Quotes About Michael Pollan

In the last several years, he and his wife, Ekaterina Malievskaia, a Russian-born physician, have devoted their considerable energy and resources to winning approval for psilocybin-assisted therapy in the European Union.

Two years after his departure from Harvard, Alpert embarked on a spiritual journey to India and returned as Ram Dass

Though reading is no substitute for hearing McKenna expound his thesis (you can find him on YouTube), he summarizes it in Food of the Gods (1992): Psilocybes

Despite his behaviorist orientation as a scientist, Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology—the subjective experience of consciousness.

The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet.

Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.

I explored at some length what I had been surprised to discover is a universal human desire to change consciousness

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time. (Leaves!)

Uncle Jeff insisted that I also take a tray of unseasoned barbecue, so I could see for myself that what's going on here at the Skylight Inn does not in any way, shape, or form depend for it's flavor or quality on sauce. That is a word he pronounces with an upturned lip and a slight sneer, suggesting that the use of barbecue sauce was at best a culinary crutch deserving of pity and at worst a moral failing.

We're in the explanation business, and if the answers to the questions we explore got too simple, we'd be out of work.

the idea that brains create consciousness—an

The dream of control is seductive but it leads to monoculture in the field and fortified white bread in the supermarket.

Ineffability is of course a hallmark of the mystical experience. "The awareness transcends any particular sensory modality," he explained, unhelpfully. Was it scary? "There was no terror, only fascination and awe.

the marvel of consciousness," as Vladimir Nabokov once called it, "that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being"—maybe

As fire's presence in our everyday lives has diminished, the social magnetism of the cook fire seems, if anything, to have only grown more powerful.

Artificial selection has become a much more important chapter in natural history as it has moved into the space once ruled exclusively by natural selection.

Convinced that trepanation would help facilitate higher states of consciousness, Feilding went looking for someone to perform the operation on her. When it became clear no professional would oblige, she trepanned herself in 1970, boring a small hole in the middle of her forehead with an electric drill.

ordained Zen monk

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.

I was really gratified that, of all the episodes of 'Cooked,' the baking one really hit a chord. There were months where there were dozens of loaves posted from people on my Twitter feed every day... And it's a little bit of a guy thing. Most of those loaves put up on Twitter were put up there by guys.

My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.

Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically.