Quotes from Michael Pollan

We don't die well in America. Ask people where do you want to die, and they will tell you, at home with their loved ones. But most of us die in an ICU. The biggest taboo in America is the conversation about death. Sure, it's gotten better; now we have hospices, which didn't exist not so long ago. But to a doctor, it's still an insult to let a patient go.

Today these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy.

Among the many, many things the green thumb knows is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging, redeems this season's deaths and disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.

But however it worked, it worked, or certainly seemed to: by the end of the decade, LSD was widely regarded in North America as a miracle cure for alcohol addiction.

why our usual perception of the world is "limited to what is biologically or socially useful"; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the "measly trickle" of information required for our survival and no more.

a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells' nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place—and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is—the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. That's it? That's it.

consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains.

Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat.

if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James, forbids[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality

Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we're to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.* Much depends on forgetting.

Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.

The entropy paper asks us to conceive of the mind as an uncertainty-reducing machine with a few serious bugs in it.

It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.

wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple -- at least five per apple, several thousand per tree -- that a couple of these novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree's adopted home.

Jesse's curiosity about psychedelics was first piqued during a drug education unit in his junior high school science class. This particular class of drugs was neither physically nor psychologically addictive, he was told (correctly);

You're better off eating the real thing in moderation than bingeing on "lite" food products packed with sugars and salt.

Maybe the problem with "the box" is that it is singular.

Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients' recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)

Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.

There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.

Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]

The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.

The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.

Carhart-Harris argues in the entropy paper that even a temporary rewiring of the brain is potentially valuable, especially for people suffering from disorders characterized by mental rigidity. A high-dose psychedelic experience has the power to "shake the snow globe," he says, disrupting unhealthy patterns of thought and creating a space of flexibility—entropy—in which more salubrious patterns and narratives have an opportunity to coalesce as the snow slowly resettles.