Quotes from Michael Pollan

Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.

The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.

psilocybin was introduced to the West by a vice president of J. P. Morgan

Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets.

If we address frankly what is evoked by cheese, I think it becomes clear why so little is said. So what does cheese evoke? Damp dark cellars, molds, mildews and mushrooms galore, dirty laundry and high school locker rooms, digestive processes and visceral fermentations, he-goats which do not remind of Chanel … In sum, cheese reminds of dubious, even unsavory places, both in nature and in our own organisms. And yet we love it.

The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate. The mouth cannot express it in words.

Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want—just as long as you're willing to cook it yourself.

Umami…is the quasi-secret heart and soul of almost every braise, stew, and soup.

There's a parable here somewhere, about the difference between journalism and history. What might appear to be the story in the present moment may actually be a distraction from it, a shiny object preventing us from seeing the truth of what is really going on beneath the surface of our attention, what will most deeply affect people's lives in time.

Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.

How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can't concentrate? That's pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.

All he would tell me is that the experience, which took place in his meditation practice, acquainted him with "something way, way beyond a material worldview that I can't really talk to my colleagues about, because it involves metaphors or assumptions that I'm really uncomfortable with as a scientist.

You're not seriously telling us that LSD is less harmful than alcohol, are you?' Of course I am!

Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist

The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but "health" is simply not one of them, because it is given.

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin

In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a "dead concept," but equally unhealthy were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abrac and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.

I wondered if this wasn't a case of making the ideal an enemy of the good, but Salatin was convinced that industrial organic was finally a contradiction in terms. I decided I had to find out if he was right.

I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. "In nature health is the default," he pointed out. "Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

In a famous experiment conducted by NASA in the 1990s, researchers fed a variety of psychoactive substances to spiders to see how they would affect their web-making skills. The caffeinated spider spun a strangely cubist and utterly ineffective web, with oblique angles, openings big enough to let small birds through, and completely lacking in symmetry or a center. (The web was far more fanciful than the ones spun by spiders given cannabis or LSD.)

Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.

Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?

the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.

Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing — without a human brain, it is inert — so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen.