Quotes About Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is a champion. In all ways. A man of great integrity, humor, and common sense and kindness.

In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.

A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the 'pieds de Dieu'—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.

Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).

Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.

Polyface is proof that people can sometimes do more for the health of a place by cultivating it rather than by leaving it alone.

psilocybin was introduced to the West by a vice president of J. P. Morgan

By the early 1970s, when I went to college, everything you heard about LSD seemed calculated to terrify. It worked on me: I'm less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked. I also had my own personal reason for steering clear of psychedelics: a painfully anxious adolescence that left me (and at least one psychiatrist) doubting my grip on sanity.

Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth

does the novelty and power of this sort of radical noticing impress women as much as men? I tend to doubt it.)

On the back was a quotation from 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.

On the spectrum he lays out (in his entropic brain article) ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction, and disorders of obsession all fall on the too-much-order end.

But however it worked, it worked, or certainly seemed to: by the end of the decade, LSD was widely regarded in North America as a miracle cure for alcohol addiction.

Jesse's curiosity about psychedelics was first piqued during a drug education unit in his junior high school science class. This particular class of drugs was neither physically nor psychologically addictive, he was told (correctly);

The point is that, as eaters (if not as scientists), we know all we need to know to act: This diet, for whatever reason, is the problem.

Since the revival of sanctioned psychedelic research beginning in the 1990s, nearly a thousand volunteers have been dosed, and not a single serious adverse event has been reported.

We were martini people." I asked if he was a spiritual man. "Not really, though I think he would have liked to have been.

Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I'm seldom surprised. The bad thing is I'm seldom surprised.

Andrew Solomon, in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, traces the links between addiction and depression, which frequently co-occur, as well as the intimate relationship between depression and anxiety.

LSD too, it is easy to forget, was derived from a fungus, Claviceps purpurea, or ergot.

allowing him to conduct clinical research on LSD in the United States—this even though he had a third-grade education

My notes are an anarchy of disputatious taxonomy I see no need to inflict on the reader.

I prized, too, the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the food chain that linked it to the wider world.