“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”
Michael Pollan apparently wrote that in Second Nature. Someone I work with pointed me to another book of his that is a study of Johnny Appleseed. I found it very compelling, especially in the sense that he looked for root-cause (pun not intended) rather than settle with the pulp of commercial drivel also known as Disney. PBS did an interview with him where he summarizes:
GWEN IFILL: So as a gardener, which you admit to being, a backyard gardener of sorts in Connecticut, how did you make these connections between human impulse and the plant world?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, it all started with the bumblebee. I mean, the premise of the book is very, very simple. I… One day in the garden I was watching a bumblebee alongside me while I was sewing [sic] seeds and thought, “well, what do I have in common with a bee as a gardener?” and realized more than I realized. Like the bumblebee, I was disseminating the genes of one species, a potato instead of a leek, say, rather than another. And like the bumblebee, I thought these plants were here for my benefit, you know, all the plants in the garden I was growing. But in fact, I realized maybe they had induced me to help them, because, you know, the bumblebee breaks into the flower, finds the nectar, thinks he’s making off with the goods and thinks he’s getting the better of the deal with the flower. But, in fact, it’s the flower that has tricked the bumblebee into doing the work for him, to take his pollen from flower to flower to flower. And then I realized well, what if… So from the flower’s point of view, the bumblebee is this credulous gullible animal, and how would we look to our plants… from our plant’s point of view? And I realize we’re much the same; we’re more like the bumblebee than we think.
I love that analysis. We are gullible if we think that we are totally in control of how we choose the food we eat. People love to be led, and those that seem to want the least regulations also appear to be the ones easiest to lead. I think this is explored best in the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Anyway, back to the Appleseed story:
GWEN IFILL: Well, you tell… You talk about sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. And sweetness you talk about the apple.
MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.
GWEN IFILL: How does Johnny Appleseed figure into this?
MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, Johnny Appleseed, in a way, he’s kind of a pagan patron saint of the book. I didn’t even know when I started this that he was a real historical figure, by John Chapman. I thought he was one of those kindergarten folk heroes, you know, like Paul Bunyon, that’s made up. It turns out Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was a real historical figure who played a very important role in the frontier in the Northwest territory. And I also found out that the version of Johnny Appleseed I learned in kindergarten was completely wrong, had been Disney-fied, cleaned up and made very benign. He’s a much more interesting character. The way figured this out was I learned this one botanical fact about apples, which is, if you plant the seeds of an apple, like a red delicious or a golden delicious, the offspring will look nothing like the parent, will be a completely different variety and will be inedible. You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.
GWEN IFILL: And they’re not American fruit.
MICHAEL POLLAN: They’re not, no. I learned it comes from Kazakhstan and has made its way here and changed a lot along the way. And so the fact that Johnny Appleseed was planting apples from seed, which he insisted on– he though grafting was wicked– meant they were not edible apples, and it meant they were for hard cider because you can use any kind of apple for making cider. Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus.
The fundamentalists who sought prohibition threated to destroy the story of Mr. Appleseed. Thus the story was somehow adapted to leave out the grain of alcohol. It also seems to leave out some of the more obvious motivation of “homesteading” land. He is portrayed as someone who was a friend of native inhabitants because he was not afraid to speak with them, while he actually was probably negotiating with them to let him “enhance” property (grow trees) in order to legally claim it as his own under nascent laws and profit from sale to a settler.