The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan: Apples
As mentioned in my previous post about the introduction to Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, the chapter on apples begins with the familiar story of Johnny Appleseed. This focus on a human, especially such a well-worn mythical figure, somewhat belies the subtitle of the book and the introduction’s promise to provide a “plant’s eye view”. However, by the end of the chapter, the method in this choice begins to show.
The turning point, in the sense of bringing the relevance of the Johnny Appleseed story into clarity, is Pollan’s search for the original definition of “sweetness”, the desire he pairs with apples. In the days before artificial sweeteners and before affordable (and slavery-free, since some abolitionists boycotted it) cane sugar, sweetness was something elusive and even divine. Pollan quotes the Transcendentalists here, as well as Jonathan Swift’s phrase “sweetness and light”. This sweetness, as well as the more familiar sugary type, is what Johnny Appleseed brought to the American wilderness.
To sum the Appleseed story, a man named John Chapman set out from Ohio, planting apple orchards from seedlings, sticking around just long enough for a wave of settlers to come along. When the area around his orchard started to get civilised, he would find someone to take over for him and head off to start a new orchard. In this way, he both made himself a fortune and maintained a semi-wild lifestyle of bare feet and kinship with the Native Americans.
From the perspective of the European settlers of the New World, Chapman’s apples brought sweetness mainly through the brewing of cider. Seedling apples, it turns out, are rarely good for eating, but they’re usually great for fermenting. Cider, of course, provides a literal sugary sweetness, but also much of the sugar gets converted to alcohol, providing the sweetness of a comforting, warming drink and the sociability that comes with intoxication, not to mention the comfort of the familiar, since they all would have been used to both apples and cider from the Old World.
The seedling apples turn out to be the key to the “plant’s-eye view” part of the story, too. The reason seedling apples are no good for eating is that they’re unpredictable. Apple seeds, apparently, tend to genetically diverge from their parent plant in a rather extreme way. By planting seedlings, Chapman was providing a lot of raw material, i.e. genetic diversity, for natural selection to work on. Thus, he helped speed the evolution of the Old World apples and enable their adaptation to life in the New World.
Pollan doesn’t say it explicitly, but this is the key part of the apple’s story, as far as the book is concerned. Chapman, who Pollan likens to an “American Dionysus”, half-civilised and half-wild, did the apple’s work of spreading its genes and ensuring its survival in a new habitat. And did the apple this favour for the somewhat selfish reason of making money. And people paid him the money because the apple provided the sweetness they needed. This chain of causation is the uniting theme under the whole chapter that implies Pollan’s thesis that human desires and the evolutionary fates of domesticated plants are related.
Pollan closes out his apple chapter with a cautionary tale about biodiversity. Around the time of Prohibition, the apple’s use in cider dropped off as its use for food rose in importance. This lead to the proliferation of grafted clones, which eventually took over from Johnny Appleseed’s practice of planting seedlings exclusively. But by taming the apple in this way, our current crop plants have lost the variability that allowed them to adapt to life in the Americas to begin with. Furthermore, they’ve lost their ability to adapt to the challenge presented by pests and parasites. Like the potato in the past and the banana in the present, we risk losing one of our favoured plants. And even if we don’t, the apple has become one of the crops most reliant on pesticides.
The final pages describe a return to the well, as it were: a project to catalogue existing agricultural varieties and, more importantly, wild varieties from the apple’s birthplace in Kazakhstan.
So far, the book has been living up to its promise of providing one of the most excellent and accurate pictures of evolution I’ve seen in a popular book that wasn’t explicitly about the subject. This chapter, with its story of John Chapman’s seedlings struggling to survive in the New World and a brief divergence into the discovery of the modern agricultural apple strains, blurs the lines between natural and artificial selection. Chapman was assisting natural selection and conducting a degree of artificial selection at the same time. Fitting the half-civilised, half-wild picture Pollan paints of the man, his approach to cultivating apple orchards blends both types of selection in such a way that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Up next: tulips and beauty!