: the dikes and canals built to drain the land, the windmills erected to interrupt the unbroken sweep of wind across it. In his famous essay on tulipomania, “The Bitter Smell of Tulips,” the poet Zbigniew Herbert suggests that the “monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colorful, and unusual flora.”
Such dreams could be indulged as never before in seventeenth-century Holland, as Dutch traders and plant explorers returned home with a parade of exotic new plant species. Botany became a national pastime, followed as closely and avidly as we follow sports today. This was a nation, and a time, in which a botanical treatise could become a best-seller and a plantsman like Clusius a celebrity.
Land in Holland being so scarce and expensive, Dutch gardens were miniatures, measured in square feet rather than acres and frequently augmented with mirrors. The Dutch thought of their gardens as jewel boxes, and in such a space even a single flower — and especially one as erect, singular, and strikingly colored as a tulip — could make a powerful statement.”
“What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that, as soon as it was discovered, doomed the beauty it had made possible. The color of a tulip actually consists of two pigments working in concert — a base color that is always yellow or white and a second laid-on color called an anthocyanin; the mix of these two hues determines the unitary color we see. The virus works by partially and irregularly suppressing the anthocyanin, thereby allowing a portion of the underlying color to show through. It wasn’t until the 1920s, after the invention of the electron microscope, that scientists discovered the virus was being spread from tulip to tulip by Myzus persicae, the peach potato aphid. Peach trees were a common feature of seventeenth-century gardens.
By the 1920s the Dutch regarded their tulips as commodities to trade rather than jewels to display, and since the virus weakened the bulbs it infected (the reason the offsets of broken tulips were so small and few in number), Dutch growers set about ridding their fields of the infection. Color breaks, when they did occur, were promptly destroyed, and a certain peculiar manifestation of natural beauty abruptly lost its claim on human affection.”
“Now, instead of relying on wind or water to move genes around, a plant could enlist the help of an animal by striking a grand coevolutionary compact: nutrition in exchange for transportation. With the advent of the flower, whole new levels of complexity come into the world: more interdependence, more information, more communication, more experimentation.
The evolution of plants proceeded according to a new motive force: attraction between different species. Now natural selection favored blooms that could rivet the attention of pollinators, fruit that appealed to foragers. The desires of other creatures became paramount in the evolution of plants, for the simple reason that the plants that succeeded at gratifying those desires wound up with more offspring. Beauty had emerged as a survival strategy.
The new rules speeded the rate of evolutionary change. Bigger, brighter, sweeter, more fragrant: all these qualities were quickly rewarded under the new regime. But so was specialization. Since bestowing one’s pollen on an insect that might deliver it to the wrong address (such as the blossoms of unrelated species) was wasteful, it became an advantage to look and smell as distinctive as possible, the better to command the undivided attention of a single, dedicated pollinator. Animal desire was thus parsed and subdivided, plants specialized accordingly, and an extraordinary flowering of diversity took place, much of it under the signs of co-evolution and beauty.
With flowers came fruit and seeds, and these, too, remade life on Earth. By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.”
Cannabis
“Some plant toxins, such as nicotine, paralyze or convulse the muscles of pests who ingest them. Others, such as caffeine, unhinge an insect’s nervous system and kill its appetite. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant’s predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures’ mind off lunch. Compounds called flavonoids change the taste of plant flesh on the tongues of certain animals, rendering the sweetest fruit sour or the sourest flesh sweet, depending on the plant’s designs. Photosensitizers present in species such as the wild parsnip cause the animals that eat it to burn in the sun; chromosomes exposed to these compounds spontaneously mutate when exposed to ultraviolet light. A molecule present in the sap of a certain tree prevents caterpillars that sample its leaves from ever growing into butterflies.”
“According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. Siegel suggests that some of these adventurous animals served as our Virgils in the garden of psychoactive plants. Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed that their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans or Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them “jaguar eyes.””
“Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells” — in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen), These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based lilying ointment that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.”
