Quotes from Michael Pollan

the second possible explanation for the noetic sense: when our sense of a subjective "I" disintegrates, as it often does in a high-dose psychedelic experience (as well as in meditation by experienced meditators), it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is subjectively and objectively true. What's left to do the doubting if not your I?

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees. •

YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO.

What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. Karl Marx may have gotten in backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.

It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease].

The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.) Stamets contends that these mycelial networks are in some sense

It was either a ritual sacrifice, or more nuts and berries for dinner.

As fire's presence in our everyday lives has diminished, the social magnetism of the cook fire seems, if anything, to have only grown more powerful.

even the weather itself is in some sense an artifact now, its temperatures and storms the reflection of our actions.

If you hadn't done what you did," he told Weil, "I would never have become Ram Dass.

IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER.

Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.

Artificial selection has become a much more important chapter in natural history as it has moved into the space once ruled exclusively by natural selection.

noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.

For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences. Speaking of lines, psychedelics in the 1960s did draw

felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, including the distinct sense that death was illusory, in the sense that it is a door we walk through into another plane of existence, that we're sprung from an eternity to which we will return.

The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal.

Convinced that trepanation would help facilitate higher states of consciousness, Feilding went looking for someone to perform the operation on her. When it became clear no professional would oblige, she trepanned herself in 1970, boring a small hole in the middle of her forehead with an electric drill.

By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world's supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.

ordained Zen monk

century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.

Part of the power of the ego flows from its command of one's rational faculties.)

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS CONTAINING INGREDIENTS THAT ARE A) UNFAMILIAR, B) UNPRONOUNCEABLE, C) MORE THAN FIVE IN NUMBER, OR THAT INCLUDE D) HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP.