Quotes from Michael Pollan

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

It's brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.

Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

all these disorders involve learned habits of negative thinking and behavior that hijack our attention and trap us in loops of self-reflection. "What started as a pleasure becomes a need; what was once a bad mood becomes continuous self-indictment; what was once an annoyance becomes persecution," in a process he describes as a form of "inverse learning.

early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips

The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We're constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. 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.

If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access "cosmic consciousness," or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience.

As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor

People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.

Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.

There's nothing really quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking all you want, but you will never get it back.

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.

Escherichia colia O157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys.

We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.

Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.

Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.

The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.

What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

This also turns out to be a pretty good summary of the drug war, which, besides doing so much to erode our liberties and fill our prisons, served to distract us from reckoning the true toll of the opiates we happened to classify as legal.

The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it.

Timothy Leary, always happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced him to put his supply of Sandoz psilocybin pills under the control of Health Services: "Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.