Update: the entire documentary is now available online for free!

A new PBS* documentary, The Botany of Desire, premieres Wednesday night (tonight!) at 8pm on PBS stations throughout the US. It’s based on the popular Michael Pollan book of the same name, and I urge you to carve out two hours (in most markets between 8pm – 10pm) on Wednesday night to watch it. The program is packed with science, history, and beautiful photography.

I’ve seen the film in advance, and I highly recommend it, particularly if you’re interested in any of the four plants featured in it: tulip, marijuana, potato, and apple. By telling the stories of these plants, Pollan explains how in some ways the plants are manipulating us, rather than the other way around — in the same way that flowers “use” bees to spread their pollen, these plants have “used” humans to spread themselves across the planet and out-compete other plants. One note: the program may not be suitable for young children, as there is use of the word “sex” (as applied to plants) and discussion of marijuana. It also might be pretty boring for the under-twelve set (despite beautiful flower photography), unless they’re thoroughly nerdy.

Here’s a preview of the documentary:

After the jump, I include some notes on each plant discussed in the documentary.

The Apple – Good for Booze AND for Eatin’

Apples arose in Kazakhstan, where bears would eat them and, uh, deposit the seeds as they went. But when people entered the picture, we began to spread the apple and its sweetness. Thus, the “biological strategy” of apples is to increase their sweetness, causing us to spread them around the globe. Humans have an innate desire for sweetness — presumably because in nature, sweetness is rare and generally denotes lots of calories.

Although the Bible doesn’t specify the fruit that was at the heart of so much trouble in the Garden of Eden, we assume it to be an apple — even though it was probably a pomegranate due to geographic restrictions on where apples grow best. Then there’s the rather fascinating discussion of Johnny Appleseed, whose real motivation was to bring alcohol (via hard cider) to pioneers, rather than tasty sweet apples. (Follow the link for some more info, all snagged from Pollan’s book, on the man — he was surprisingly rich for a dude who wore a tin pot on his head.)

Tulips

Tulips are examples of angiosperms, or flowering plants. The rise of the angiosperms brought sex (via flowers and pollen exchange) into the plant picture, and as Pollan says, “sex creates variation.” The documentary thoroughly explains the Dutch speculative investment bubble known as Tulip Mania, which made tulips one of the most valuable commodities in the world. At the height of Tulip Mania, a single tulip bulb sold for the equivalent of what today would be $10-15 million! Tragically, some of the most prized tulips were made beautiful because of a virus that was slowing killing them — which caused spectacular striped or “broken” flowers, but ultimately killed the plant. Pollan suggests that the tulip’s biological “strategy” has been to develop a form of beauty that humans find very appealing, causing us to domesticate and grow it even to the point of financial ruin.

Cannabis

I won’t say much about this section, as this is a family blog, but I can certainly say that this program treats the topic fairly and doesn’t go nuts with it. There’s an interesting discussion of how THC (the main “active ingredient”) binds to receptors in the human brain that affect the brain’s ability to remember and forget — and Pollan wonders exactly how a plant would find a way to manipulate those human brain receptors in order to make cannabis such a widely-propagated plant today. It is a curious question, indeed — how would a plant manage to just “happen” to have such a profound effect on humans? Again, Pollan wonders if this is a biological “strategy” in some sense.

The documentary includes extensive footage of legal (under state laws, though not federal law) cannabis growing operations — you get an inside look into how medical marijuana is produced, and it’s surprisingly complex. My favorite line: in describing how the farmers plant only female cannabis plants so they’ll produce more THC-rich resin, Pollan describes the grow room as a room of “massive sexual frustration” — all the female plants are desperately trying to catch some male pollen, producing more and more resin in their efforts.

Potatoes

The documentary takes us to South America, showing how the descendants of the Incas are still farming potatoes, and how potatoes traveled from South America to Europe via the Spanish Conquistadores. The potato was such a hugely productive crop (more food per acre than grain) that it transformed the Old World, enabling the industrial revolution. There’s also much discussion of “The Lumper,” the dominant strain of potato in Ireland that happened to be susceptible to a wind-spread fungus that destroyed Lumpers, causing the terrible Potato Famine. The famine killed one out of every eight people living in Ireland. Can you imagine that? Pollan suggests that the Potato Famine is a parable about the dangers of monoculture (planting a single type of plant) — had the Irish planted a wider variety of potatoes, they might have had more that were resistant to the fungus that killed Lumpers.

Also discussed: how the fast food industry currently relies on a monoculture of the Russet Burbank potato to make the “long fries” used in McDonald’s, to fill those tall red fry boxes; how that monoculture demands lots of pesticides; and how Monsanto is developing insect-repellant crops — and what happens with those crops over the long term.

Full Blogger Disclosure

I have received an advance screener of this documentary from PBS, but have not been compensated in any way for this post. I just like PBS and documentaries, and think this is a great program — and the book is highly recommended as well.

* = Note that the program is presented by KQED in San Francisco and produced by Kikim Media. But to myself and y’all, that’s fancy talk for “PBS.”