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3cc66f1
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Huxley suggests that the reason there aren't nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.
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Michael Pollan |
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819bf96
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The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but "health" is simply not one of them, because it is given."
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Michael Pollan |
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353f3c0
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Schwartz said that several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. "You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help."
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Michael Pollan |
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78504e6
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Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says. Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the out..
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Michael Pollan |
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d2ff210
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Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.
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Michael Pollan |
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7407e56
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I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.
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Michael Pollan |
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bbd6e3c
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Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist
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overeating
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Michael Pollan |
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7537293
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For me, "spiritual" is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct--at once so familiar and on reflection so strange--stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within."
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Michael Pollan |
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293d4f6
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When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"--to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to--he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't d..
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organic-farming
sustainability
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Michael Pollan |
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110c748
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I wondered if this wasn't a case of making the ideal an enemy of the good, but Salatin was convinced that industrial organic was finally a contradiction in terms. I decided I had to find out if he was right.
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Michael Pollan |
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9ec5f66
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But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate." Joel Salatin"
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Michael Pollan |
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7f8f25c
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In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known
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Michael Pollan |
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a228e95
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We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
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Michael Pollan |
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7ccf009
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But I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it--in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone--is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.
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Michael Pollan |
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d1c0714
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For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...
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Michael Pollan |
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94da66e
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It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.
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depression
sensual
flower
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Michael Pollan |
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b9c5469
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All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem freshly intrigued by the peony that, after years of being taken for granted, suddenly fails to bloom. They understand that, in the garden at least, failure speaks louder than success. By that I don't mean that the gardener encounters more failure than success (though in..
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Michael Pollan |
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1e61b2a
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how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.
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sustainability
food
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Michael Pollan |
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a9ff3b6
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The ads have also helped manufacture a sense of panic about time, depicting families so rushed and harried in the morning that there is no time to make breakfast, not even to pour some milk over a bowl of cereal. No, the only hope is to munch on a cereal bar (iced with synthetic "milk" frosting) in the bus or car. (Tell me: Why can't these hassled families set their alarm clocks, like, ten minutes earlier?!)"
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Michael Pollan |
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6cc25a0
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One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.
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Michael Pollan |
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7f07397
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You have just dined," Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
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Michael Pollan |
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59a81f8
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Perhaps as the sway of tradition in our eating decisions weakens, habits we once took for granted are thrown up in the air, where they're more easily buffeted by a strong idea or a breeze of fashion.
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Michael Pollan |
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bb57021
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Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.
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vegetarian
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Michael Pollan |
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ac892d7
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Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to work directly in our own support, and in the support of the people we feed. If this is not "making a living," I don't know what is. In the calculus of economics, doing so may not always be the most efficient use of an amateur cook's time, but in the calculus of human emotion, it is beautiful even so. For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any t..
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Michael Pollan |
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d46678a
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In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a "dead concept," but equally unhealthy were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abrac and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time."
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Michael Pollan |
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9428f27
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Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture.
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metabolism
secondary-metabolites
plants
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Michael Pollan |
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5e12f03
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For great many species today, "fitness" means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force."
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evolutionary-process
fitness
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Michael Pollan |
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23f133d
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Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].
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Michael Pollan |
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7ea355f
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The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.
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botany
biology
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Michael Pollan |
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28f5ea8
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Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth
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Michael Pollan |
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957a333
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all these disorders involve learned habits of negative thinking and behavior that hijack our attention and trap us in loops of self-reflection. "What started as a pleasure becomes a need; what was once a bad mood becomes continuous self-indictment; what was once an annoyance becomes persecution," in a process he describes as a form of "inverse learning."
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Michael Pollan |
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31504c6
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If we address frankly what is evoked by cheese, I think it becomes clear why so little is said. So what does cheese evoke? Damp dark cellars, molds, mildews and mushrooms galore, dirty laundry and high school locker rooms, digestive processes and visceral fermentations, he-goats which do not remind of Chanel ... In sum, cheese reminds of dubious, even unsavory places, both in nature and in our own organisms. And yet we love it.
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Michael Pollan |
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9c70679
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The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate. The mouth cannot express it in words.
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Michael Pollan |
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e7e3174
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Boiled food is life,' Levi-Strauss writes, 'roast food death.' He reports finding countless examples in the world's folklore of 'cauldrons of immortality,' but not a single example of a 'spit of immortality.
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Michael Pollan |
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4b1eb3a
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I]t is remarkable how much sheer bullshit seems to accrete around the subject of barbecue. No other kind of cooking comes even close. Exactly why, I'm not sure, but it may be that cooking over fire is so straightforward that the people who do it feel a need to baste the process in thick layers of intricacy and myth. It could also be that barbecue is performed disproportionately by self-dramatizing men.
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Michael Pollan |
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dc01053
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Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: they can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body w..
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Michael Pollan |
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a615d9a
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Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the supermarket and the "home-meal replacement" have succeeded in obscuring. yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one's pronou..
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Michael Pollan |
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a025037
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It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away fr..
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Michael Pollan |
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ab52b8e
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I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well. "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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organic-farming
sustainability
pesticides
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Michael Pollan |
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787e57b
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the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.
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Michael Pollan |
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678c15a
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perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwavable organic TV dinners(four words I never expected to see conjoined)stacked in the frozen food case.
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Michael Pollan |
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d72b601
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Today promised not to be about the ecstasy of life on a farm. Today was the day we were "processing" broilers or, to abandon euphemism, killing chickens."
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Michael Pollan |
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3d3b125
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Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal--unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of "manufacturing a controlled substance." Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge."
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eden
knowledge
drugs
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Michael Pollan |
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ce8366c
|
Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience--something that turned on nothing more than the ingestion of a pill or square of blotter paper--could put a big dent in such a worldview? Shift how one thought about mortality? Actually change one's mind in enduring ways? The idea took hold of me. It was a little like being shown a door in a familiar room--the room of your own mind--that you had somehow never noticed before and being told..
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Michael Pollan |