I can say that I’m done with my
project. And this week all I needed to do was to finish my poster for the presentation
in the Estrella Mountain Community College conference. Like always Matt helped
me a lot to make it perfect. Since it was my first time, it was a little bit stressful
for me but I was able to get the third place.
Also I was reading a really
interesting book this week for my honors project, and I thought it’s a good
idea to share my brief summary of each chapter of the book. The book’s name is “The
Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”. The book has four different
chapters about apple, tulips, marijuana and potato. You can read a short
summary of it here and hopefully you enjoy it too.
Apple:
The first chapter on the apple explains
why apple symbolized the sweet landscape, and it was the sign of human
habitation. The history of apple start from Europe and It brought with western
European to America when they immigrant to America. Michael Pollan, talks about
the desire for sweetness and describes the word sweet and how it was so
important before. Basically, the apple was a reliable source of sweetness. And
if people could keep them cool and dry they were last for a long time.
It was really interesting that the
main reason of spreading the apple around the world was because; apple was a
source of alcohol rather than food. And even more interesting how they used to
get drink out of apple. The hard cider which is the wine of apple they just ferment
it and drink it, it’s like 5-8 percent alcohol. But if they wanted a stronger
drink they could make that too, which called “apple jack”. they took the hard cider
and left it out in the winter, and the colder it got the part that wouldn’t
freeze was alcohol, so they get rid of the ice and what was left was very
potent apple jack. And the colder the winter the more ice they could remove and
that would give them the stronger liquid.
Dionysus is a mysterious figure in Greek
mythology, he’s the bringer of alcohol and also the bringer of agriculture, and
he thought man how to use of nature. So Pollan, believes John Chapman, also
known as Johnny Appleseed, he was the American Dionysus, because of all the
values have been brought. Also he’s one of the reasons that the apple derived
in America because all those cider orchards that he helped plant.
Tulips
In tulip chapter, Pollan talks about
how we messed with tulip like all other plants that we have messed around with and
now a days the lost their values. We changed them to reflect our taste, beauty
and our uses of them. Basically if we look at the modern tulips, compare to the
old ones, they are very different. The modern tulips are just about size and
color, we make them so cheap and common and we don’t know anymore how
extraordinary they are. Tulips like many other plants don’t come through from seeds,
which mean the offspring of tulip plant are different seed and were look nothing
like it’s parents. Reproducing the good tulips is very slow and painstaking, but
by taking the seed of this rare plant and planting them everywhere all these
diversity was created in Holland. And when they found the good tulip, they propagate
it from bulbs by cloning it and keep them stable. And that’s part of why tulips
are precious.
Marijuana:
Coffee and tea are also plant drugs;
we’ve been using them for a long time. They both change your mood basically
because of their caffeine. As Pollan justified, some plants can heal us, and
some other can kill us, even more interesting than both of those. There are
some plants that can change your viewpoint of reality altogether, these drugs
get in the way of capitalist economy and marijuana is one of them. It diminutions
the ambition and drive and makes people contemn with what they have so that
maybe one of the reason that in our very fast achievement oriented society
marijuana has been demonized.
Potatoes:
In the course of human history the
potato has much greater treasure than gold, and when it got to Europe it had a
lot of trouble getting established there, because it was inside the soil and
they consider it dirty. Also they are from night shade plant family which is
poisonous plants and they have a bad repetition.
I really enjoyed this book and
highly recommend it to everyone.
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