Quotes from Michael Pollan

Solomon Katz put forth the arresting theory that it was the human desire for a steady supply of alcohol, not food, that drove the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Beer, in other words, came before bread, and as soon as people got a taste of it, Katz reasoned, they would have wanted more than could be produced by gathering seeds or fruits or honey.

What had been as recently as 2010 a modest gathering of psychonauts and a handful of renegade researchers was now a six-day convention-cum-conference that had drawn more than three thousand people from all over the world to hear researchers from twenty-five countries present their findings.

The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative.

The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power." This sense of having temporarily surrendered to a superior force often leaves the person feeling as if he or she has been permanently transformed.

At the time, LSD was not well known outside the small community of medical professionals who regarded it as a potential miracle drug for psychiatric illness and alcohol addiction.

Alcoholism can be understood as a spiritual disorder, Ross told me the first time we met, in the treatment room at NYU. Over time you lose your connection to everything but this compound. Life loses all meaning. At the end, nothing is more important than that bottle, not even your wife and your kids. Eventually, there is nothing you won't sacrifice for it.

Si yo fuese un dictador dispuesto a controlar la prensa nacional, Organic Gardening sería la primera publicación que acallaría, porque es la más subversiva. Creo que los horticultores orgánicos encabezan un esfuerzo serio por salvar el mundo, cambiando la disposición del hombre hacia él para alejarse del estado colectivo, centralista y superindustrial y alcanzar una relación más sencilla, real y de tú a tú con la propia tierra.

one of the packages warned that we would not get optimal results in the microwave. The various stages that made up the frozen brown rocket of onion soup would meld together pointlessly in the microwave. If we wanted the gratinée effect promised on the package, then we had to bake it in the oven (at 350°F) for forty minutes. I could make onion soup from scratch in forty minutes! (p.198-199)

How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?

In the last several years, he and his wife, Ekaterina Malievskaia, a Russian-born physician, have devoted their considerable energy and resources to winning approval for psilocybin-assisted therapy in the European Union.

there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.

the church, with communities in nine

One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself.

A maneira de comer é um dos meios mais poderoso que um povo tem de expressar e preservar sua identidade cultural. (...) Tornar as opções alimentares mais científicas é esvaziá-las de seu conteúdo étnico e de sua história.

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. (These figures would be about 4 percent higher if the salad were grown conventionally.) I

I asked him if he agreed with something I'd read the Dalai Lama had said, that the idea that brains create consciousness—an idea accepted without question by most scientists—"is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact." "Bingo," Jesse said. "And for someone with my orientation"—agnostic, enamored of science—"that changes everything.

Institutions generally like to mediate the individual's access to authority

Diabetes is well on its way to becoming normalized in the West—recognized as a whole new demographic and so a major marketing opportunity. Apparently it is easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.

Unlike these other states of consciousness, ordinary waking consciousness has been optimized by natural selection to best facilitate our everyday survival.

As the whole-grain food synergy study suggests, science doesn't know nearly enough to compensate for everything that processing does to whole foods. We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again. Destroying complexity is a lot easier than creating it.

The Romantic Tree is in fact the mirror image of the Puritan Tree: if Puritans clear trees to redeem nature, romantics worship trees to redeem culture. Both regard nature and culture as opponents; they just vote differently

one of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. Because

the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.

psilocybin, had been used by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America for hundreds of years as a sacrament. Called teonanácatl by the Aztecs, or "flesh of the gods," the mushroom was brutally suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church after the Spanish conquest and driven underground.