Quotes from Michael Pollan

Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House "had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify

Every new step in the direction of simplification – toward monoculture, say, ore genetically identical plants – leads to unimaginable new complexities.(intended as challenges)

When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long way

kinds of mental disorders characterized by mental rigidity: addiction, depression, obsession.

Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture.

Cancer? Stamets's extract of turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor) has been shown to help cancer patients by stimulating their immune systems. (Stamets claims to have used it to help cure his mother's stage 4 breast cancer.)

For many flowers the great love of their lives now is humankind.

how economists seem to view the question of work and leisure: as antithetical terms that neatly line up with the equally antithetical categories of production and consumption. But perhaps that view says more about them, and consumer capitalism, than it does about us. For one of the most interesting things about cooking today—optional cooking—is how it confounds the rigid categories of work and leisure, of production and consumption.

The psychedelic experience of "non-duality" suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think.

An alternative food system is rising up on the margins," Joel continued. "One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren't as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?

How can we be certain, he was suggesting, that our experience of consciousness is "authentic"? The answer is we can't;

Agriculture—which consists mainly of growing edible grasses like wheat, corn, and rice—is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting food from the soil and the sun.

nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.

Whenever history and culture seem stifling, weeds begin to look good.

For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a plain old onion.

Baking was the carpentry of cooking, and I've always gravitated toward pursuits that leave considerably more room for error.

Insect infestation? A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a "mycopesticide"—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that, after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them, but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in its environment and then bursting a mushroom from the top of its head that releases its spores to the wind.

free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment

Weed" is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception.

Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.

The Buddhists are probably right about chopping onions: It's all a matter of how you choose to see and experience it, as a chore to resist or a kind of path—a practice, even. Depending on the context, the very same activity can have diametrically opposed meanings.

Lawns are a form of television.

DON'T EAT ANYTHING YOUR GREAT GRANDMOTHER WOULDN'T RECOGNIZE AS FOOD.

This was huge for me. I saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would let go. A little older and wiser, now I can do this for myself.