Quotes from Michael Pollan

William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: "The true method of knowledge is experiment.

My wager is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we'll have traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place

We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.

This is simply another failure of imagination: nature is not only to be found "out there"; it is also "in here," in the apple and the potato, in the garden and the kitchen, even in the brain of a man beholding the beauty of a tulip or inhaling the smoke from a burning cannabis flower.

But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation.

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS THAT MAKE HEALTH CLAIMS.

Policies are useful tools. Instead of prescribing highly specific behaviors, they supply us with broad guidelines that should make everyday decision making easier and swifter.

Madison, Deborah. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Nabhan

William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.

Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt.

GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

EAT MOSTLY PLANTS, ESPECIALLY LEAVES.

People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets.

EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN.

So much of the intelligence and local knowledge in agriculture has been removed from the farm to the laboratory, and then returned to the farm in the form of a chemical or machine. "Whose

Hand taste, however, involves something greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it—the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it.

To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic? I

BE THE KIND OF PERSON WHO TAKES SUPPLEMENTS

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born in 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. (An African American child's chances are two in five.)

EAT MORE LIKE THE FRENCH. OR THE ITALIANS. OR THE JAPANESE. OR THE INDIANS. OR THE GREEKS.

existential distress

changing the course of history or, in a great many more cases, the course of their own lives. "No doubt" is the key. I can think of a couple of ways to account for such a phenomenon, neither entirely satisfying. The most straightforward and yet hardest to accept explanation is that it's simply true: the altered state of consciousness has opened the person up to a truth that the rest of us, imprisoned in ordinary waking consciousness, simply cannot see.

Resistance is essentially a form of coevolution that occurs when a given population is threatened with extinction.

The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.