Quotes from Michael Pollan

either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild.

The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet.

Katherine MacLean, the former Hopkins researcher who wrote the landmark paper on openness, hopes someday to establish a "psychedelic hospice," a retreat center somewhere out in nature where not only the dying but their loved ones can use psychedelics to help them let go—the patient and the loved ones both.

It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.

Worldwide, the prospects for coffee production in a changing climate are, according to the agronomists, dismal. By one estimate, roughly half the world's coffee-growing acreage—and an even greater proportion in Latin America—will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change. Capitalism, having benefited enormously from its symbiotic relationship with coffee, now threatens to kill the golden goose.

I don't work with crazies anymore

Carhart-Harris suspects that the loss of a clear distinction between subject and object might help explain another feature of the mystical experience: the fact that the insights it sponsors are felt to be objectively true—revealed truths rather than plain old insights. It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person's opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.

We feed animals a high-energy diet of grain to make them grow quickly, even in the case of ruminants that have evolved to eat grass. But even food animals that can tolerate grain are much healthier when they have access to green plants—and so, it turns out, are their meat and eggs. The food from these animals will contain much healthier types of fat (more omega-3s, less omega-6s) as well as appreciably higher levels of vitamins and antioxidants.

As far as the body is concerned, white flour is not much different from sugar. Unless supplemented, it offers none of the good things (fiber, B vitamins, healthy fats) in whole grains—it's little more than a shot of glucose. Large spikes of glucose are inflammatory and wreak havoc on our insulin metabolism. Eat whole grains and minimize your consumption of white flour.

Goldsmith has so far raised three million pounds to fund and organize psilocybin trials (starting with treatment-resistant depression) at multiple sites in Europe. Already he is working with designers at IDEO, the international design firm, to redesign the entire experience of psychedelic therapy.

For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

It gave us permission to try weird shit in cahoots with other people.

During Prohibition, Hubbard drove a taxi in Seattle, but that appears to have been a cover: in the trunk of his cab he kept a sophisticated ship-to-shore communications system he used to guide bootleggers seeking to evade the Coast Guard. Hubbard was eventually busted by the FBI and spent eighteen months in prison on a smuggling charge.

Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.

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

I explored at some length what I had been surprised to discover is a universal human desire to change consciousness

and spirituality. I asked him if he agreed with E. O. Wilson, who has written that all of us must ultimately choose: either the path of science or the path of spirituality

The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead. Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals]. The food scientists' chemistry set is designed to extend shelf life, make old food look fresher and more appetizing than it really is, and get you to eat more.

The great advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do

We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry—before you eat and then again along the way. (One old wives' test: If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry.) Food is a costly antidepressant.

Lawns, I am convinced, are a symptom of, and a metaphor for, our skewed relationship to the land. They teach us that, with the help of petrochemicals and technology, we can bend nature to our will. Lawns stoke our hubris with regard to the land.

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.

Science has trouble with this interpretation, however, because, whatever the perception is, it can't be verified by its customary tools. It's an anecdotal report, in effect, and so has no value. Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too. But it's worth pointing out that there are cases

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control—what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.