He thus makes some plants appealing to us and the author calls this determinism: "We too cast evolutionary (deterministic?) votes every time we reach for the most symmetrical flower or the longest French fry. The survival of the sweetest, the most beautiful....proceeds according to a dialectical processes, a give and take between human desire and the universe of all plant possibility." (243-244)

The convoluted histories of plants have been very carefully explored. The author has done a marvelous job in exploiting historical changes to plants and agriculture to support his thesis. However it would have been better to hypothesize that our relationship with the plants falls in the bigger scheme of things instead of presenting plants as some thinking beings. It is interesting but often a little too far-fetched nonetheless. Pollan's premise is definitely original and his histories of apple and tulip are worth reading more than once; if not...
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