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To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction.
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Michael Pollan |
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Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than two hundred years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650--very promising, and very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them operate on you? I think I'll wait awhile.
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Michael Pollan |
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The banquet is in the first bite.
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Michael Pollan |
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Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the seed--the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects--and sell that off, retaining the least nourishing part to feed us. In effect, they're throwing away the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most..
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Michael Pollan |
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68e669d
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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.
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Michael Pollan |
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The mysteries of germination and flowering and fruiting engaged me from an early age, and the fact that by planting and working an ordinary patch of dirt you could in a few months' time harvest things of taste and value was, for me, nature's most enduring astonishment.
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Michael Pollan |
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Since the body can't break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track without ever turning into calories of glucose--a particular boon, we're told, for diabetics. When fake sugars and fake fats are joined by fake starches, the food industry will at long last have overcome the dilemma of the fixed stomach: whole meals you can eat as often or as much of as you like, since this food will leave no trace. Meet the ultimate--the ..
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Michael Pollan |
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Because of diabetes and all the other health problems that accompany obesity, today's children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The
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Michael Pollan |
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A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be as small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day's Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony, "Where's the beef?," and of course the notion of the meme itself."
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Michael Pollan |
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There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well--everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.
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Michael Pollan |
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Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox--that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.
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Michael Pollan |
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the critical influence of "set" and "setting." Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place." --
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Michael Pollan |
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Shortly after Carhart-Harris published his results in a 2012 paper in PNAS ("Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin"*), Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale* who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin's looked remarkably alike. The transcendence of self reported by expert meditators showed up on fMRIs as a quieting of the default mode ne..
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Michael Pollan |
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Leary reported eye-popping results: ten months after their release, only 25 percent of the psilocybin recipients had ended up back in jail, while the control group returned at a more typical rate of 80 percent. But when Rick Doblin at MAPS meticulously reconstructed the Concord experiment decades later, reviewing the outcomes subject by subject, he concluded that Leary had exaggerated the data; in fact, there was no statistically significan..
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Michael Pollan |
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The psychedelic experience of "non-duality" suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we--and it--like to think."
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Michael Pollan |
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GMO seed is just the latest chapter in an old story: Farmers eager to increase their yields adopt the latest innovation, only to find that it's the companies selling the innovations who reap the most from the gain in the farmer's productivity.
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Michael Pollan |
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psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity.
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Michael Pollan |
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If we limit psychedelics just to the patient," she explains, "we're sticking to the old medical model"
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Michael Pollan |
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a cross between a spa/retreat and a gym, where people can experience psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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What had been as recently as 2010 a modest gathering of psychonauts and a handful of renegade researchers was now a six-day convention-cum-conference that had drawn more than three thousand people from all over the world to hear researchers from twenty-five countries present their findings.
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Michael Pollan |
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The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power." This sense of having temporarily surrendered to a superior force often leaves the person feeling as if he or she has been permanently transformed."
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Michael Pollan |
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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.
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Michael Pollan |
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Institutions generally like to mediate the individual's access to authority
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Michael Pollan |
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As for the guides themselves, they are already being trained and certified: late in 2016, the California Institute of Integral Studies graduated its first class of forty-two psychedelic therapists.
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Michael Pollan |
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A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system- a patch of soil, a human body- and the health of one is connected- literally- to the health of the other.
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food-chain
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Michael Pollan |
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the idea that brains create consciousness--an
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Michael Pollan |
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idea accepted without question by most scientists--"is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact."
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Michael Pollan |
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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."
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Michael Pollan |
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Mysticism," he likes to say, "is the antidote to fundamentalism."
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Michael Pollan |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in "Nature": Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
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Michael Pollan |
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TO EAT
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Michael Pollan |
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Industrial processes follow a clear, linear, hierarchical logic that is fairly easy to put into words, probably because words follow a similar logic: First this, then that; put this in here, and then out comes that. But the relationship between cows and chickens on this [Polyface] farm...takes the form of a loop rather than a line, and that makes it hard to know where to start, or how to distinguish between causes and effects, subjects and ..
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closed-loop
ecological
food
industrial-farming
scale
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Michael Pollan |
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Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. In effect, Joel is farming in time as well as space - in four dimensions rather than three. . .The ides is not to slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species 'fully express their physiologica..
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closed-loop
farm-ecosystem
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Michael Pollan |
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allowing him to conduct clinical research on LSD in the United States--this even though he had a third-grade education
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Michael Pollan |
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A fishmonger told me about a Martha Stewart tip for keeping grilled fish from sticking to a barbecue: rub the grill with a raw potato sliced down the middle
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Michael Pollan |
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A few years ago, at a conference on organic agriculture in California, a corporate organic grower suggested to a small farmer struggling to survive in the competitive world of industrial organic that "you should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market." Holding his fury in check, the small farmer replied as levelly as he could manage: "I believe I developed that niche twenty years ago. It's called 'organic.' And ..
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Michael Pollan |
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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.
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Michael Pollan |
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Two years after his departure from Harvard, Alpert embarked on a spiritual journey to India and returned as Ram Dass
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Michael Pollan |
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Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective [...] To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen. In my hands its flesh feels a little less like th..
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Michael Pollan |
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effect.
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Michael Pollan |
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either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild.
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Michael Pollan |
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I don't work with crazies anymore
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Michael Pollan |
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Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat.
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Michael Pollan |
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When we mistake what we know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation for one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature like a machine.
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Michael Pollan |