Quotes from Michael Pollan

Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.

We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called this grace wholly gratuitous? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64)

Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

Sir Albert)Howard put it this way:Artificial manures (synthetic fertilizers)lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It's not something we generate; it's something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers." Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens.

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.

I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.

Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share," he explains in another one. "I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.

A good pot holds memories.

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we're being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this is a fault of our own vocabulary. We don't have a very good vocabulary to describe what others species do to us, because we think we're the only species that really does anything.

Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever's already going on both inside and outside one's head.

For me, "spiritual" is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct—at once so familiar and on reflection so strange—stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within.

That anyone should need to write a book advising people to eat food could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.