Quotes from Michael Pollan

How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?

If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.

Charnay's journey at Hopkins solidified her commitment to herbal medicine (she now works for a supplement maker in Northern California); it also confirmed her in a decision to divorce her husband.

Since the low-fat campaign began in the late 1970s, Americans actually have been eating more than 500 additional calories per day, most of them in the form of refined carbohydrates like sugar. The result: The average male is seventeen pounds heavier and the average female nineteen pounds heavier than in the late 1970s.

Though reading is no substitute for hearing McKenna expound his thesis (you can find him on YouTube), he summarizes it in Food of the Gods (1992): Psilocybes

In the end, women did succeed in getting men into the kitchen, just not their husbands. No, they've ended up instead with the men who run General Mills and Kraft, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.

Food processing began as a way to extend the shelf life of food by protecting it from these competitors. This is often accomplished by making the food less appealing to them, by removing nutrients from it that attract competitors, or by removing other nutrients likely to turn rancid, like omega-3 fatty acids. The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is. Real food is alive—and therefore it should eventually die.

Consider all we've done on this plant's behalf: allotted it more than 27 million acres of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth.

antidotes to our abstraction.

If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise & kill a great many more of them. And indeed, this has become the rule with disastrous results for both the animals & the land... If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little as we possibly can. Something that the humble cook-pot allows us to do.

Writing is about music...finding the music of a sentence....

He writes in his book that mycelia—the vast, cobwebby whitish net of single-celled filaments, called hyphae, with which fungi weave their way through the soil—are intelligent, forming "a sentient membrane" and "the neurological network of nature.

Chapman's craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together.

For what is the environmental crisis, if not a crisis of the way we live? The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us... 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.

Good gardens often seem to have this quality, of order under a certain amount of pressure, wilderness just barely contained. They make something of the fact that nature seems to resist our forms, turn this fact of fate to good account.

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure. You can argue, as some diehards will do, that the problem was one of faulty execution or you can accept that the underlying tenets of the ideology contained the seeds of the eventual disaster.

Aren't we identical with our ego? What's left of us without it? The lesson of both psychedelics and meditation is the same: No! on the first count, and More than enough on the second.

We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the "French paradox," for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein

Two of the most nutritious plants in the world —lamb's quarters and purslane—are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens. The fields and forests are crowded with plants containing higher levels of various phytochemicals than their domesticated cousins. Why? Because these plants have to defend themselves against pests and diseases without any help from us

A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.

Despite his behaviorist orientation as a scientist, Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology—the subjective experience of consciousness.

Wes Jackson calls our species "homo the homogenizer.")

Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yalefn7 who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin's looked remarkably alike.