“Even in Grandmother’s garden you’re apt to find datura and morning glories (the seeds of which some Indians consume as a sacramental hallucinogen) and opium poppies — right there, the makings of a witch’s flying ointment or apothecary’s tonic. The knowledge that once attended these powerful plants, however, has all but vanished.
And as soon as this plant knowledge is restored to consciousness — as soon as, say, one forms the intention of slitting the head of an opium poppy to release its narcotic sap — so too must be its taboo. Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal — unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.”
“Growing any amount of marijuana in Oklahoma qualifies a gardener for a life sentence.
Jail time would not be my only worry were I so foolish as to reprise my experiment. If the New Milford police chief happened to find marijuana growing in my garden today, he would have the power to seize my house and land, regardless of whether I was ultimately convicted of a crime.”
“Most of the marijuana smoked in America was grown in Mexico until the mid-1970s, when the Mexican government, at the behest of the United States, began spraying the crop with the herbicide paraquat. About the same time, the U.S. government began cracking down on pot smugglers. With foreign supplies contracting and the safety of Mexican marijuana in doubt, a large market for domestically grown marijuana suddenly opened up. In a sense, the rapid emergence of a domestic marijuana industry represents a triumph of protectionism.
In the beginning, domestic marijuana was grossly inferior to the imported product. Part of the problem was that most early growers did what I did: plant seeds picked out of pot that had been grown in tropical places. Invariably these were the seeds of Cannabis sativa, an equatorial species poorly adapted to life in the northern latitudes. Sativa can’t withstand frost and, as I discovered, usually won’t set flowers north of the thirtieth parallel. Working with such seeds, growers found it difficult to produce a high-quality domestic crop (and especially sinsemilla) outside places such as California and Hawaii.
The search was on for a type of marijuana that would flourish, and flower, farther north, and by the end of the decade, it had been found. American hippies traveling “the hashish trail” through Afghanistan returned with seeds of Cannabis indica, a stout, frost- tolerant species that had been grown for centuries by hashish producers in the mountains of central Asia. The species looks quite unlike the familiar marijuana plant (a distinct advantage to its early growers): it rarely grows taller than four or five feet (as compared to fifteen for the stateliest satias), and its purplish green leaves are shorter and rounder than the long, slender fingers of sativa. Indica also proved to be exceptionally potent, although many people will tell you that its smoke is harsher and its high more physically debilitating than that of sativa. Even so, the introduction of indica to America proved a boon, since it allowed growers in all fifty states to cultivate sinsemilla for the first time.
Some indicas will flower reliably as far north as Alaska. Initially, indicas were grown by themselves. But enterprising growers soon discovered that by crossing the new species with Cannabis sativa, it was possible to produce vigorous hybrids that would combine the most desirable traits of each plant while downplaying its worst. The smoother taste and “clear, belllike high” associated with the best equatorial sativas, for example, could be combined with the superior potency and hardiness of an indica. The result was what Robert Connell Clarke, a marijuana botanist I met in Amsterdam, calls “the great revolution” in cannabis genetics.
In a wave of innovative breeding performed around 1980, most of it by amateurs working in California and the Pacific Northwest, the modern American marijuana plant was born. Even today the sativa X indica hybrids developed during this period — including Northern Lights, Skunk #1, Big Bud, and California Orange — are regarded as the benchmarks of modern marijuana breeding; they remain the principal genetic lines with which most subsequent breeders have worked. Nowadays American cannabis genetics are widely regarded as the world’s best; they are the basis of the thriving cannabis seed trade in Holland, as the American growers I met there were quick to point out. Yet without the Dutch to safeguard and disseminate these strains, the important genetic work done by American breeders would probably have been lost by now, scattered to the winds by the drug war.”
