Quotes from Michael Pollan

it would be a big mistake if medicalization is all that happens." Why a mistake? Because Bob Jesse was ultimately less interested in people's mental problems than with their spiritual well-being—in using entheogens for the betterment of well people.

does the novelty and power of this sort of radical noticing impress women as much as men? I tend to doubt it.)

Yet in general all writers can really do is lift a sensitive finger to the cultural breeze and sense a coming change in the weather; very seldom do they actually change it themselves.

On the back was a quotation from William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: "The true method of knowledge is experiment.

A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.

the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since the creature that conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. we are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.

While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation.

researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.

Barbecue brings people together, it always did and always will. Even in the sixties, during the race movements, barbecue was one of the things that held down the tensions. At a barbecue, it didn't matter who you were.

The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)

On the spectrum he lays out (in his entropic brain article) ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction, and disorders of obsession all fall on the too-much-order end.

Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only "good to eat"—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, "good to think," for among all the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas.

food system organized around quantity rather than quality has a destructive feedback loop built into it, such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eats, in a futile—but highly profitable—quest for the absent nutrient.

It's astonishing, actually, how much anger an animal's assault on your garden can incite.

The final standards do a good job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible kind of farming but, as perhaps was inevitable as soon as bureaucratic and industrial thinking was brought to bear, many of the philosophical values embodied in the word organic - the sorts of values expressed by Albert Howard - did not survive the federal rule making process.

Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.

there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall.

if the therapy works as it's supposed to, there won't be a lot of repeat business.

I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley

compost is trucked in; some crops also receive fish emulsion along with their water and a side dressing of pelleted chicken manure. Over the winter a cover crop of legumes is planted to build up nitrogen in the soil.

The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent.

You've heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.

The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending.

coffee helped disperse Europe's alcoholic fog, fostering a heightened alertness and attention to detail, and, as employers soon discovered, dramatically improving productivity.