Quotes from Michael Pollan

REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM

Perhaps that's why he sometimes likened himself to a bumblebee, and why he would rig up his boat the way he did. Instead of towing his shipment of seeds behind him, Chapman lashed the two hulls together so they would travel down the river side by side.

The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce - doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging.

An experience of awe appears to be an excellent antidote for egotism.

When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms—about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it's possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food (and health).

DON'T LOOK FOR THE MAGIC BULLET IN THE TRADITIONAL DIET.

the apple couldn't cross the Atlantic without changing its identity—a fact that encouraged generations of Americans to hear echoes of their own story in the story of this fruit. The apple in America became a parable.

HAVE A GLASS OF WINE WITH DINNER.

The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce - doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.

In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.

PAY MORE, EAT LESS.

once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.

keep coming back to that image of John Chapman floating down the Ohio River, snoozing alongside his mountain of apple seeds—seeds that held sleeping within them the apple's American future, the golden age to come. The barefoot crank knew something about how things stand between us and the plants, something we seem to have lost sight of in the two centuries since. He understood, I think, that our destinies on the river of natural history are twined.

depatterning factor." There are times in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population.

DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE.

Is there any more feudal, soul eradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking but it is not enjoyable & surely not ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self & humanity.

DON'T GET YOUR FUEL FROM THE SAME PLACE YOUR CAR DOES.

Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand." Why us? "We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.

Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.

TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE.

Los humanos nos esforzamos por diferenciarnos de las bestial hasta tal punto que mostramos un denodado empeño por evitar aquello que nos recuerda que también somos bestias, animales que orinan, defecan, copulan, sangran, mueren, apestan y se descomponen.

Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.

CONSULT YOUR GUT.

Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.