Michael Pollan's inquiry into who is really domesticating whom, built around four plants that each satisfy a basic human craving: the apple for sweetness, the tulip for beauty, marijuana for intoxication, and the potato for sustenance. Johnny Appleseed's real story opens the film, tracing how a scraggly, mostly inedible fruit became an American orchard staple by appealing to frontier settlers' taste for hard cider. From there the film follows tulip mania in seventeenth-century Holland, the underground breeding of cannabis strains in the Pacific Northwest, and the industrial-scale potato fields feeding fast food chains, alongside the genetically engineered NewLeaf potato built to produce its own pesticide. Pollan interviews growers, breeders, and historians, using orchard visits, greenhouse tours, and archival images to make the case that these plants evolved traits that hijacked human desire for their own reproductive advantage. The film treats agriculture less as human mastery over nature and more as a negotiated, sometimes precarious partnership between species.