![]() ![]() ![]() ‘I have only the testimony of Isaac’s face to go by (that, and his fierceness to repeat the experience), but it was plain that his first encounter with sugar had intoxicated him – was in fact an ecstasy, in the literal sense of that word. ![]() I loved this description of Pollan’s son’s first encounter with sugar – the icing on his first birthday cake. For most of the history of mankind, sweet food would have been a handful of berries in autumn, or a lick of honey when someone was brave enough to knock down a wild bee’s nest. So, firstly we have the story of the apple, which fulfills our need for sweetness, something which seems almost primal. The book centres on four human desires, and the plants that encapsulate them. I’ve found it a fascinating read, one of those where you interrupt your partner’s book about the Vietnam War to regale him with facts about the arrival of the apple in the US or the way that prohibition and the war on drugs in the US led to the development of much stronger marijuana in Europe. Indeed, it took one of my friends buying ‘The Botany of Desire – A Plant’s-Eye View of the World’ for me as a birthday present for me to actually read it. ![]() Dear Readers, I’m a bit late to the party here: my friends have been raving about ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ and this book for quite some time. ![]()
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