Want some flounder with your tomatoes?

The Botany of Desire
By Michael Pollan
Published in 2001 by Random House

Today's Assigned Reading: Chapter Four (p181-238)
Otherwise known as Desire: Control, Plant: The Potato

In this eloquent and casually written essay, Pollan interweaves his historical narrative about the potato with examples of how people have attempted and are currently attempting to control nature, plants, animals, economies, and ultimately people and societies.

For example, he discusses how the strength of large-scale industrial monoculture relies upon massive inputs of synthetic compounds and similar machinations. By following the train of logic that suggests genetically modified foods are critical to feed the world because their modifications will relieve farmers of the need to use these synthetic inputs, Pollan got me to understand and even sympathize with the conventional farmer — he almost got me thinking that maybe GM crops were a good thing.

But next ……… next, Pollan shatters this idea with a terrible and stark reality — this is not the only way to grow food! For example, organic farmers do NOT use massive amounts of synthetic inputs; they hardly use any at all! And furthermore, their farms are sustainable, alive, and producing yields equal to that of conventional farmers (p224)!

So why doesn't all our food come from organic farms? Well, there is a very simple answer to this question, and yet it is a very complex one. This answer is best summarized by the name "Monsanto," but really is a matter of how we as consumers are willing to buy what such massive multinational corporations offer us. By giving them the power of our purchase, we allow them to dictate what is available, what is the norm, and what is acceptable in society. Basically we have given faceless, nameless corporations — whose main goal is to make money — utter control of a critical resource that every single human on this planet needs to survive: food.

This multinational control is particularly well demonstrated by the case of the Russet Burbank potato. As dictated by McDonald's, fries must be made of this potato. However, as this variety is particularly vulnerable to net necrosis (p226), farmers must frequently load up their spray guns and douse their plants with pesticides so toxic that they'd rather loose their crop than go near a recently sprayed field (p219).

Shocking, eh? Well, it gets better (or worse, depending upon your perspective…). When Pollan asked a nearby organic farmer how he gets around this disease without applying any pesticides, he replied "That's only really a problem with Russet Burbank's… So I plant other kinds" (p 226).

To this I thought WHAAAAAAAAAAAT? A national; no, an INTERNATIONAL corporation with stores in almost every country of the world is DEMANDING their farmers grow varieties that require multiple applications of several different TOXIC and LETHAL pesticides, all to make the perfect french fry????

Er…… what else, aside from potato and veggie oil and salt (the listed ingredients) was in that french fry I ate yesterday?

Furthermore, how the blazes can this have occurred? How screwed up IS our food system — how can people allow this to happen? How is this morally, socially, environmentally or ethically acceptable? Surely the perfect french fry is not worth this much.

But no, someone wants to get rich and control the market and screw up our future's food supply — and then they say "trust us". Um… I want to point out — if someone representing a massive multinational corporation that has its fingers in every part of the food system's pie asks you to trust them, would YOU? WOULD YOU?


Another part of this narrative that especially worried me was the eventuality of insects developing resistance to genetically modified crops, in addition to other conventional pesticides. Monsanto estimates this will occur, at the latest, in thirty years (p215). Um, I'll be 50 then, and still around to see this happen. So this makes me worried as it'll definitely occur in my lifetime — what'll my food look like then?

With regard to the issue, Pollan raises this question regarding the use of crops GM'd to produce Bt - should Monsanto be promoting resistance to one of the safest organic pesticides around? In my opinion, this is essentially like shooting our grandchildren in the foot.

Furthermore, what right has Monsanto to destroy Nature's own pest-control mechanism, one that has been used by farmers since the 1930s to keep crops organic and plants safe from marauding pests (p215)?In light of this horrifying thought, I would like to offer a personal addition to the notion of wide-scale resistance — such resistance will have a far greater impact than just upon our food.

For three months last summer, I patrolled around the Thompson and Okanagan valleys looking for the West Nile Virus. Basically, I collected mosquitos and dead birds and shipped them off for testing at the BCCDC in Vancouver. But West Nile is not what I want to talk about here - I want to talk about the density of mosquitos in the city. While last spring was very wet and in some places in the country the bugs were horrendous, their densities were kept pretty low in the city thanks to my mosquito-killing counterparts.

Beginning in mid-April, teams all across the Interior were out killing mosquitoes using Btk, a variation of the chemical produced by Bt-impregnated potatoes. In this case, bacterial spores are caked upon corn grits and are applied to water bodies when mosquito larvae are present in high enough numbers to warrant treatment. Aside from killing 99.9% of mosquito larvae, this "pesticide*" is pretty amazing as it only affects mosquitos and black flies in their larval stage; it harms no other critters. For example, my boss has two dogs and they have eaten the grits many times to no ill effect. Even better, the killed mosquito larvae provide a non-toxic food source for local fish and insectivores!

