Plants Rule the World

Gary Pollan, in his Botany of Desire, demonstrates how plants, with their ability to mutate and change rapidly, have secretly manipulated human behavior. We are simply so much better at spreading their little seedies than those dumb animals that just eat them and poop them out. Just think about maize corn, which has progressed from a wimply little local grass eaten by a few gatherers to THE agricultural crop that single handedly determines a huge slice of US politics. Now that it's going to fuel our cars, woohoo, the sky's the limit! When you couple Pollan's book with Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a look at how civilization has spread and developed (follow the spread of food crops!) you realize that most of our human history has been secretly controlled by plants.

I think maybe they've decided that we have proliferated too fast, folks. This is not good news. I noticed in this weeks' Science News that the E coli and salmonella outbreaks in produce recently aren't just from bad hygiene among all those field hands who don't have any chem-toilets in the fields. Oh no. Apparently both E coli and salmonella are now capable of colonizing fresh produce (notice that it's fresh produce? Not the stuff like stringbeans that we normally cook?). That means they don't wash off. Forget all those spendy and environmentally safe veggie washes. Boiled lettuce salad anyone?

Hey, looking back at history, if the plant world wants to reduce our numbers is there any hope for us????

Happy Halloween and don't turn your back on those pumpkins!