Any time. Both In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma are great. My wife also swears by The Botany of Desire but I haven't read it yet.

> I forget where I read about the original hypothesis behind this (Michael Pollan?)

Perhaps in “The Botany of Desire”[1]. I might be misremembering, but I think I heard it (audiobook) there.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Botany_of_Desire

Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire has this and a lot more on apples for anyone interested.

Honeycrisp are amazing. So are Jazz, if you can find them. Our local grocer has many interesting kinds. Also, read Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" for a more in-depth treatment of apple biodiversity vs. the market forces.

I highly recommend The Botany of Desire (Michael Pollan) which dives even deeper on this thought across a variety of relationships in nature.

Michael Pollan's less known book, The Botany of Desire, is an excellent read and examines four crops -- one of them the Apple -- that have shaped human history.

Yep, this is more or less the thesis of M. Pollan's 'The Botany of Desire,' which, whatever one thinks of his stance or other works, is a thought-provoking read [misguided treatment of Appleseed expert W.E. Jones aside]

I haven’t read his more recent writings, but The Botany of Desire is a fascinating book. It will show you how interesting the history of plants and their relationship with culture can be. I read it many years ago, but I still find myself going “did you know...” to people before recounting something I learned there.

He does seem to be sliding down hill. A decade ago I picked up his book The Botany of Desire not knowing what kind of writer he was or his fame. It was a very interesting read, especially the part about apples and the history of their variety. It led me to try other, more delicious varieties than I had known. It also included a more surprising section on cannabis. He recounts a time when he grew it in his garden (which tells you that his interests aren't only agrarian or abstract). The cannabis growing account ends with a rather humorous story about him selling firewood to a person who shows up in his driveway and turns out to be a sheriff in his day job. A frantic attempt to dispose of the aforementioned illegal controlled substance ensues so that the sheriff doesn't finds out, and I won't ruin the ending.

Fastforward to the other articles and books mentioned here, and I'm starting to wonder if this earliest episode led him to try more daring and far riskier exploits. Has writing about drug cultivation and his conflicts with authorities large and small become his shtick?

Michael Pollan makes such a case for plants in his book, Botony of Desire.

[..] Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees 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 similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?[..]

If AI became sentient and were ‘artificial intelligence’ to ‘evolve’, it will most definitely likely start by trying to seduce us. Not necessarily sexually always.

The Botany of Desire is based on a book by the same name. The author, Michael Pollan, has written quite a bit about food. Another book of his, The Omnivore's Dilemma, thoroughly examines the industrial food chain (in addition to others) from its origins to methods of production.

Yeah I learned a whole bunch about this from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appl... (via Fark, and summarizing a book) recently:

* Johnny Appleseed planted from seed instead of grafting trees in part due due to his Swedenborgian Church beliefs

* Apples are extreme heterozygotes and each newly seeded tree produces very different apples, so you can randomly stumble on some brand-new delicious varieties among many thousands of cider-only trees

* The FBI cut down many of Johnny Appleseed's trees during Prohibition to combat hard cider production (I should probably read the source book for these claims, Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire", because this sounds kind of crazy)

Its amazing to see varieties of the same plant have such a broad range of effects on people's behavior and state of mind. This chart does not even consider the consumption method.

Its cool to think that in places where consumers have both information and choice (like SF and Amsterdam) the taste for weed will get refined. Strains will be grown for states of mind that consumers desire and demand.

'The Botany of Desire' is a really cool book/video that describes how cannabis DNA has been evolving according to the human brain's desire to affect its own state (the book also talks about apples, potatoes and tulips for other examples of human-driven plant evolution). We're probably looking at the results of strains that were originally selected for a market primarily driven to the potency of THC. I'd love to see the strains that self-select in markets where consumers have information and choice.

I would recommend a couple of documentaries in this context about sugar.

1. The Botany of Desire [1]

See the part about selective breeding of apples that are sweet, where varieties with other tastes are either discarded or used for making apple cider vinegar.

2. That Sugar Film [2]

This goes into detail on the amount of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) added to all kinds of foods that people would consider as normal and "healthy". It's really shocking how invisible such things are to consumers.

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/

[2]: http://thatsugarfilm.com/

This also gets me thinking about pesticides in apples, of all things. I read Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" a while ago, and was really struck by the story of Johnny Appleseed. For those of you who didn't grow up in the USA, he travelled through the country planting apple seeds, so that later settlers would find whole apple orchards in place when they moved in.

The interesting thing is that apples don't "spring true" from seed. In other words, an tree that bears sweet apples will almost certainly have seeds that lack the gene for sweetness. Apple trees grown from seed will certainly bear crab apples. They are sour, and are only good for fermenting and making alcoholic apple cider. Settlers were certainly happy to have crab apples, because cider is fun and easy to make. But they certainly didn't eat those apples.

If you want sweet apples, you have to use grafting: if you are lucky enough to get a tree with sweet apples, you will probably immortalize it, but taking cuttings from its branches, and grafting them onto ordinary crab-apple root stock. The part of the tree above ground will be genetically different from the part below. If the root stock nears death, you'll take cuttings from the part above ground and graft them onto new roots.

This is all very nice, but it sidesteps evolution: you've created an immortal organism, which won't be able to fight off insects, fungus, and bacteria that attack apples, and which are constantly evolving to overcome a plant's defenses. Since the tree can't generate new chemicals that kill or repel these attackers, humans have to invent fungicides and insecticides to do it for them. That's why apple farming relies so heavily on spraying scary chemicals on the trees.

Any war you declare on time and change is a war you will lose.

It is a series based on the book The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.

"There are many more folks in my position."

Us humans (other animals as well, by the way) have been self medicating ourselves for - ever really. Michael Pollen wrote about this in "The Botany of Desire". His brilliant look at our relationship with four plants that we use to treat our "fundamental desires" of "sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control": the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato.

Intoxication. We can expand it's list, of course, to include poppies, and the coca plants. Our problem is that many abuse these. The people of South America have been chewing the leaves of the Cocoa plants for thousands of years. Without addiction destroying their societies. We need these plants. And mother nature was good enough to provide them. :)

But we also need education. And in American, we'd rather "just say no". Then be honest about being a human being and our need for intoxication.

And when I write intoxication I don't mean falling down drunk. That's certainly part of it - to have a moment of rest outside our our heads. But it's also, like the post above stated - to conquer depression, stress and (I'll add) anxiety.