“Until the early 1980s, almost all the marijuana grown in America was grown outdoors: in the hills of California’s Humboldt County, in the cornfields of the farm belt (cannabis and corn thrive under similar conditions), in backyards just about everywhere — and a lot more of it than anybody realized. In 1982 the Reagan administration was chagrined to discover that the amount of domestic marijuana being seized was actually a third higher than its official estimate of the total American crop. Shortly thereafter, the administration launched an ambitious nationwide program — enlisting local law enforcement agencies and, for the first time, the armed forces — to crush the domestic marijuana industry.
Though the government’s campaign failed to eradicate marijuana farming, it did change the rules of the game, forcing both the plant and its growers to adapt: “The government pushed us all indoors,” a grower from Indiana told me. And it was there, under the blazing metal halide lights, that Cannabis sativa X indica attained a kind of perfection.
The early indoor gardeners had basically sought to bring outdoor conditions and practices inside, growing full-size plants in soil under a regimen of light and nutrients designed more or less to mimic those found in nature. Very soon, however, growers discovered that nature was, if anything, holding back this particular plant, retarding its full potential. By judiciously manipulating the five main environmental factors under their control — water, nutrients, light, carbon dioxide levels, and heat — as well as the genetics of the plant, growers found that the marijuana plant, this remarkably obliging weed, could be made to perform wonders.
Most of the hybridizing needed to adapt cannabis to indoor conditions was done in the early 1980s by amateurs working in the Pacific Northwest. Cultivars with a high proportion of indica genes performed especially well indoors, it was found, and these were further bred and selected for small stature, high yield, early flowering, and increased potency. No one knew just what this plant was capable of, but by the end of the decade there were sativa X indica hybrids yielding flowers big as fists on dwarf plants no higher than your knee. During this period, cannabis genetics improved to the point where it was no longer unusual to find sinsemilla with concentrations of THC, marijuana’s principal psychoactive compound, as high as 15 percent. (Before the crackdown on marijuana growers, THC levels in ordinary marijuana ranged from 2 to 3 percent, according to the DEA; for sinsemilla, 5 to 8 percent.) Nowadays THC levels upward of 20 percent are not unheard of.”
“In the 1980s growers discovered they could speed photosynthesis by supplying plants with all the nutrients, carbon dioxide, and light they could handle — vast amounts, as it turned out. (Cannabis is, after all, a weed.) Gardeners found that their plants could absorb hundreds of thousands of lumens — a blinding amount of light-twenty-four hours a day. Later on, by abruptly slashing their diet of light to twelve hours daily (and changing from metal halide to sodium lights, the frequency of which more closely mimics the autumn sun), growers could shock their plants into flowering before they were eight weeks old. With the right equipment, an indoor grower could create a utopia for his plants, an artificial habitat more perfect than any in nature, and his happy, happy weeds would respond.
These sedulous attentions would be wasted on male plants, which are worse than useless in sinsemilla production. As long as a female marijuana plant remains unpollinated, it will continue to produce new calyxes, steadily adding to the length of its flower. In this state of perpetual sexual frustration, the plant also continues to produce large quantities of THC-rich resins. But allow even a few grains of pollen to reach the plant’s flowers, and the process abruptly stops: bud and resin production shuts down, the plant commences producing seeds — and the sinsemilla is ruined.
Growers who start their plants from seed rogue out the males as soon as they declare their gender, but since this doesn’t happen until the plants mature, much time and space are wasted growing males. The solution was to plant clones instead of seeds — cuttings taken from established female “mother” plants.”
“After my eyes adjusted to the light, I stepped into a windowless chamber not much bigger than a walk-in closet, crammed with electrical equipment, snaked with cables and plastic tubing, and completely sealed off from the world: More than half the room was taken up by the gardener’s Sea of Green: a six-foot-square table invisible beneath a jungle of dark, serrated leaves oscillating gently in an artificial breeze. There were perhaps a hundred clones here, each barely a foot tall, yet already sending forth a thick finger of hairy calyxes, casting about vainly for a few grains of airborne pollen. A network of narrow plastic pipes supplied the plants with water, a tank of CO2 sweetened their air, a ceramic heater warmed their roots at night, and four 600-watt sodium fixtures bathed them in a blaze of light for twelve hours of every day. The other twelve, they were sealed in perfect darkness. The briefest lapse of light, the gardener informed me gravely, would ruin the whole crop.”
