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What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions--involving the temporary dissolution of one's ego--that may be the key to changing one's mind.
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Michael Pollan |
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Psychedelics are for those of us who aren't so innately gifted.
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Michael Pollan |
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There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.
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Michael Pollan |
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In this and so many other ways, it seems, the Hopkins psilocybin experience is the artifact not only of this powerful molecule but also of the preparation and expectations of the volunteer, the skills and worldviews of the sitters, Bill Richards's flight instructions, the decor of the room, the inward focus encouraged by the eyeshades and the music (and the music itself, much of which to my ears sounds notably religious), and, though they m..
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Michael Pollan |
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Charnay's journey at Hopkins solidified her commitment to herbal medicine (she now works for a supplement maker in Northern California); it also confirmed her in a decision to divorce her husband.
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Michael Pollan |
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He writes in his book that mycelia--the vast, cobwebby whitish net of single-celled filaments, called hyphae, with which fungi weave their way through the soil--are intelligent, forming "a sentient membrane" and "the neurological network of nature."
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Michael Pollan |
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Savannah gave little thought to her habit during the journey, except toward the end when she pictured herself as a smoking gargoyle. "You know how gargoyles look, crouched down with their shoulders hunched? That's how I felt and saw myself, a little golem creature smoking, pulling in the smoke and not letting it out, until my chest hurts and I'm choking. It was powerful and disgusting. I can still see it now, that hideous coughing gargoyle,..
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Michael Pollan |
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They can print more money," he liked to say, "and they can print new stocks and bonds, but they can't print more land."
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Michael Pollan |
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A single unmowed lawn ruins the whole effect, announcing to the world that all is not well here in utopia.
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Michael Pollan |
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we need, and now more than ever, to learn how to use nature without damaging it.
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Michael Pollan |
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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. He quotes an expert on anxiety who suggests we should think of the two disorders as "fraternal twins": "Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss." Both reflect a mind mired in rumination,..
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Michael Pollan |
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PAY MORE, EAT LESS.
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Michael Pollan |
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EAT MEALS.
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Michael Pollan |
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DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE.
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Michael Pollan |
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DON'T GET YOUR FUEL FROM THE SAME PLACE YOUR CAR DOES.
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Michael Pollan |
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TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE.
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Michael Pollan |
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CONSULT YOUR GUT.
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Michael Pollan |
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EAT SLOWLY.
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Michael Pollan |
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REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM
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Michael Pollan |
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farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself.
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Michael Pollan |
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The philosophical implications of "predictive coding" are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories."
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perception
reality
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Michael Pollan |
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c3ec1c1
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If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.
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environment
food
home
kitchen
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Michael Pollan |
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For what is the environmental crisis, if not a crisis of the way we live? The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us... If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.
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cooking
environment
environmentalism
home
kitchen
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Michael Pollan |
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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?
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Michael Pollan |
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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 n..
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Michael Pollan |
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Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.
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Michael Pollan |
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ad78476
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Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.
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Michael Pollan |
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David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries.
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Michael Pollan |
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Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine.
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Michael Pollan |
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From a typical McDonald's meal] this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%).
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Michael Pollan |
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We simply don't have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words.
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Michael Pollan |
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To eat corn directly is to consume all the energy in the corn, but when you feed that corn to an animal, 90% of its energy is lost... what this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories in our meal, tens of thousand corn calories could have been used to feed many more people.
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Michael Pollan |
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6a4a99a
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All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.
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Michael Pollan |
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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.
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Michael Pollan |
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The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shap..
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Michael Pollan |
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The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the..
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Michael Pollan |
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Despite his behaviorist orientation as a scientist, Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology--the subjective experience of consciousness.
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Michael Pollan |
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Maybe the problem with "the box" is that it is singular."
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Michael Pollan |
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whenever we hired someone, they would receive a couple of LSD sessions as part of their training
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Michael Pollan |
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What opened up before me was, for lack of a better word, a space, but not our ordinary concept of space, just the pure awareness of a realm without form and void of content. And into that realm came a celestial entity, which was the emergence of the physical world. It was like the big bang, but without the boom or the blinding light. It was the birth of the physical universe. In
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Michael Pollan |
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pile, I started to see the golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots, floating in the puddles of rainwater, pancaked on the steel rails. Most of this grain is destined for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it particularly clean. Even so, it was hard not to register something deeply amiss in the sight of so much food lying around on the wet ground.
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Michael Pollan |
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People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.
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Michael Pollan |
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If you hadn't done what you did," he told Weil, "I would never have become Ram Dass."
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Michael Pollan |
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ordained Zen monk,
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Michael Pollan |