Quotes from Michael Pollan

Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature.

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner.

Foods are more than the sum of their nutrient parts, and those nutrients work together in ways that are still only dimly understood. It may be that the degree to which a food is processed gives us a more important key to its healthfulness: Not only can processing remove nutrients and add toxic chemicals, but it makes food more readily absorbable, which can be a problem for our insulin and fat metabolism.

The new plants are novel enough to be patented, yet not so novel as to warrant a label telling us what it is we're eating. It would seem they are chimeras: "revolutionary" in the patent office and on the farm, "nothing new" in the supermarket and the environment.

De fapt, chiar È™i cei mai fervenÈ›i adepÈ›i ai alimentelor locale spun c? este în regul? o "cump?n? a alimentelor" (un termen specific unui lanÈ› trofic local, care face o analogie cu "cump?na apelor"), fiind permis? achiziÈ›ia bunurilor care nu se pot produce local - cafea, ceai, zah?r, ciocolat? -, o practic? ce precede globalizarea hranei noastre cu câteva mii de ani. (Fir-ar s? fie!)

Harris believes that people suffering from a whole range of disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thought—including addiction, obsessions, and eating disorders as well as depression—stand to benefit from "the ability of psychedelics to disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior by disintegrating the patterns of [neural] activity upon which they rest.

We have a tendency to assume that what we can see is the important thing to look at.

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel.

Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists reach the public) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. In form this is a quasireligious idea, suggesting the visible world is not the one that really matters, which implies the need for a priesthood. For to enter a world where your dietary salvation depends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help.

Kids' perceptions are not mediated by expectations and conventions in the been-there, done-that way that adult perception is; as adults, she explained, our minds don't simply take in the world as it is so much as they make educated guesses about it.

We were martini people." I asked if he was a spiritual man. "Not really, though I think he would have liked to have been.

And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness

Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I'm seldom surprised. The bad thing is I'm seldom surprised.

Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)

he once punished his own foot for squashing a worm by throwing away its shoe.

Ninety percent of a cooked egg is digested whereas only 65 percent of a raw egg is; by the same token, the rarer the steak, or more al dente the pasta, the less of it will be absorbed. Dieters take note.

Hayes particularly recommends the experience to people in middle age for whom, as Carl Jung suggested, experience of the numinous can help them negotiate the second half of their lives. Hayes added, "I would not recommend it to young people.

Each of the tastes has been selected by evolution for its survival value. Either it guides us toward nutrients we need to survive, or it steers us away from ingesting things that might endanger us.

Some researchers attribute the increase in gluten intolerance and celiac disease to the fact that modern brands no longer receive a lengthy fermentation.

In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work so much as attentiveness.)

In the course of a lifetime, sixty tons of food pass through the gastrointestinal tract, an exposure to the world that is fraught with risk.

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure.

Sugar was a rarity in eighteenth century America. Even after cane plantations were planted in the Caribbean, it remained a luxury good beyond the reach of most Americans...It wasn't until late in the nineteenth century that sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to enter the lives of many Americans...; before then the sensation of sweetness in the lives of most people came chiefly from the flesh of fruit. And in America that usually meant the apple

whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.