Quotes from Michael Pollan

Mysticism," he likes to say, "is the antidote to fundamentalism.

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1

Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.

After a week in front of the screen, the opportunity to work with my hands—with all my senses, in fact—is always a welcome change of pace, whether in the kitchen or in the garden. There's something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense. I don't want you to get the idea it's made a Buddhist of me, but in the kitchen, maybe a little bit. When stirring the pot, just stir the pot.

The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.

We don't die well in America.

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

The food never tastes so good as when everybody at the table worked on it and everybody knows what went into it. (Interview in Lucky Peach 6)

Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.

the typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there

Cooking is no longer obligatory, and that marks a shift in human history, one whose full implications we're just beginning to reckon.

The colors and shapes of the flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive," the poet and critic Frederick Turner has written. He goes on to suggest that it "would be a paradoxically anthropocentric mistake to assume that, because bees are more primitive organisms .         .         . there is nothing in common between our pleasure in flowers and theirs.

Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion.

Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or prairies—in "the wild." Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.

Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner?

farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself.

By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time

The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe.

Two of the most nutritious plants in the world —lamb's quarters and purslane—are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.

It is possible to be indifferent to flowers—possible but not very likely. Psychiatrists regard a patient's indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.

The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.