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8d6f9e7
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In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.
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Michael Pollan |
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5703ef1
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The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food's food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is beef and salmon salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question of cost, for it quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of..
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Michael Pollan |
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f687cc0
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There is a myth about such highs," Sagan wrote; "the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved while high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day...If I find in the morning a message from myself the night ..
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Michael Pollan |
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8656168
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early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips,
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Michael Pollan |
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374f9d9
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The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We're constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the futur..
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Michael Pollan |
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971b7b6
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Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child's-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.
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Michael Pollan |
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00e7e00
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Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. That's why he was so popular. That's why he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio. He was the American Dionysus.
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johny-appleseed
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Michael Pollan |
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b6dff31
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You're not seriously telling us that LSD is less harmful than alcohol, are you?' Of course I am!
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Michael Pollan |
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ce10ec4
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If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.
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nature
wheat
food-for-thought
field
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Michael Pollan |
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593e4ab
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Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.
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Michael Pollan |
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88a03c9
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My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.
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origins
food
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Michael Pollan |
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fc8aeb2
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Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather e..
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food
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Michael Pollan |
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0b285f5
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consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we--and it--like to think. Carhart-Harris
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Michael Pollan |
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60d56f0
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What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?
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Michael Pollan |
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370e70c
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The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe.
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Michael Pollan |
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69c5f27
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In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same -- mageiros -- and the word shares an etymological root with "magic."
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magic
food
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Michael Pollan |
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2ed1dd4
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Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1
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food
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Michael Pollan |
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2348b34
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After a week in front of the screen, the opportunity to work with my hands--with all my senses, in fact--is always a welcome change of pace, whether in the kitchen or in the garden. There's something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense. I don't want you to get the idea it's made a Buddhist of me, but in the kitchen, maybe a little bit. When stirring the pot, just stir the pot.
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Michael Pollan |
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5f45fcb
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Immersed this spring in research for this chapter, I was sorely tempted to plant one of the hybrid cannabis seeds I'd seen for sale in Amsterdam. I immediately thought better of it, however. So I planted lots of opium poppies instead. I hasten to add that I've no plans to do anything with my poppies except admire them - first their fleeting tissue-paper blooms, then their swelling blue-green seedpods, fat with milky alkaloid. (Unless, of co..
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Michael Pollan |
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d817a1a
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As we drove up, Mr. Flowers himself was sitting beneath a tree out front, having a smoke. He was a wiry old white guy with the most unusual facial hair I had ever laid eyes on. If in fact it was facial hair, because it wasn't quite that simple. Mr. Flowers's prodigious muttonchops, once white but now stained yellow by tobacco smoke, had somehow managed to merge with the equally prodigious yellowish-white hair sprouting from his chest. I did..
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Michael Pollan |
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1ff28c8
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Two of the most nutritious plants in the world --lamb's quarters and purslane--are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.
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Michael Pollan |
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a873d86
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the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since the creature that conceive of eating anything (including, notably, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. we are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.
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Michael Pollan |
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a058d28
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Okay, but what about microbial disease? "To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than one percent of them threaten our health makes no sense. Many of the bacteria we're killing are our protectors." In fact, the twentieth-century war on bacteria--with its profligate use of antibiotics, and routine sterilization of food--has undermined our health by wrecking the ecology of our gut. "For the first time in human history, it ..
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Michael Pollan |
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35b9436
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Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.
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Michael Pollan |
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282b585
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The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to argue with; it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap and abundant that many of us now eat it three times a day. Not so compelling is the biological logic behind this cheap meat. Already in their short history CAFOs have produced more than their share of environmental and health problems: polluted..
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Michael Pollan |
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581d517
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The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending.
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Michael Pollan |
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dba2a09
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Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want--just as long as you're willing to cook it yourself.
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Michael Pollan |
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44bad93
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Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.
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Michael Pollan |
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adf22e5
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By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved.
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Michael Pollan |
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5ea1fe4
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Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]
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farming
food
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Michael Pollan |
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e236470
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The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.
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farming
food
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Michael Pollan |
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f7ac73f
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To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisur..
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Michael Pollan |
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e930452
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For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love? So
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Michael Pollan |
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7d21426
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Hand taste, however, involves something greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it--the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it. Hand taste cannot be faked, Hyeon Hee insisted, and hand taste is the reason we go to all this trouble, massaging the individual leaves of each cabbage and then..
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Michael Pollan |
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68e7bf6
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A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.
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Michael Pollan |
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573fa0d
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The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style.
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Michael Pollan |
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184abbf
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I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny, and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace. But as the conversation at the table unfurled like a sail amid the happy clatter of silver,..
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Michael Pollan |
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75f3425
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Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.
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Michael Pollan |
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00e62b2
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I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.
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Michael Pollan |
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d2eedcc
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A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.
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Michael Pollan |
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e790a6e
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researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.
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Michael Pollan |
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7f23bf1
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Barbecue brings people together, it always did and always will. Even in the sixties, during the race movements, barbecue was one of the things that held down the tensions. At a barbecue, it didn't matter who you were.
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Michael Pollan |
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d8a6bc8
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The final standards do a good job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible kind of farming but, as perhaps was inevitable as soon as bureaucratic and industrial thinking was brought to bear, many of the philosophical values embodied in the word "organic" - the sorts of values expressed by Albert Howard - did not survive the federal rule making process."
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Michael Pollan |
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10ffb65
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compost is trucked in; some crops also receive fish emulsion along with their water and a side dressing of pelleted chicken manure. Over the winter a cover crop of legumes is planted to build up nitrogen in the soil.
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Michael Pollan |