Now imagine if mosquitoes became resistant to Bt… Consider first the efficacy of this product — it is about 99.9%, meaning that about one out of every thousand mosquito larvae survives treatment. Next, I encourage you to remember the occasional mosquito you saw from your sun deck last summer — and multiply it by a thousand. Now, please visualize a whole horde of mosquitos dive-bombing you and making your life a miserable living hell.

I don't know if mosquitos would become resistant to Bt, but this is one thing I know I do NOT want to experience.

As you can probably tell, I thought this chapter was bloody disturbing, especially due to Pollan's comparison between conventional GMO farms and Mike Heath's organic farm. If people would simply chose to eat different things (i.e., not french fries), maybe we wouldn't need to screw up our environment in such a way and maybe we could all eat organic too.


Well, Lyn, you wanted emotion in the writing — you've gotten it from me. I am just a little bit disturbed and ticked off and seriously disheartened by this reading… Monsanto sure has done a good job at getting us to swallow what they feed us, both literally and figuratively.

*if you want to get your hands upon some of this "pesticide," you need only to wander into your local Zellers or Home Hardware where you can buy it like you do toilet paper. Btk-encased corn-grits is only considered a restricted product and a pesticide-applicator's licence is required only if you want to buy 18 kg bags of the stuff. Which seriously, unless you intend to nuke your local lake, you don't need AT ALL. In fact, the only danger this product poses is that…… um…… er…… uhhhhh…… it kills mosquitoes! Yeah, this stuff is real dangerous.

In which plants were first "domesticated"... or, how to make an Almond

Guns, Germs and Steel

By Jared Diamond

Published in 1999 by W.W. Norton and Company

New York, New York

Today’s Assigned Reading: Chapter 7 (p114 to 130)

Otherwise known as “How to make an Almond”

and

The Botany of Desire

By Michael Pollan

Published in 2001 by Random House

Today's Assigned Reading: The Introduction (pxii-xxv)

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is an approachable and engagingly written non-fiction book that does not require any background knowledge to understand. It tells of the many factors important in how different societies across the world and throughout time began, developed, progressed, and in some cases, fell. In Chapter 7, Diamond explains how plants were first domesticated and what factors lead to the rise of agriculture — literally, he tells us “How to make an Almond”.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World is likewise an easily read and approachable work of non-fiction. In it, Michael Pollan profiles four plants — the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato — and tells us of their history, domestication and interrelation with people from the perspective of both the plants and the people.

The main point of these readings — and what I found most mind-blowing — was how the early domestication of plants by humans was driven primarily by the plants themselves.

Basically, the “domestication of plants” for human purposes did not arise from some smart human who took wild seeds and stuck them in the ground and watched to see what would happen. Nope, early “domestic” plants came about as a result of the influences that hunter-gatherers had upon the plants they gathered — and how these plants adapted to be better dispersed by the new animal in their environment.

That is to say, plants influenced people to domesticate them, to disperse their seeds and to increase their fitness in the exact same ways that plants influence all other animals, both now and historically (GGS, p116; BOD, pxv).

This elegant idea explains the origin of most of our current “domestic” plants. At the root of this explanation is the idea that humans are not the only ones to have "domesticated" plants. To explain what Diamond and Pollan means by this, I want to use the definition of domestication. According to Wikipedia (accessed on Jan 16th, 2012), “Domestication is the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of artificial selection, is changed at the genetic level, accentuating traits desired by humans." However, if we rephrase this definition and make it less human-centric and broader in scope, we find that “domestication” implies that certain animals or plants are selected for and are changed as a result, based on what is desired by the forces or species doing the selecting.

Thus we can state that other animals “domesticate” plants, too!

For a human-driven example, imagine lettuce: it has been selected to have large crunchy and delectable leaves. We want large leaves, and so we select and propagate plants with the traits we want. But… what about birds? How, when a bird species selectively prefers “larger” or “bluer” berries, is this bird not domesticating this berry species to produce the traits that the bird “wants”?

Granted this is not a deliberate process and occurs through natural selection — that is, if large blue berries are preferentially eaten, over time these traits will increase as seeds from these berries will be dispersed at a greater rate and have greater reproductive success compared to those berries that are smaller and less blue. But, because the traits that the birds “wanted” increased in frequency, can we not, according to the definition above, consider these birds to be domesticating these plants, too?

Or what about bees. Imagine if you will, that bees prefer to collect nectar from red flowers more so than yellow ones. This, over time, would result in an increase in the overall prevalence of red flowers, because they are being selected for and thus experience higher pollination rates and will set more seed!

Thus based on these examples of natural selection, we can say that plants are being "domesticated" by the birds and the bees, too.

Therefore I suggest that we humans get off our high and mighty horse named “superior species” — we have not domesticated plants; they have manipulated us into spreading their seeds around! That is to say, as plant populations adapted to express certain traits preferred by humans (based upon human-imposed selection pressures), those plants’ fitness increased exponentially as their seeds were spread across our farms and fields.

Thus I very much like Pollan's idea that our relationship with plants is not one of superiority or dominance, but rather one of mutual survival (BOD, pxviii). Without our “domestic” plants, we cannot survive, and without our help, our "domesticated" plants cannot enjoy the high level of fitness and world-wide growth that they do now!

So I want to say that long ago, perhaps without either side even being aware of it, some plants and a few people entered a contract; an alliance. While each gave up something (people their independence and free-ranging nature as hunter-gatherers, and plants their ability to grow in the wild), each would help the other become the most dominant species of their respective kingdoms on the planet today.

This is an amazingly different and perhaps a unique way to look at plants — and one definitely worth exploring.

In Praise of Plants

The following posting is a freewrite critique on the points raised and writing style presented in Chapters 2 and 5 of the very interesting book entitled "In Praise of Plants".

"In Praise of Plants"
Written by Francis Halle.
Translated from French by David Lee.
Published in 2002 by Timber Press in Portland, Oregon.

Covering the content found in:
Chapter 2: A Visit to the Landscape of Form, pages 41 to 124, and
Chapter 5: Evolution, pages 173 to 184


“In Praise of Plants” provides a compelling argument as to why plants should be given an equal or superior status to animals in the often animal-dominated worlds of science and society. From this book, our assigned readings consisted of Chapter 2 in full (p 41 to 124) and the first eleven pages of Chapter 5 (p 173 to 184).

In Chapter 2, the many differences in body form between plants and animals were described in vivid detail. In this chapter, three overall points were made. Firstly, “plants are immense surfaces” (p44), whereas “animals are … volumes covered by small external surfaces” (p47), albeit with large internal surfaces (p47). According to Halle, this difference is a direct result of how members of each Kingdom collect energy (p43). A second point made was that plants in general are vertical-growing and radially symmetrical (p69), while animals predominate the horizontal and are bilaterally symmetrical (p73). Finally, his third point is that plants undergo indeterminate growth and will continue to grow throughout their life, whereas most animals do not; most mobile critters have a pre-determined maximum body size (p97).

In the first 11 pages of Chapter 5, the author declares that plants and animals are not affect by evolutionary pressures in the same way and that this difference is due to the manner in which plants and animals reproduce (p173). Specifically, for every lifecycle plants go through, two separate generations are required – the diploid sporophyte and the haploid gametophyte (p176). Furthermore, there is no specific “somatic cell line” or “gametic cell line” in plants – all somatic tissues are potentially gametic, and all gametic tissues are potentially somatic, depending on what factors are present (p184). In animals, this is unheard of! Indeed, in animals, the somatic and gametic cell lines are distinct and separate. Also, only one diploid generation is required per lifecycle (p181).

Structurally, I thought this book was well-written with the popular audience in mind (albeit initially only those able to read French) and that it flowed quite well. The content and points made throughout are very interesting and provide a unique way of looking at the world of plants. Indeed, in many cases I had never before thought about plants the way Halle describes them until I read this book! A very dramatic example is how Halle states that “Animals are confused plants, turned inside out like a glove… [and] Plants are fantastic animals, their insides turned out, bearing their entrails like feathers” (p50). This is such a neat way of looking at the differing biological features of plants and animals!

I thought the entire book is well-structured with subtle humor woven throughout, making the writing very persuasive and clear. Furthermore, I liked how Halle included quotes and observations that other authors and scholars have made about plants – from Pliny to Darwin to numerous recent scientific papers. By including their thoughts in almost every paragraph, I thought that Halle made his argument even more persuasive, showing that he is not the only one who talking about and looking at plants in such a unique way! And, in case you did not understand the written content, many large and well-drawn illustrations make his point even more clear.

Overall I found the writing to be generally understandable and that the main points for each section were made very clear… so exceptionally clear that, in one case, Halle spends nearly 25 pages to get his point across that plants grow vertical and are radially symmetrical, whereas animals are horizontal and bilaterally symmetrical (p53 to 77). Not surprisingly, I found this to be a little tedious. Another part of the writing that I did not like was how in many cases, complex or uncommon words are used – and no definitions were given. For example, “zenith” (p57), “nadir” (p57), “polarity” (p59), “Echinoderms” (p77) and “lianas” (p99) are just a few.

While I am not entirely sure if I now believe that plants are superior to animals, I certainly will view plants quite differently having now read this book! The differences between these two kingdoms that really stuck me were how plants grow vertically and animals grow horizontally, and how plants are essentially surfaces whereas animals are essentially volumes. I found that these two points provided a much more rational way to define the difference between animals and plants - far better than the definition that animals don’t have chlorophyll or that plants cannot pick up their roots and move around*.

*Like an Ent from the Lord of The Rings. But then… the real question is - are Ents animals or plants?!?!