|
323a4f6
|
is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
f767a59
|
You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It's not something we generate; it's something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers." Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion." --
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
76a09f9
|
Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar cou..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
4bb838c
|
There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
52b484d
|
In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they're grown from seed, and sex is nature's way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At t..
|
|
pesticides
plants
resistance
|
Michael Pollan |
|
65e7c7b
|
Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.
|
|
dreaming
|
Michael Pollan |
|
9746d4c
|
For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
c8630a2
|
Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
3242c7a
|
IT WAS AT THIS POINT that the idea of "shaking the snow globe," as one neuroscientist described the psychedelic experience, came to seem more attractive to me than frightening, though it was still that too. 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 ..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
9c0a356
|
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.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
d4c63eb
|
You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
fde8a86
|
This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. Its helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, ..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
8b4134f
|
Lawns are a form of television
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
8ed43e6
|
Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around th..
|
|
spectacle
sumptuousness
|
Michael Pollan |
|
5b8384c
|
Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)"
|
|
apple
cider
history
|
Michael Pollan |
|
cb0e3f8
|
Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.
|
|
humans
natural-selection
plants
|
Michael Pollan |
|
9c8d633
|
As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.
|
|
organic
quality
|
Michael Pollan |
|
b542b59
|
Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
295caa3
|
Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz ketchup, a flavor principle in a bottle that kids, or their parents, use to domesticate every imaginable kind of food. We also now have the familiar salty-um..
|
|
cuisine
culture
flavor
taste
|
Michael Pollan |
|
4f4c155
|
So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an American supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, after I realized that the straightforward question 'What should I eat?' could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: 'What am I eating? And where in the world did it come ..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
c4b5598
|
Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
5e987ea
|
Gopnik has tested this hypothesis on children in her lab and has found that there are learning problems that four-year-olds are better at solving than adults. These are precisely the kinds of problems that require thinking outside the box, those times when experience hobbles rather than greases the gears of problem solving, often because the problem is so novel. In one experiment, she presented children with a toy box that lights up and pla..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
80c9c58
|
Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring - to the carelessness of both producers and consumers.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
0f5e283
|
Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
d86f650
|
More than any other single trait, it is the apple's genetic variability--its ineluctable wildness--that accounts for its ability to make itself at home in places as different from one another as New England and New Zealand, Kazakhstan and California. Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple--at least five per apple, several thousand per tree--that a couple of these nove..
|
|
genetics
variability
|
Michael Pollan |
|
2b11445
|
So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.
|
|
corn
cows
factory-farms
food
industry
oil
petroleum
|
Michael Pollan |
|
c1d0370
|
Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
364faf7
|
The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself."
|
|
safe-eating
soybeans
|
Michael Pollan |
|
e3d0f98
|
So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to e..
|
|
food
responsibility
|
Michael Pollan |
|
c95b665
|
Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
a85b691
|
I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that--something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply,..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
e8b958c
|
IN THE MID-1950S, Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, learned about Osmond and Hoffer's work with alcoholics. The idea that a drug could occasion a life-changing spiritual experience was not exactly news to Bill W., as he was known in the fellowship. He credited his own sobriety to a mystical experience he had on belladonna, a plant-derived alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties that was administered to him at Towns Hospita..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
9ba1fbc
|
By now you will not be surprised to learn that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called "Air and Dreams". he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound. joy is ae..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
08c501a
|
The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: "the greater fool theory." Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world."
|
|
greater-fool-theory
logic
tulipomania
tulips
|
Michael Pollan |
|
447f07f
|
is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys.
|
|
cattle
factory-farming
feedlots
|
Michael Pollan |
|
e43ae8a
|
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
2c4619e
|
We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.
|
|
food
hunger
|
Michael Pollan |
|
e6a2ba5
|
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is." --D. H. Lawrence, Pansies" --
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
7083ff9
|
Be the kind of person who takes supplements -- then skip the supplements.
|
|
vitamins
|
Michael Pollan |
|
a7885b7
|
our everyday waking consciousness "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
7c066ee
|
Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share," he explains in another one. "I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return a..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
d25a45d
|
you know what the best kind of organic certification would be? make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer's bookshelf. Because what you're feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. the way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what is sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms." Joel Salatin"
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
4085e74
|
The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |
|
0cf09fa
|
Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth. Though indispensable to the health of the planet (as recyclers of organic matter and builders of soil), they are the victims not only of our disregard but of a deep-seated ill will, a mycophobia that Stamets deems a form of "biological racism." Leaving aside their reputation for poisoning us, this is surprising in that we are closer, genetically speak..
|
|
|
Michael Pollan |