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16bbe5b
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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 the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illness, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water -- of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make chea..
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Michael Pollan |
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2b88b69
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Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoor..
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american-culture
americans
big-business
corn
corn-corn-corn
fast-food
george-mcgovern
hfcs
it-s-all-about-the-corn
nixon-administration
obesity
obesity-epidemic
solyent-green-is-corn
you-are-what-you-eat
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Michael Pollan |
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7d17b83
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It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly. Unitasking.
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Michael Pollan |
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128edd0
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If the omnivore's dilemma is to determine what is good and safe to eat amid the myriad and occasionally risky choices nature puts before us, then familiar flavor profiles can serve as a useful guide, a sensory signal of the tried and true. To an extent, these familiar blends of flavor take the place of the hardwired taste preferences that guide most other species in their food choices. They have instincts to steer them; we have cuisines.
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Michael Pollan |
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2f84997
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People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.
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Michael Pollan |
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7bc94c1
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cultural change occurs whenever a new meme is introduced and catches on. It might be romanticism or double-entry book-keeping, chaos theory or Pokemon. So where in the world do new memes come from? sometimes they spring full-blown from the brains of artists or scientists, advertising copywriters or teenagers. often a process of mutation is involved in the creation of a new meme, in much the same way that mutations in natural environment can..
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Michael Pollan |
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0db5d02
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Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.
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Michael Pollan |
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ab7da52
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There's nothing really quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking all you want, but you will never get it back.
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Michael Pollan |
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1156d37
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Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo.
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drugs
rules
taboos
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Michael Pollan |
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018f30d
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Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches' magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after Pope Innocent's fiat against witchcraft, cannabis, opium, belladonna, and the rest were simply transferred from the realm of sorcery to medicine, thanks largely to the work of a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician named Paracelsus. ..
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Michael Pollan |
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8cc9c4c
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I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.
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Michael Pollan |
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85a765d
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Eating in our time has gotten complicated -- needlessly so, in my opinion. I will get to the "needlessly" part in a moment, but consider first the complexity that now attends this most basic of creaturely activities. Most of us have come to rely on experts of one kind or another to tell us how to eat -- doctors and diet books, media accounts of the latest findings in nutritional science, government advisories and food pyramids, the prolifer..
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Michael Pollan |
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a866511
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But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
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Michael Pollan |
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f5146f8
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The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.
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Michael Pollan |
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c3fca49
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It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
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eating
food
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Michael Pollan |
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54c7a4a
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Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever's already going on both inside and outside one's head.
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Michael Pollan |
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2e4eb0e
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One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens.
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Michael Pollan |
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3ead683
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Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life--the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids--is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simpl..
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biology
carbon
corn
food
photosynthesis
plants
science
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Michael Pollan |
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ca583a7
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A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
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food
health-problems
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Michael Pollan |
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d515b96
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To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of oursel..
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cooking
fermentation
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Michael Pollan |
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53e7153
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Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
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Michael Pollan |
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bddd61e
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I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.
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Michael Pollan |
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e9bcb54
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S policy: "no snacks, no seconds, no sweets--except on days that begin with the letter S."
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Michael Pollan |
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2ec4a7f
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Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.
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Michael Pollan |
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66ff693
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Cooking--of whatever kind, everyday or extreme--situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.
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Michael Pollan |
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cf73410
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Polyface is proof that people can sometimes do more for the health of a place by cultivating it rather than by leaving it alone.
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Michael Pollan |
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e49d52c
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The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
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Michael Pollan |
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cdd5771
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As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor
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health-care
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Michael Pollan |
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31629cd
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Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.
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food
practice
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Michael Pollan |
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b6c2c37
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Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.
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Michael Pollan |
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21cf34d
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Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.
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Michael Pollan |
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5051bd7
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This was before the importance of set and setting was understood. I was brought to a basement room, given an injection, and left alone." A recipe for a bad trip, surely, but Richards had precisely the opposite experience. "I felt immersed in this incredibly detailed imagery that looked like Islamic architecture, with Arabic script, about which I knew nothing. And then I somehow became these exquisitely intricate patterns, losing my usual id..
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Michael Pollan |
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b7b0d13
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On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. "If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night," Richards offered by way of an analogy, "you wouldn't look for her in the TV set." The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient."
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Michael Pollan |
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60fe4d0
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You are what you eat eats.
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Michael Pollan |
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84cb489
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The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it.
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Michael Pollan |
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a599fc8
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Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.
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Michael Pollan |
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423d15b
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participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable "to the birth of a first child or death of a parent." Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five "most spiritually significant experiences" of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives."
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Michael Pollan |
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c2e0435
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Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.
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Michael Pollan |
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db24ad6
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There is another word for this extremist noticing--this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind--and that word, of course, is wonder.
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Michael Pollan |
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429bae1
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Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and "value" or they can nourish a food chain organized around values--values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote--a vote for health in the largest sense--food no longer seems like t..
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Michael Pollan |
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177a42b
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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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54d808d
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A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country,...
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stating-the-obvious
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Michael Pollan |
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62d127f
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As I've heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it's not YOUR time.
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Michael Pollan |
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d08fe5e
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Umami...is the quasi-secret heart and soul of almost every braise, stew, and soup.
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Michael Pollan |