The Botany of Desire

The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times best-selling author of Cooked and The Omnivores Dilemma, one of America's most trusted food experts

Every schoolchild learns the mutually beneficial dance of bees and flowers: the bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similar reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four basic human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. By telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how plants have evolved to satisfy humanity's most basic yearnings. And just as we have benefited from these plants, we have also succeeded well with them. So, who is really domesticating whom?