Quotes from Michael Pollan

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man.

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.

sometimes the answer is not the application of force but rather changing the terms of the problem in such a way that it loses its dominion without actually crumbling.

The banquet is in the first bite.

Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an "experience of the numinous" to help them negotiate the second half of their lives. By

Two years after his departure from Harvard, Alpert embarked on a spiritual journey to India and returned as Ram Dass

I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.

Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients. Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.

Los abonos artificiales conducen inevitablemente a la nutrición artificial, a la comida artificial, a los animales artificiales y, finalmente, a los hombres y mujeres artificiales».

If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.

The virus altered the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.

bacteria can swap genes and pieces of DNA among themselves, picking them up and dropping them almost as if they were tools. This capability is especially handy when a new toxin or food source appears in the environment. The microbiota can swiftly find precisely the right gene needed to fight it—or eat it.

What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one's ego—that may be the key to changing one's mind.

was reminded of the "flight instructions" that the guides employed at Johns Hopkins: instead of turning away from any monster that appears, move toward it, stand your ground, and demand to know, "What are you doing in my mind? What do you have to teach me?

coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.

For though we may be the earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role—that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

Also, organic cows, like Rosie the organic chicken, are never fed corn that contains residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. The tiniest amount of this chemical (0.1 part per billion) has been shown to change the sex of frogs. There's been no study to show what it does to children.

These days 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the car.

Psychedelics are for those of us who aren't so innately gifted.

For Huxley, the drug gave him unmediated access to realms of existence usually known only to mystics and a handful of history's great visionary artists. This other world is always present but in ordinary moments is kept from our awareness by the "reducing valve" of everyday waking consciousness, a kind of mental filter that admits only "a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness" we need in order to survive.

What should we have for dinner?

There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.

Quanto mais branco o pão, mais depressa você vai para o caixão.