This was a fascinating read. The author takes four well-known and reasonably widely-used plants and examines how they have evolved to appeal to humans for their — the plant’s — own benefit.
The apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato have all moved from their original centers of diversity to their current distributions with our help, based on properties humans found valuable. In the apple, it was sweetness in a time before cheap and plentiful processed cane sugar. The apples planted by John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) were planted from seed, rather than grafted rootstocks, ensuring that new apple varieties would emerge, rather than the clones that we see today. A by-product of this was cider, both sweet and alcoholic, the latter of which was why the temperance movement’s symbol was an axe. While cider was a wholesome product where water was unreliable, it could be transformed into a more heady beverage and often was. The axe was for levelling orchards, not breaking down saloon doors.
In the tulip, it was beauty, but ironically, the desired trait was caused by a virus. Anyone who has read about tulipomania is familiar with most of this.
Marijuana offered intoxication, but at the same time, a kind of clarity. It seems that the active ingredient in the plant — THC — has an internal counterpart that uses the same receptor network as the inhaled variety. The benefits are a kind of forgetfulness, a de-emphasis on the peripheral (you don’t remember all you see: quick, recite all the license tags you’ve seen today) and an increased focus on the here and now (cue image of stoner staring at his thumb in wonderment). The details about how much is produced and how strong it is — THC yields are as high as 20% where they were 2-3% 20 years ago — are a fascinating look at how plant breeding works. The plants bred today are a cross of a robust but non-intoxicating variety and a desirable but less robust one: now it’s possible to grow your own as far north as Alaska.
The potato chapter was horrifying in a lot of ways. The details of the Irish potato famine and it’s roots in a monoculture were an eye-opener. But the situation is not all the dissimilar today with a couple of varieties being grown almost exclusively and breeding/genetic manipulation being performed such that Monsanto’s NewLeaf potato isn’t classified as a vegetable, but as a pesticide. That’s right: the natural pesticide BT (bacillus thuringiensis) is engineered into the plant, moving it from the pantry to the shelf next to the WD-40 and paint-thinner. The worst of this is that if insects in the field develop a resistance to BT — as they will — we could find ourselves powerless against them within 30 years. At that point, we may have to go all-organic — using natural predators and avoiding the questionable efficiency of corporate monoculture farming, or die.
The discussion of how laced with chemicals the growing process is almost made me ill: it’s not unlike hydroponic gardening with the soil used as a medium for chemicals and water.
The author, a gardener himself, got some NewLeaf seeds to plant and while he was pleased with their yield, he couldn’t bring himself to eat them.
A really insightful and informative book, and one that inspires further reading and investigation.