Quotes from Michael Pollan

Mental time travel is constantly taking us off the frontier of the present moment. But when time travel turns obsessive, it fosters the backward-looking gaze of depression and the forward pitch of anxiety.

Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice—reducing food or drug plants to their most salient chemical compounds—can lead to problems.

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.

Indeed, the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet.

Caffeine does, in fact, shrink the appetite and discombobulate insect brains...The caffeinated spiders [in a certain study] spun a strangely cubist and utterly ineffective web, with oblique angles, openings big enough to let small birds through, and completely lacking symmetry or center. (The web was far more fanciful than the ones spun by spiders given cannabis or LSD.)

COOK AND, IF YOU CAN, PLANT A GARDEN.

The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead." This

Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)

A vegetarian living on the frontier, he deemed it a cruelty to ride a horse or chop down a tree; he once punished his own foot for squashing a worm by throwing away its shoe.

For us, the first big change came ten thousand years ago with the advent of agriculture. (And it devastated our health, leading to a panoply of deficiencies and infectious diseases that we've only managed to get under control in the last century or so.) The biggest change in our food environment since then? The advent of the modern diet.

Could it be that the doctors were mistaking transcendence for insanity?

Hoping to escape those associations and underscore the spiritual dimensions of these drugs, some researchers have proposed they instead be called "entheogens"—from the Greek for "the divine within.

The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world

Altered States of Consciousness, that made a tremendous impression on Paul. Edited by Charles T. Tart

maybe his libido was submerged in some sort of polymorphous love of nature, as some biographers have theorized about Thoreau.

When several years ago an NYU colleague mentioned to Ross that LSD had once been used to treat thousands of alcoholics in Canada and the United States (and that Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had sought to introduce LSD therapy into AA in the 1950s), Ross, who was in his thirties at the time, did some research and was "flabbergasted" by all that he—as an expert on the treatment of alcoholism—did not know and hadn't been told.

Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).

imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

The deeper I delved into the confused and confusing thicket of nutritional science, sorting through the long-running fats versus carbs wars, the fiber skirmishes and the raging dietary supplement debates, the simpler the picture gradually became. I learned that in fact science knows a lot less about nutrition than you would expect--that in fact nutrition science is, to put it charitably, a very young science.

the biological, the psychological, the philosophical, or the spiritual—has yet earned the right to claim it has the final word. It may be that by layering these different perspectives one upon the other, we can gain the richest picture

Isn't it curious how in so many of our pastimes and hobbies we play at supplying one or another of our fundamentally creauturely needs—for food, shelter, even clothing?

I hope whatever you're doing, / you're stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all.")

There is a lot more religion in science than you might expect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in "Nature": Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.