Mathematical Modeling of Food Processing Book

Having just read a book which ripped the reddish-green face off the tomato industry, I was anticipating the same treatment for flowers, after which I could go in search of an exploration of the human suffering that goes into every bottle of spray starch, or perhaps a brutal exposé on the machinations of Big Carrot. But Amy Stewart isn't going there, even if she observes and documents a normal amount of, uh, garden-variety exploitation while documenting a flower's path to the marketplace. She is generally not shocked by the process of getting the product to the market, but she does seem a little flabbergasted, or perhaps bemused.

I am neither flabbergasted or bemused. It all makes perfect sense to me. Although I don't (even after reading the book) understand flowers, I have perhaps a better instinctive grasp of money than this book's author. So, for example, when the author says she is confused why flower breeders are squandering so much time and treasure in a (to this day unsuccessful) search for a naturally-occurring (not spray-painted) blue rose when she can find no one who will admit to wanting one, I have to remark that no one thought that they needed an Ipad, or the "Ode to Joy" for that matter, before they came to the market. Yet when they appeared, people seemed to believe that they somehow filled a void that they didn't even know that they had. The result was an avalanche of money for a few lucky people, and also a general improvement in the world. Blue roses might or might not be a monster smash on their first day on the market. If they aren't, a political movement lacking a symbol might adopt them, or perhaps they will feature prominently in some lucrative romantic movie, and before you know it they'll be flying off the shelves steadily for months at a stretch. You don't need a rich imagination to envision this happening; you just need to be walking around with your eyes open.

My black-and-white Kindle of course could not present an adequate picture of the so-called "Blue Rose" produced by the Japanese whiskey-making conglomerate Suntory in 2009 and described on page 47. However, you can see a picture of it here, among other places. I agree with Stewart: that sucker is purple. Not Blue. Purple. They can call it blue, but it's not blue, because, the twin best efforts of modernity and capitalism to the contrary, words still mean things. (Why is a whiskey-making conglomerate breeding flowers? There's a pretty good explanation in the book.)

I might be showing some sort of deep-seated moral/spiritual/aesthetic deficit by admitting my relative immunity to the charms of flora, but Stewart's repeated reaction in the book to nearly everything botanic -- specifically, that she wants to pick it up, stroke it, own it, hug it, caress it, take it home -- also struck me as rather odd. (I wanted to say: "You know, flowers don't actually care if you love them.") However, she doesn't let this distract her too much from documenting the flower industry. Her enthusiasm for flowers sometimes translates into a resentment of those who profit from them, but she acknowledges it and mostly keeps it under control.

There's a lot of personification of flowers in this book. Commenting on the commercialization of flowers on page 184 of the Kindle edition, Stewart writes: "If it seems like flowers have lost their soul in this process, well, they have." My first reaction was to wheel out a massive siege engine of invective and prepare a missile asking if turnips, weeds, and ugly flowers have souls too, or if souls just reside in pretty flowers that Stewart want to take home and snuggle. After a nice lie down and some medication, I decided that Stewart didn't mean "soul" in the sense of the ghostly presence that is alleged to reside in human beings. Instead, I think that she meant the sense that we use sometimes when we speak of music or other arts, that is, a sense of a personal transmission of the emotional experience of the producer, which cannot be summed up by the inadequate words "happy" or "sad", to the receiver, an attempt to bridge the gulf between humans. Anyway, I hope that's what she meant, because if you believe that flowers have actual souls, it's hard to defend supporting an industry that murders them at the height of their beauty, and then prolongs their death agonies so we can momentarily beautify our homes, or please a woman.

In summary, a good book which told me interesting things concerning a subject which I previously knew nothing.

Recommended in, of all places, Foreign Policy magazine, July/Aug 07