Home » Gardening Information » Book Reviews
Garden Reading—The Botany of Desire
Plants & Gardens News | Volume 24, Number 3 | Fall/Winter 2009
by Elizabeth Peters
Does it seem like recently author Michael Pollan is everywhere? Speaking on the radio and on movie screens, writing in the pages of the New York Times and National Geographic, and leading Q&A events on Facebook, the environmental writer—whose last two books, The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) and In Defense of Food (2008), remain in the Times' nonfiction top 20—keeps popping up, calling upon us to consider our role in the web of nature.
The Botany of Desire
Produced and directed by Michael Schwarz
Airing on PBS October 28, 8–10 p.m.
PBS Video. 2009.
DVD: $24.99;
Blu-ray: $29.99
This fall, Pollan reinterprets two of his award-winning books for new audiences. Dial Books is releasing a young readers' edition of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and public television will broadcast a version of The Botany of Desire (2001), produced as a two-hour documentary by Michael Schwarz.
I've been a fan of Michael Pollan ever since reading the chapter in his first book, Second Nature (1991), that details his battle with groundhogs. In 1991, I was working on an organic farm in Pennsylvania, where those relentless rodents could take out an acre of lovingly tended transplants overnight. When I started working at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, an ecology-minded friend pressed his copy of The Botany of Desire into my hand, and I found it an entertaining and thought-provoking reintroduction to plant science and the relationships between people and plants.
Like the book, the documentary opens with Pollan in his garden, planting potatoes. As bees buzz among the apple blossoms, he realizes that he and the bees are all hard at work in the service of plants. Setting aside his usual perspective and adopting "a plant's eye view" leads Pollan to wonder: What if we don't give plants enough credit? We believe we've domesticated plants, but what if instead they've domesticated us?
Shot in glorious HD and narrated by Frances McDormand, the show whisks viewers around the globe and through history, while an interview with Pollan guides us through an assemblage of stories about what he calls "the dance of domestication." The film follows the book's structure, with sections devoted to four human desires and particular plants that gratify them: sweetness, the apple; beauty, the tulip; intoxication, cannabis; and control, the potato. Each segment offers some botanical concepts, an exploration of human needs, and background on our historical relationship with the plant, and introduces individuals who are working in service of these species.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat
By Michael Pollan
Dial Books for Young Readers. 2009.
Hardcover: $17.99;
Paperback: $9.99.
Wait—do you really want to eat that? The young readers' edition of The Omnivore's Dilemma adapts Pollan's best-selling exploration of the food chain, now offering graphics and photos, updated facts, and new backmatter just for kids.
The book is presented squarely in Pollan's voice, as his journey of discovery, but the documentary takes a more objective stance. Subjects speak for themselves, and the off-screen narrator fills in the detail. In this Botany of Desire, Pollan already knows the answers: He sets up segments and shows up periodically to offer his particular take or restate a central theme. Personally, I missed his sense of sometimes self-deprecating discovery that carried me through the book in a sort of complicit partnership.
The film doesn't track directly to the book but instead updates facts and offers new stories and subjects, such as cider entrepreneur Stephen Wood and an anonymous couple who grow marijuana for medical use (legal in their state but proscribed by federal law). The potato story in particular is significantly recast: The book focused on the troubling concept of patenting seeds, but that story lost its punch when seed supplier Montsanto pulled its New Leaf potato off the market in 2001 (after much anti-GMO outcry). The documentary instead focuses on the comparison of chemically enhanced and organic farming methods, concluding that organic may be more labor intensive but can net more profit per acre.
The documentary plays to the strengths of the visual medium, offering breathtaking close-ups of plants, both staged and in nature; aerial shots of cultivated and natural areas; and action sequences of cultivating, harvesting, warehousing, and experimenting. It takes us places we wouldn't otherwise be able to go and makes vivid the various processes of plant stewardship, such as those undertaken by the individuals Pollan terms "the best gardeners of my generation."
My key beef with the book was Pollan's choice to anthropomorphize plants, and this seems even more pervasive in the documentary. Yes, I understand that it's just a friendly device to help us put ourselves in the plants' "roots." About four minutes in, Pollan tells us that it's just a metaphor, that of course plants don't have consciousness; in the summary he restates this. But throughout the program plants are described as active agents, getting us to do their bidding, changing themselves to better exploit our weaknesses. This is not how nature works.
This oversimplification reflects the challenges of condensing a complex, 250-page book into a two-hour program. Still, it's great that it will air for prime-time television viewers. It is one more opportunity for Pollan to redress what he sees as a failure of our imagination, asking us to shift our perspective, to step outside ourselves and see humans as participants in the biotic community rather then the center of it.
Elizabeth Peters is the director of Publications at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.