“With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn’t a people on Earth who doesn’t use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn’t use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. (As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimo to fermented grain, he immediately joined the consciousness changers.) What this suggests is that the desire to alter one’s experience of consciousness may be universal.
Nor is the desire limited to adults. Andrew Weil, who has written two valuable books treating consciousness changing “as a basic human activity,” points out that even young children seek out altered states of awareness. They will spin until violently dizzy (thereby producing visual hallucinations), deliberately hyperventilate, throttle one another to the point of fainting, inhale any fumes they can find, and, on a daily basis, seek the rush of energy supplied by processed sugar (sugar being the child’s plant drug of choice).
As the examples from childhood suggest, using drugs is not the only way to achieve altered states of consciousness. Activities as different as meditation, fasting, exercise, amusement park rides, horror movies, extreme sports, sensory or sleep deprivation, chanting, music, eating spicy foods, and taking extreme risks of all kinds have the power to change the texture of our mental experience to one degree or another. We may eventually discover that what psychoactive plants do to the brain closely resembles, at a biochemical level, the effects of these other activities.”
“Ronald Siegel, the animal intoxication expert, has shown that animals who get high on plants tend to be more accident prone, more vulnerable to predators, and less likely to attend to their offspring.”
“A select group of psychoactive plants and fungi (among them the peyote cactus, the Amanita muscaria and psilocybin mushrooms, the ergot fungus, the fermented grape, ayahuasca, and cannabis) were present at the creation of several of the world’s religions. One of the world’s earliest known religions was the cult of Soma, practiced by the ancient Indo-Europeans of central Asia; according to its sacred text, the Rig Veda, Soma was an intoxicant with the powers of a god. People worshiped the drug itself — which ethnobotanists now think was Amanita muscaria, the mushroom sometimes called fly agaric — as a path to divine knowledge.
Much the same process took place again and again all over the ancient world as people experimented, individually and in groups, with the power of plants to transcend the here and now and induce ecstasy — to take them elsewhere. What these peoples discovered was that certain plants or fungi (ethnobotanists call them “entheogens,” meaning “the god within”) opened a door onto another world. The images and words brought back from these journeys — visits with the souls of the dead and unborn, visions of the afterlife, answers to life’s questions — were powerful enough to compel belief in a spirit world and, in some cases, to serve as the foundation of whole religions.”
“Cannabis was one of the earliest plants to be domesticated (probably for fiber first, then as a drug); it has been coevolving with humankind for more than ten thousand years.”
“What is so unusual about cannabis’s coevolution (compared to that of the rose, say, or the apple) is that it followed two such divergent paths down to our time, each reflecting the influence of a completely different human desire. Along the first path (which appears to have begun in ancient China and moved west toward northern Europe, then on to the Americas), the plant was selected by people for the strength and length of its fibers. (Up until the last century, hemp was one of humankind’s main sources of paper and cloth.) Along the other path (which began somewhere in central Asia and moved down through India, then into Africa, and from there across to the Americas with the slaves and up to Europe with Napoleon’s army), cannabis was selected for its psychoactive and medicinal powers. Ten thousand years later, hemp and cannabis are as different as night and day: hemp produces negligible amounts of THC and cannabis a worthless fiber.”
“It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment. The cannabinoids are molecules with the power to make romantics and transcendentalists of us all. By disabling our moment-by-moment memory, which is ever pulling us off the astounding frontier of the present and throwing us back onto the mapped byways of the past, the cannabinoids open a space for something nearer to direct experience. By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelved our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time.”
“Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive — it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true — that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.”
“We don’t merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry — the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt of swallowing a pill containing nothing but sugar and belief. What all this suggests is that the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.”
