Plow to Plate Film Series Presents: The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire, a film based on Michael Pollan’s best-selling book of the same name, finds common ground in four very different plants: apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes. Each, it seems, in its own unique way, has capitalized on a different thread of human desire to further its own evolutionary success.

The apple was able to spread beyond its own humble origins in Kazakhstan in Central Europe by appealing to humans’ sweet tooth. The potato overcame its isolation in South American because it’s an ideal food staple and appealed to humans’ desire to control. Tulips succeeded beyond their natural habitats in Central Asia because of their aesthetic beauty and marijuana proliferated because of its power to alter human consciousness. Pollan tells each plant’s story in four separate chapters, each with its own fascinating history. 

For most of their history apples were a bitter fruit, considered evil not just because Adam was tempted by one (the bible is actually vague on the particulars but it was more likely to have been a pomegranate) but because since the sweet apple was a rarity, their primary use was to be distilled into alcoholic cider. 

Through grafting man learned to produce a consistently sweet fruit. With the help of a little good PR and marketing (the legend of Johnny Appleseed who was actually a real person and expressions like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”) apples are now universally beloved.

Tulipmania, one of the world’s first financial bubbles, took place in Holland from 1634 to 1637. Tulips, an exotic flower from a distant land were the thing to have in your garden if you were a Dutch elite. At its height, a single rare type of tulip bulb was worth as much as a Grand Canal house (equivalent to a New York City Fifth Avenue town house).

The bubble finally burst one day when at auction no one bid and the prices came crashing down. A flower bulb was once again just a flower bulb.  Despite this set back, tulips today comprise a large part of the global demand for fresh cut flowers. Today, as in the 17th century, tulips continue to have their devotees and many people make their living by breeding them to produce new and exciting colors. 

Cannabis, a lowly weed, was legal in America in the 19th century, an ingredient in many a medicinal tincture. In the early 20th century it was mostly associated with the African American jazz scene of New Orleans. It was not until the 1960s that its use exploded.  Today it’s one of the most popular drugs, as well as the heart of a multi-billion dollar legal and illegal global industry. 

Potatoes are uniquely capable of feeding millions of people while taking up minimal acreage. A farmer can feed his family for a year by planting potatoes on a half-acre plot. When in 1845 a fungus landed on Irish soil turning the potatoes in the fields into a black mush – the Great Potato Famine - one million people, or an eighth of the country’s population, perished.  

Each of these plants has a different story, and that of the potato, in particular, allows Pollan to lecture on the fragility and dangers of mono-cultures, as he has done in many other food related documentaries. Together though they illustrate a larger and more philosophical point that is not part of the standard lexicon about the food system, namely that some plants use us just as certainly as we use them. 

Human beings may think we are in charge, believing, as the book of Genesis in The Bible tells us, we are to replenish and subdue the earth, having dominion over fish, fowl, and every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

But Pollan makes a clever and quite convincing argument of a more Buddhist nature. Humans do not sit apart from the rest of God’s creations. We are an integral part of the web of life.  

The Botany of Desire will be screened Tuesday, April 9, in the second floor meeting room at the Park Slope Food Coop, 782 Union St, at 7 p.m. All Plow to Plate film screenings are free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.