Quotes from Michael Pollan

The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. So we ignore the elephant in the room and focus instead on good and evil nutrients, the identities of which seem to change with every new study.

This might not matter to much of anyone but a confirmed Slow Foodie, eager to save and sample endangered food traditions, except for one notable fact: Medical researchers are coming around to the startling conclusion that, in order to be healthy, people need more exposure to microbes, not less; and that one of the problems with the so-called Western diet—besides all the refined carbohydrates and fats and novel chemicals in it—is the absence from it of live-culture foods.

Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life "so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again." It is the brain's own drug for coping with the human condition.

When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more.

Sometimes the best way to show your respect for something is to just leave it alone.

It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) .

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map—and not the only map.

A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.

Be the kind of person who takes supplements—then skip the supplements.

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.

What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence—a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.

My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.

One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)

One of the last nights we were together, he said, 'Honey, don't push me. I'm finding my way.'" At the same time, he sought to comfort her. "This is simply the wheel of life," she recalls him saying. "'You feel like you're being ground down by it now, but the wheel is going to turn and you'll be on top again.

It's always better to know more rather than less, even when that knowledge complicates your life.

Taloma] offered prayers for us and for our troubled country and world. She invoked the spirit of the cactus in teaching us how to heal ourselves and how, once healed, we could better help to heal others. We are our own best healers," she said. What came next? Taloma spoke of the ripples in water and how far they could travel. She prayed for us to become ripples of healing, traveling out from this room to repair the world before it was too late.

Stamets had recommended that I "cook" the mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach.

Watch out for those health claims.

The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.

one of the first American "employers" to seize on the practical value of caffeine was the Union Army during the Civil War. The army issued each soldier thirty-six pounds of coffee a year at the same time the economic blockade of the South deprived the Confederacy of coffee.

Plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have

I reject the conventions you've given me for ordering this land (my land!); now watch me strike my own relationship to it.

the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.