Domestication is a two-way transaction, not human conquest

Pollan's organizing insight is that we habitually describe domestication as something humans do to plants and animals, but the grammar is misleading — a domesticated species has, from an evolutionary standpoint, struck an enormously successful bargain. By evolving traits that appeal to human desire, a species can recruit an entire civilization's labor, land, and protection on its behalf, a strategy at least as clever as anything a wild species manages through wind dispersal or animal pollination alone.

He points out that the four plants profiled in the book — apple, tulip, cannabis, potato — have vastly expanded their range and numbers compared to their unassuming wild ancestors, precisely because they triggered a human craving strongly enough that people planted, protected, and bred them intensively. Seen this way, corn, wheat, and rice have arguably "domesticated" humans into organizing entire agricultural economies and lifestyles around their needs, every bit as much as the reverse.

Takeaway: ask, of any successful species, who's really working for whom — the answer is often more mutual than it looks.