Not only did my friend Steven Edholm ( of the fantabulous Skillcult site ) reek a rat when read Michael Pollan ’s bookThe Botany of Desire … he has gone on to demonstrate the generator wrong .
Fromyesterday ’s post :
“ About 5 years ago or so I decided I wanted to farm some apples from seed . Michael Pollan ’s book Botany of Desire was very democratic at the time I opine . His chapter in that Koran on apple is largely woven around the idea that you are very improbable to get a good apple by planting a cum . The book was so widely say that it seems to have form that electronegative idea onto the public mind . For a while there it seemed like if I institute up apples in conversation I was likely to hear one or more of the following things “ phytology of desire ” “ Michael pollan ” “ Johnny Appleseed was a pervert ” Michael Pollan ” “ you ca n’t grow Malus pumila from seed ” “ Michael Pollan ” “ mass did n’t drink water , they only drank hard cyder ” right wing , just test that sometime !
I am a critical somebody , and I just was n’t bribe it . What I see in Michael Pollan is an academic who is write about things outside of his experience . A lot of his stuff on apple , the whole chapter really , is envelop around this melodic theme that you ca n’t grow an apple from seed and carry to get anything good . But , like a heap of things , this is a matter of context , not just some cover accuracy . Well , the idea that apples planted from seed are by and large no good to exhaust is a revenue over simplification . But when it ’s the hingepin of the story you ’re fabricate , you drum it to death and make it set . I speed read through the Botany of Desire apple section the other Clarence Day to see why this mind stay with mass so much :
“ The fact , plainly , is this : apples do n’t “ come straight ” from seeds — that is , an apple tree grow from a seminal fluid will be a wildling carry niggling resemblance to its parent . Anyone who wants edible apples plant engraft trees , forthe fruit of seedling apple is almost always inedible — “ off-key enough , ” Thoreau once wrote , “ to mark a squirrel ’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream . ”Thoreau claim to care the taste of such apple , but most of his countrymen try them good for footling but hard cider — and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until proscription . Apples were something multitude wassail . ”
“ In the case of the apple , the fruit nearly always falls far from the tree . ”
“ The botanical term for this variability is “ heterozygosity , ” and while there are many species that share it ( our own included),in the Malus pumila the tendency is extreme . ”
“ orchard apple tree were precious on the frontier , and Chapman could be trusted of a strong demand for his seedlings , even if most of them would succumb nothing but spitters . ”
“ cider — being safe , tastier , and much easier to make — became the alcoholic drink of selection . Just about the only intellect to plant an orchard of the form of seedling apple John Chapman had for sale would have been its intoxicating harvest of drink .. ”
“ Americans ’ “ angle of dip toward cider ” is the only way to explain John Chapman ’s succeeder — how the man could have made a living selling spitter to Ohio settlerswhen there were already grafted Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree bearing eatable fruit for sale in Marietta . ”
“ The nationwide Leigh Hunt for pomological genius , the odds of which were normally held to be eighty thousand to one , brought forth literally hundreds of unexampled varieties , include most of the ones I was now tasting . ”
you may see why people read this volume and think it ’s accomplished folly to plant an orchard apple tree seed . But I imagine Pollan ’s fiction is woven around misunderstood ideas . It ’s not as though we can say what the odds are of getting a full apple is from any random batch of semen . Or , for that affair , from the semen John Chapman was planting . I doubt the settlers of that meter were just a bunch of accomplished dunderheads . They were people that grew clobber and made things find to make their lives continue , instead of not continuing no more . How resourceful and knowledgeable do you have to be to stick your vulnerable snowy a – out on the fresh frontier to quite possibly be tomahawk by the angered displace aboriginal public , while trying to wrest a living of some kind . Well I guaran - f____-tee ya that they all experience at least one thing- flora a cum from a good intellectual nourishment works and you ’re more likely to get well offspring than if you plant seeds from a shitty industrial plant . That ’s the material of farming 101 properly there . Maybe Monseigneur Apple Seed was crazy enough to ignore that and impart it all to gods will with whatever apple seeds fall out to be on hand , but I ca n’t see that as being the norm for the more sane .
Pollan , being a domesticated intellect rather than a dirty nail James Leonard Farmer type has , I think , mixed up and over simplify some things … ”
GO HERE and read the rest at his site . Plus , you’re able to watch his video there . You CANgrow fruit Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree from seedand get wondrous results – why are you being a chicken ?
Do it .
