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146e44a
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Indeed, the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet.
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Michael Pollan |
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b9078d3
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Can a recognition of one's shallowness qualify as a profound insight?
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Michael Pollan |
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e0678ba
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Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place.
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Michael Pollan |
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a2738e6
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The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.
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Michael Pollan |
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fa95f83
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Whatever else it impressed on the culture, Huxley's experience left no doubt in his mind or Osmond's that the 'model psychosis' didn't begin to describe the mind on mescaline. 'It will give that elixir a bad name if it continues to be associated, in the public mind, with schizophrenia symptoms," Huxley wrote to Osmond in 1955. 'People will think they are going mad, when in fact they are beginning, when they take it, to go sane."
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Michael Pollan |
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07e5f2c
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This points to the second possible explanation for the noetic sense: when our sense of a subjective "I" disintegrates, as it often does in a high-dose psychedelic experience (as well as in meditation by experienced meditators), it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is subjectively and objectively true. What's left to do the doubting if not your I? * * * IN THE YEARS following that first powerful psychedelic journey, Bob Jesse ha..
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Michael Pollan |
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16b31a9
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Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: "Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet." Those main trails represent the most well-traveled n..
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Michael Pollan |
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ca11882
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For the first time since embarking on this project, I began to understand what the volunteers in the cancer-anxiety trials had been trying to tell me: how it was that a psychedelic journey had granted them a perspective from which the very worst life can throw at us, up to and including death, could be regarded objectively and accepted with equanimity.
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Michael Pollan |
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d574fb8
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I'm struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight--..
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nature
psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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29e48cc
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But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from th..
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noetic-quality
psychedelics
mystical
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Michael Pollan |
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9378f2b
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I began braising and stewing solo, regularly devoting my Sunday afternoons to cooking various pot dishes on my own. The idea was to make a couple of dinners at a time and freeze them to eat during the week: my own home-meal replacements, homemade. Weeknights, it's often hard to find more than a half hour or so to fix dinner, so I decided to put in a few hours on the weekend, when I would feel less rushed. I also borrowed a couple of minor m..
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Michael Pollan |
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fa91c91
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If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise & kill a great many more of them. And indeed, this has become the rule with disastrous results for both the animals & the land... If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little as we possibly can. Something that the humble cook-pot allows us to do.
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philosophy
ethics
food
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Michael Pollan |
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3ed337a
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How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein
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americanization
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Michael Pollan |
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b931d05
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Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would seem to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hun..
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Michael Pollan |
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1c9a790
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Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience,
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Michael Pollan |
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8d79afc
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Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?
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omnivore
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Michael Pollan |
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1ba40e3
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The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.
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omnivore
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Michael Pollan |
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9b9d57f
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The dream of control is seductive but it leads to monoculture in the field and fortified white bread in the supermarket.
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monoculture
control
food
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Michael Pollan |
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42fb889
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It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us.
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Michael Pollan |
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d7dc713
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Americans are consuming a diet that is at least half sugars in one form or another--calories providing virtually nothing but energy. The energy density of these refined carbohydrates contributes to obesity in two ways. First, we consume many more calories per unit of food; the fiber that's been removed from these foods is precisely what would have made us feel full and stop eating. Also, the flash flood of glucose causes insulin levels to s..
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Michael Pollan |
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d63ce8f
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After more than half a century of its more or less constant companionship, one's self--this ever-present voice in the head, this ceaselessly commenting, interpreting, labeling, defending I--becomes perhaps a little too familiar. I'm not talking about anything as deep as self-knowledge here. No, just about how, over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of ..
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Michael Pollan |
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b985de4
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So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when "all mean egotism vanishes." Wonders (and terrors) we're ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and..
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science
spiritual
psychology
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Michael Pollan |
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59e1a03
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Watch out for those health claims.
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health
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Michael Pollan |
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98be9a8
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Quantum mechanics holds that matter may not be as innocent of mind as the materialist would have us believe. For example, a subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple locations, is pure possibility, until it is measured--that is, perceived by a mind. Only then and not a moment sooner does it drop into reality as we know it: acquire fixed coordinates in time and space. The implication here is that matter might not exist as such ..
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Michael Pollan |
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d322da1
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Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked--nature into culture.
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Michael Pollan |
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71676dd
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Cheese is all about the dark side of life" - Sister Noella; aka The Cheese Nun"
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death
life
fermentation
foodie
decay
cooking
food
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Michael Pollan |
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f343994
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there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
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Michael Pollan |
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e065e75
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the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.
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Michael Pollan |
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cb2839b
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This ambivalence about the value of cooking raises an interesting question: Has our culture devalued food-work because it is unfulfilling by it's very nature or because it has traditionally been "women's work"?"
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feminism
women
society
food
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Michael Pollan |
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99aff33
|
Yet, running just beneath the surface of food industry feminism was an implicit anti-feminist message. Then as now, ads for packaged foods are aimed almost exclusively at women and so reinforced the retrograde idea that responsibility for feeding the family fell to mom. The slick new products would help her do a job that was hers & hers alone.
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feminism
women
cooking
food
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Michael Pollan |
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3feaf33
|
Most recipes try to rush the process, promising to wrap things up & get the dish on the table in a couple of hours. These days recipes are steeped in the general sense of panic about time & so have tried to speed things up, the better to suit our busy lives.
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Michael Pollan |
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7759397
|
In nature health is the default," he pointed out. "Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong."
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Michael Pollan |
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a16f488
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More birds on a farm mean fewer insects, but most birds won't venture more than a couple hundred yards from the safety of cover. Like many species, their preferred habitat is the edge between forest and field. The biodiversity of the forest edge also helps control predators. As long as the weasels and coyotes have plenty of chipmunks and voles to eat, they're less likely to venture out and prey on the chickens.
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Michael Pollan |
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0701b3d
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One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.
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Michael Pollan |
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a6b88f7
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Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?
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Michael Pollan |
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04a96f7
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I could, like some of the meat we were cooking, relax into it, clear my mind of competing desires & give myself over to the work... This time became a kind of luxury. And that is precisely when I began to truly enjoy the work of cooking.
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foodie
self-care
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Michael Pollan |
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4e5ffc8
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whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water--of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make c..
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Michael Pollan |
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c25580d
|
The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.
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Michael Pollan |
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30036a1
|
Is there any more feudal, soul eradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking but it is not enjoyable & surely not ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self & humanity.
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time
homemade
foodie
food
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Michael Pollan |
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815ff32
|
I hope whatever you're doing, / you're stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all.")"
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Michael Pollan |
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e00fa6c
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We had had a few beers, and while we hadn't touched our tiny stash of azzies, we had smoked a little pot. Stamets dilated on the idea of psilocybin as a chemical messenger sent from Earth, and how we had been elected, by virtue of the gift of consciousness and language, to hear its call and act before it's too late. "Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us ..
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Michael Pollan |
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10d31af
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The usual antonym for the word "spiritual" is "material." That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry--that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical."
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Michael Pollan |
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1971718
|
When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic--that is, more spiritual--idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.
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Michael Pollan |
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7faf2bf
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The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant--commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes--it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven't killed him, it's true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it's also true th..
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science
cordyceps
stamets
fungus
brain
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Michael Pollan |