“The fact that witches and sorcerers were the first Europeans to exploit the psychoactive powers of cannabis probably sealed its fate in the West as a drug identified with feared outsiders and cultures conceived in opposition: pagans, Africans, hippies.”
The Potato
“The not-so-distant future will, we’re told, bring us potatoes genetically modified to absorb less fat when fried, corn that can withstand drought, lawns that don’t ever have to be mowed, “golden rice” rich in Vitamin A, bananas and potatoes that deliver vaccines, tomatoes enhanced with flounder genes (to withstand frost), and cotton that grows in every color of the rainbow.”
“Genetic engineering promises to replace expensive and toxic chemicals with expensive but apparently benign genetic information: crops that, like my Newleafs, can protect themselves from insects and diseases without the help of pesticides.”
“A more or less vertical habitat presents special challenges to both plants and their cultivators, because the microclimate changes dramatically with every change in altitude or orientation to the sun and wind. A potato that thrives on one side of a ridge at one altitude will languish in another plot only a few steps away. No monoculture could succeed under such circumstances, so the Incas developed a method of farming that is monoculture’s exact opposite. Instead of betting the farm on a single cultivar, the Andean farmer, then as now, made a great many bets, at least one for every ecological niche. Instead of attempting, as most farmers do, to change the environment to suit a single optimal spud — the Russet Burbank, say — the Incas developed a different spud for every environment.
To Western eyes, the resulting farms look patchy and chaotic; the plots are discontinuous (a little of this growing here, a little of that over there), offering none of the familiar, Apollonian satisfactions of an explicitly ordered landscape. Yet the Andean potato farm represented an intricate ordering of nature that, unlike Versailles in 1999, say, or Ireland in 1845, can withstand virtually anything nature is apt to throw at it.
Since the margins and hedgerows of the Andean farm were, and still are, populated by weedy wild potatoes, the farmer’s cultivated varieties have regularly crossed with their wild relatives, in the process refreshing the gene pool and producing new hybrids. Whenever one of these new potatoes proves its worth — surviving a drought or storm, say, or winning praise at the dinner table — it is promoted from the margins to the fields and, in time, to the neighbors’ fields as well. Artificial selection is thus a continual local process, each new potato the product of an ongoing back-and-forth between the land and its cultivators.”
“In Germany, Frederick the Great had to force peasants to plant potatoes; so did Catherine the Great in Russia. Louis XVI took a subtler tack, reasoning that if he could just lend the humble spud a measure of royal prestige, peasants would experiment with it and discover its virtues. So Marie Antoinette took to wearing potato flowers in her hair, and Louis hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, however, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly convinced of the crop’s value, made off in the night with the royal tubers.
In time, all three nations would grow powerful on potatoes, which put an end to malnutrition and periodic famine in northern Europe and allowed the land to support a much larger population than it ever could have planted in grain. Since fewer hands were needed to farm it, the potato also allowed the countryside to feed northern Europe’s growing and industrializing cities. Europe’s center of political gravity had always been anchored firmly in the hot, sunny south, where wheat grew reliably; without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.”
“Dave Starck, one of Monsanto’s senior potato people, escorted me through the clean rooms where potatoes are genetically engineered. He explained that there are two ways of splicing foreign genes into a plant: by infecting it with agrobacterium, a pathogen whose modus operandi is to break into a plant cell’s nucleus and replace its DNA with some of its own, or by shooting it with a gene gun. For reasons not yet understood, the agrobacterium method seems to work best on broadleaf species such as the potato, the gene gun better on grasses, such as corn and wheat.
The gene gun is a strangely high-low piece of technology, but the main thing you need to know about it is that the gun here is not a metaphor: a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells’ nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place — and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is — the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. That’s it? That’s it.
