I have a bunch of quotes from books I have been reading for the past couple months that I want to start collecting and sharing here. A bunch of them - such as this one - are from Michael Pollan’s excellent The Botany of Desire. The book is broken down into four main sections, each of which focuses on a particular plant and how it satisfies one of humanity’s archetypal desires. This excerpt comes from the section on apples.

The central premise of this chapter is that apples were so popular among early Americans not because of their fruit, but because of the hard cider they produced in abundant quantities. And he re-examines the mythic figure of Johnny Appleseed from this context. Really amazing chapter - probably my favorite in the book. In any case, this excerpt relates to the fact that all of the cultivated varieties of apples which we use today commercially are actually clones, since the majority of the apples that come from seeds do not “come true” - that is, they are genetically different from the parent plant, and therefore possess usually very different traits. Pollan uses that simple fact as “proof” that Johnny Appleseeds trees were not for eating but for drinking, since such a mass of planted seeds would only occasionally yield edible fruit.

This quote comes from page 52 and reads:

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they’re grown from seed, and sex is nature’s way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests’ sight - unless, that is, people come to the tree’s rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry.

This, I think, is very interesting information in its own right. But I also think it may be a very appropriate metaphor for our cultural situation. Allow me to elaborate.

Actually, I think we could borrow from the language of the primitivists in this regard. They see “civilization” as being this horrific perversion of natural and human impulses, and often go to great lengths detailing the evils committed in its name. Though I disagree with many of their conclusions, I think Pollan’s quote above could well help us understand what they are talking about.

It is almost as though somehow our culture or society (not sure what word to use here) is also based on this practice of grafting or cloning. We find something we like (whether a belief, a set of values, a system, model or whatever) and then try to perpetuate it forever - usually through institutionalization. But by trying to force this thing to exist through time and still maintain its recognizable form (ie, what we liked about it in the first place) we must prevent it from evolving or from changing so much that we no longer recognize it. The problem may well be though that by trying to freeze a thing’s development, we cause it to become increasingly weakened. In Pollan’s words, we reduce its resistance to its pests and predators, which continue to evolve, though the object of our attention has been frozen at a particular point in time.

On page 51, Pollan quotes Phil Forsline, the curator of a collection of rare and unusual apple trees:

“A century ago there were several thousand different varieties of apples in commerce; no most of the apples we grow have the same five or six parents: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, Macintosh, and Cox’s Orange Pippin. Breeders keep going back to the same well, and it’s getting shallower.

From a more conspiratorial standpoint, it might also be interesting at some point to try and apply this same idea to the bloodlines of royalty and nobility which have throughout the ages governed the mass of humanity. It seems that obsession with purity and lineage have introduced genetic problems into those groups as well - such as hemophilia, etc. It kind of makes you wonder if these people in charge aren’t using the same problematic breeding and selection mechanisms that they have used on their own bloodlines onto the mass of culture and society itself.

The word “culture” itself, after all, comes from the same root as “to cultivate.” We openly recognize agriculture by the definition of “the process of producing food, feed, fiber and other goods by the systematic raising of plants and animals.” But when we think of human culture, we rarely look at what it is that is actually being cultivated - what is being grown by the “systematic raising” of people. And maybe that is the missing piece for which we have been looking after all.