Accommodation and Domestication

While reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I was taken aback by Pollan’s depiction of how corn came to domesticate humans, and how successful this plant was at accommodating the people who would help it colonize “virtually every microclimate of North America.” Pollan presents the idea that rather than human’s inventing agriculture, it could just as easily be regarded as an evolutionary process of plants and animals to cater to humans, exhibiting the traits that we humans favored in order to survive. The artificial selection imposed by humans came to be just as important as the natural selection that had allowed corn to thrive, long before the Native Americans had begun to cultivate it.

Another surprising feature that seemed to accommodate humans was the way in which it could be “engineered” and how the companies invested in such engineering would be guaranteed a return, due to the fact that after the first season, the crops would yield anything profitable. The fact that these strategic crops, who had been successful in accommodating the physical desires of humans for centuries, also lent themselves to being sold and patented in our markets, was what shocked me the most.