By Shahar Shiloah
Translated by Deanna L'am
Illusion of Mastery
Domesticated dogs, cows that produce extra milk, hybrid plants, crossed tomato plants that produce particularly red and large tomatoes – we, human beings, think we harnessed them all to our service.
We tend to think they serve us for the purpose of our prosperity, and not the other way around.
A domesticated and seemingly spoiled dog is considered inferior to a wild wolf wondering the forest, but actually the dog won one over the wolf – it stands no threat to its survival.
Michael Polan, author of
The Botanic Of Desire, offers a different point of view regarding the development of plant and wild life in a human environment.
From A Plant’s Point Of View
Polan looks at the world from a plant’s point of view. If we do the same, we may find, among other things, that there are plants (and animals) that use us in order to realize the “desire” common to all living beings on earth: to spread themselves as much as possible, and to improve genetically so that they can survive in changing conditions. An example is grasses such as wheat and corn, which developed into tastier and more nutritious plants, and thereby “caused” humans to cut forests down for them.
In The Botanic Of Desire Polan uses four human desires, and four plants, to demonstrate how plants benefit from humans’ desires in order to increase, spread, and improve themselves.
Apples use the desire for sweetness, tulips the desire for beauty, marijuana uses the desire for intoxication, and potatoes the desire for control. Each of these plants played a role in world politics and economics, and occasionally run into the law.
If we examine what marijuana went through since it became illegal, we’ll find that new varieties, suitable for domestic growing, were developed, and were grown in places where they didn’t grow before the police started showing interest. To growers’ delight, they also contained much higher concentration of THC, the active component.
Looking At The Apple
If we focus on the apple we’ll find that this mischief stars in Western history, probably not by accident. Genesis doesn’t specify that the fruit of the Tree Of Knowledge was an apple, but ancient people’s desire for this particular fruit was fixed thanks to Christian art.
One of the explanations for this is the Latin name for the apple: Malus. This is the origin of the words Malice and Malicious. When temptation is negative, malicious women such as the step-mother, use rosy-cheeked apples to send Snow White into deep sleep. When temptation is positive, the apple becomes a term of endearment, like in New York’s nickname: The Big Apple.
In the
Song Of Solomon, the nameless beloved, whose smell is that of apples, “cuddles up to her beloved under the apple tree,” while he is described as “an apple among the trees of the forest.” The wise apple succeeded in reaching far away from its birthplace, the Caucasus, to most parts of the world.
Polan didn’t go very far into history. He was satisfied with the history of the U.S. and the real, if mythological, character of John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed.
Chapman was a nineteen-century pioneer who spread apple seedlings in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, following the advancement of settlements in what used to be the frontier.
The apples that ripened on Chapman’s sprouted trees were nearly the only source of “sweets” for the pioneers. Unlike nowadays, America didn’t have sugar then. The apples were both a sweet, and the material from which settlers made apple cider, an alcohol that raised their spirit in the context of a harsh daily existence.
The trees gave settlers a sense of home, since they reminded them of the Old World of Europe from where they arrived. This, too, is a sort of sweetness.
Johnny Appleseed made a lot of money from his apple business, but was much more than a shrewd businessman. What made him a mythological character was his unusual way of life: he slept in nature in any weather, saw animals as friends rather than enemies, and therefore didn’t eat meat (this was much different from the settlers, who perceived nature as a threat, which needed conquering), he liked children and Native Americans, and used plants to heal the sick and wounded.
Contrary to conventional agricultural methods, Chapman’s apple seedlings were not genetically identical. Apples have a similar quality to that of human beings – no two identical seeds can be found in any one apple, and thus a single tree can produce thousands of apples that will differ in size, taste, and fruit shape.
If you cut an apple sideways, you’ll discover a star, with a tiny genetic warehouse for different apple trees in each of its rays. There is no way of knowing which “off spring” will come out of the apple you bit into. In order to get a tree identical to an existing one, a plant needs to be grown from a shooting or cutting, not from seed.
But Johnny Appleseed, like his name, used seeds just as nature does, and was responsible for birthing infinite varieties of trees. By this he actually ensured the absorption of the tree of sweetness in America. The genetic diversity allowed for survival of varieties that were suited to the land and weather, and the extinction of those that weren’t.
In time, white Americans, who of course warmly adopted the sweet fruit, were busy crossing and developing varieties that produce desired fruits – not only sweet, but beautiful, large, and resistant. They planted wide orchards, which are genetically monotonous. Apples became an inseparable part of American culture, owing to their sugar content. The classic apple pie, “The Big Apple,” Apple software company, and the saying: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” are all a testament to this fact.
Taking Responseability
The fact that plants “use” us for their needs doesn’t release us from responsibility to the environmental damage we are causing. Ironically, conventional agriculture, which hurts some species for the benefit of others, is one of the most environmentally damaging industries. Polan reminds us that without plants, in particularly flowers, we could not survive. Grasses and weeds that seem useless to us are part of a mechanism, which is tightly connected to our evolution: if there were no flowers, there would be no fruits.
If there were no fruits, the world would offer us limited nutrition, which would be unable to support the development of the human brain. In fact, the desire for sweetness has evolutionary logic – it allows us, and other animals, to be attracted to foods that supply good amounts of energy.
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