Michael Pollan, Cultural Appropriation and Complicity: This is my mind on "This is Your Mind on Plants"
Has anyone else read Michael Pollan's most recent book This Is Your Mind on Plants - and cringed throughout?
Much of my own writing has focused on food, culture, and ecology, and Pollan's ethnobotany-adjacent angle couldn't be more up my alley. I've loved much of what he has written, including large swaths of this book. Less up my alley is a pattern in which the author recognizes his privilege, acknowledges cultural appropriation, and then proceeds to still do and say potentially problematic things anyway.
It's not that Pollan doesn't mention the shadows of the plant-derived substances that inspire each of the book's three sections, covering opium, caffeine, and mescaline. For instance: the disproportionate toll on black communities in "the war on drugs," inequality in the global coffee market, and the use of peyote by white people despite the insistence of many indigenous people that they not.
This isn't a book exclusively about those issues, and it doesn't claim to be: it's about Michael Pollan's personal engagement with and related musings on the three substances. Still, the fact that he addresses the suffering tied to each product but gives it so much less air time than his own curiosity feels almost worse than not mentioning it all. At times, he disregards what he has seen in the shadows and joins in.
Take the section on opium. I learned a lot from this part of the book, particularly regarding how explicit the political motivation was for the so-called war on drugs in the U.S., thanks to a rather confessional quote attributed to former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."
Yet the overall tone of the chapter - not only on the page but also in the ear, as the author narrates the audiobook - is something like that of a naughty schoolboy, half exhilarated that he might get caught. The very idea that he - white Michael Pollan! - could face legal consequences for growing and producing an illegal substance? Despite his well chronicled efforts to expand his consciousness in this book and others, he can't seem to wrap his mind around that fact. (If you were wondering, the word "flabbergasted" does indeed appear.)
I struggled the most with the part devoted to mescaline, in which Pollan is refused knowledge of the inner workings of peyote ceremonies by multiple indigenous people but presses on, undeterred, until he finds someone who will tell him what he wants to know. With all due respect to the individuals who were willing to speak with Pollan, I personally felt the need to skip portions of this section. Knowing that there were people who explicitly asked that this information not leave their culture, I couldn't listen to it in good conscience. To do so would have transformed me from book reader to bystander in a long line of theft - which Pollan acknowledges, but is not stopped by. That's a trip I don't want to join him on.
I no longer have access to the book, so I'll have to paraphrase, but while partaking in a wachuma (aka san pedro) ceremony predominantly attended by other white people, he asks "Was this cultural appropriation? Probably." And continues.
I appreciate Pollan's tendency towards gonzo journalism when it comes to trying out illegal substances on himself, but I would prefer that he not test his indifference on the reader. I believe we already know the results of that experiment.
Thoughts? Leave a comment or drop me a line.
[Photo credit: Victoria Tronina]
