Good news (especially for all you oh-so-proud non-television owning types out there):

Good news (especially for all you oh-so-proud non-television owning types out there): the full-length video of the recent PBS special The Botany of Desire is now available online. Based on Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World from 2002 (back before Pollan’s writings prescribed how we should eat and were taken as gospel), the program shows “how four familiar species – the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato – evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.” The Botany of Desire is a fascinating read (you’ll never think of witches and broomsticks the same again) and the program is a fascinating, well-executed documentary that looks at everything from domestication, evolution, and GMOs to the passionate (and, of course, endearingly oddball) cultivators of these crops today.