Media Outlets
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MY town’s annual agricultural fair fell on the Saturday after the attacks on New York and Washington, and I think everyone was relieved when the selectmen decided to go ahead with the event. The turnout, 500 people at least, was huge for a town our size, all of us more pleased than usual to come…
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What do sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control have to do with plants? Well…everything according to Michael Pollan, the author of the best selling The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. In this hour of Science Friday, we’ll take a look at the way people and plants–including apples and marijuana–interact with each other,…
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GWEN IFILL: The book is “The Botany of Desire: A plant’s-eye view of the world.” In it, author Michael Pollan explores human impulse and its connection to the life of plants””our desire for the apple’s sweetness, the tulip’s beauty, the intoxication of marijuana and our desire to control nature by producing the perfect genetically modified…
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“This is the story of a body,” Susanne Antonetta tells us near the end of her arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the shadows of the 20th century’s most sinister molecules: the DDT, tritium, chlordane, benzene and plutonium that are now part of the American landscape. Antonetta, the author of three collections…
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Listen to the broadcast BOB EDWARDS, host: Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.’ That’s particularly true. The apple’s history in the United States where a passion for sweetness has transformed this simple fruit. In the second part of her conversation…
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Listen to the broadcast BOB EDWARDS, host: Plants have evolved complicated strategies to ensure their survival. The most obvious is the flower, designed to attract pollinators, typically bees. In his new book, “The Botany of Desire,” Michael Pollan suggests that the plant world’s most obliging suitor is man, and the plants that have figured out…
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Almost overnight, the amount and variety of organic food on offer in my local supermarket has mushroomed. Fresh produce, milk, eggs, cereal, frozen food, even junk food—all of it now has its own organic doppelganger, and more often than not these products wind up in my shopping cart. I like buying organic, for the usual…
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For a while there, it looked as if this might be the year it never happened, but the gardening season has arrived at last. Last week the peas went in, finally, and today I’ll plant potatoes. Nights are still way too cold to put out the tender vegetables—tomatoes and the like—but on my windowsills their…
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Unless I’m missing something, the aim of the biotechnology industry’s audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me—well-off first worlders dubious about genetically engineered food—on the horns of a moral dilemma. Have you seen these ads? Over a speedy montage of verdant rice paddies, smiling Asian kids and kindly third-world doctors, a caring…
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Whenever I go to the supermarket these days, I collect labels. No, I’m not saving up box tops in order to get a decoder ring from Battle Creek. The sort of labels I collect now promise something else, a slightly different decoding. Each of them tells me a little story about where the food I’m…
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History is written by the victors, it’s often said, but what about natural history? This invariably gets written by one human being or another, no matter what species’ triumph it trumpets, for the altogether trivial reason that (so far as we know) humans do all the writing around here. But what if it were otherwise?…
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I grew up in a pretty nice subdivision on Long Island, but try as I might to kindle some spark of nostalgia for “the Gates of Woodbury,” the gravitational pull of the place is almost nil. It has been nearly 30 years since I left, and at least until a couple of months ago, I…