Apart from its slightly more debonair means of entry, the agrobacterium works in much the same way. In the clean rooms, where the air pressure is kept artificially high to prevent errant microbes from wandering in, technicians sit at lab benches before petri dishes in which fingernail-sized sections of potato stem have been placed in a clear nutrient jelly. Into this medium they squirt a solution of agrobacteria, which have already had their genes swapped with the ones Monsanto wants to insert.”
“The whole operation, trom pet dish to transplant to greenhouse, is performed thousands of times, Glenda explained as we worked across a wheeled potting bench from each other, largely because there is so much uncertainty about the outcome, even after the DNA is accepted. If the new DNA winds up in the wrong place in the genome, for example, the new gene won’t be expressed, or it will be expressed only poorly. In nature — that is, in sexual reproduction genes move not one by one but in the company of associated genes that regulate their expression, turning them on and off. The transfer of genetic material is also much more orderly in sex, the process somehow ensuring that every gene ends up in its proper neighborhood and doesn’t trip over other genes in the process, inadvertently affecting their function. “Genetic instability” is the catchall term used to describe the various unexpected effects that misplaced or unregulated foreign genes can have on their new environment. These can range from the subtle and invisible (a particular protein is over- or under-expressed in the new plant, say) to the manifestly outlandish: Glenda sees a great many freaky potato plants.
Starck told me that the gene transfer “takes” anywhere between 10 percent and 90 percent of the time — an eyebrow-raising statistic. For some unknown reason (genetic instability?), the process produces a great deal of variability, even though it begins with a single, known, cloned strain of potato. “So we grow out thousands of different plants,” Glenda explained, “and then look for the best.” The result is often a potato that is superior in ways the presence of the new gene can’t explain.”
“The arrival of the blight was announced by the stench of rotting potatoes, a stench that became general in Ireland late in the summer of 1845, then again in ’46 and ’48. Its spores carried on the wind, the fungus would appear in a field literally overnight: a black spotting of the leaves followed by a gangrenous stain spreading down the plant’s stem; then the blackened tubers would turn to evil-smelling slime. It took but a few days for the fungus to scorch a green field black; even potatoes in storage succumbed.
The potato blight visited all of Europe, but only in Ireland did it produce a catastrophe. Elsewhere, people could turn to other staple foods when a crop failed, but Ireland’s poor, subsisting on potatoes and exiled from the cash economy, had no alternative. As is often the case in times of starvation, the problem was not quite so simple as a shortage of food. At the height of the famine, Ireland’s docks were heaped with sacks of corn destined for export to England. But the corn was a commodity, determined to follow the money; since the potato eaters had no money to pay for corn, it sailed for a country that did.
The potato famine was the worst catastrophe to befall Europe since the Black Death of 1348. Ireland’s population was literally decimated: one in every eight Irishmen — a million people — died of starvation in three years; thousands of others went blind or insane for lack of the vitamins potatoes had supplied. Because the poor laws made anyone who owned more than a quarter acre of land ineligible for aid, millions of Irish were forced to give up their farms in order to eat; uprooted and desperate, the ones with the energy and wherewithal emigrated to America. Within a decade, Ireland’s population was halved and the composition of America’s population permanently altered.
Contemporary accounts of the potato famine read like visions of Hell: streets piled with corpses no one had the strength to bury, armies of near-naked beggars who’d pawned their clothes for food, abandoned houses, deserted villages. Disease followed on famine: typhus, cholera, and purpura raced unchecked through the weak ened population. People ate weeds, ate pets, ate human flesh. “The roads are beset with tattered skeletons,” one witness wrote “God help the people.””
“Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, but they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper. Potatoes, like apples, are clones, which means that every Lumper was genetically identical to every other Lumper, all of them descended from a single plant that just happened to have no resistance to Phytophthora infestans. The Incas too built a civilization atop the potato, but they cultivated such a polyculture of potatoes that no one fungus could ever have toppled it. In fact, it was to South America that, in the aftermath of the famine, breeders went to look for potatoes that could resist the blight. And there, in a potato called the Garnet Chile, they found it.”
