Sweet Tooth and Chocolate Pig

The Botany of Desire
By Michael Pollan

Published in 2001 by Random House
Today's Assigned Reading: Chapter one (p3-59)
Otherwise known as Desire: Sweetness, Plant: The Apple

In this chapter, Pollan interweaves the story of Johnny Appleseed with the history of the apple, from its roots in Kazakhstan (p53) to Europe and then over to North America (p20). He also tells of how the apples of centuries ago progressed from being bitter and inedible, useful only to be made into cider to the modern day edible- fruited apple and the success of the marketing strategy "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" (p22).

I found his narration to be a little too loose for my tastes, and somewhat hard to follow... although that may have been my fault as I was a little illucid at the time when I read this chapter. However I did find his history of the apple to be quite fascinating!

This weekend I hiked up Tranquille Creek and to my surprise in this most-travelled of destinations, I found three beaver dams, the remains of an old homestead... and one stubborn old apple tree, all bent and knarled and twisted but alive nonetheless. How long ago was it that this apple was planted, and what sort of fruit does it yield!?

And what of the ancient settler that planted it - what was their reasons for growing an apple tree not twenty feet from their front porch? In Pollan’s own words, “a taste for sweetness appears to be universal” (p19). And like the ancient settlers of yesteryear, I too desire sweetness.

It’s poetic, really, that I am sitting here reading this chapter and cursing myself for breaking my four-year fast of chocolate. Well, now I'm chowing down upon – what else – an apple, trying to get over the vertigo I am currently feeling. And why you ask, why am I experiencing such spectacular vertigo that I cannot bear to watch people moving around me, much less to move my head from side to side? Well, that’s because I cannot get over my sweet tooth. And not even a very sweet tooth I have!

Perhaps I should backup and explain. About four years ago I developed an irritating and unwanted sensitivity to sugars – white, brown, cane, maple… even honey! Immediately upon consuming even the slightest bit of sugar my head would start to spin and all semblance of concentration would be lost. So, after swiftly figuring out why I felt so ill was due to eating sugar, I reluctantly stopped. No more sugar, no more bread (which requires sugar for the yeast to make the bread rise), no more molasses cookies, no more flavoured potato chips (which I must say, are loaded with sugar)… and definitely no more chocolate.

Well, OK, every few months or so I’d break and have a little bit, perhaps some chocolate here, a cookie there… but very soon after I’d be reminded of why I stopped eating sugar in the first place and that’d be enough to get me to stop for the next few months.

So you can imagine my happiness at how over this past reading week I had more than my usual amount of chocolate-dusted roasted almonds - and felt quite fine! Perhaps I’ve out-grown the sugar issue (I thought), maybe it’s gone away on its own. So you can imagine why, on this past Sunday night when I found a chocolate bar that’d been hidden from last year that I just had to have a piece.

For me, that first bite of refined sugar, the sweetness of the chocolate – after four years in self-enforced sugar purgatory, wow. Can you blame me for eating some more??
Reveling in the sweetness I promptly I ate ¼ of the chocolate bar - it wasn’t even that big to begin with! Then I went to bed.

Well, the next morning (yesterday) when I got out of bed and stood up – that is to say, attempted to stand up... and fell back down again. Everything was spinning and it wasn’t me that was moving! This vertigo continued all through the day and into the next. Even now, it still hasn't gone away, not really. So… I guess I cannot have sugar after all :(

It's back to apples for me.

I guess what I’m trying to say with the above narrative is that I sympathize with the American settlers. With no other source of sugar but that from hard apple cider or the rare sweet-tasting apple fruit, in comparison to vegetables, those apples sure taste darn good. But with regards to that sweet tooth, how even sweeter things are desired – say cheap sugar, cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup… I can totally see why the apple tree was given up in favor of the even more compacted sweetness of refined sugar. And I can especially see how those people who, without restraint, could easily pack on the pounds. Because historically, all there was apple cider *sigh*. And I cannot even have that.