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1e869a6
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To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines--"production units"--incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and ..
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Michael Pollan |
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59c0f8c
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Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we're to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.* Much depends on forge..
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Michael Pollan |
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8d45dbb
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Yet the organic label itself--like every other such label in the supermarket--is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.
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food-industry
organic
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Michael Pollan |
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c236e0a
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Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.
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Michael Pollan |
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7c1fa1a
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The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. So we ignore the elephant in the room and focus instead on good and evil nutrients, the identities of which seem to change with every new study.
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Michael Pollan |
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01ecae3
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Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life "so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again." It is the brain's own drug for coping with the human condition."
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forgetting
life
pain
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Michael Pollan |
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4912b8d
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If you walk five blocks north from the wholefoods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight way, you'll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few homeless people.
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Michael Pollan |
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f5794c5
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Be the kind of person who takes supplements--then skip the supplements.
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Michael Pollan |
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8503d69
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My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.
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worry
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Michael Pollan |
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fe4d8be
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Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states," one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They "return with a new perspective and profound acceptance." --
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Michael Pollan |
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2cae6ef
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What would shopping this way mean in the supermarket? Well, imagine your great grandmother at your side as you roll down the aisles. You're standing together in front of the dairy case. She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes--and has no idea what this could possibly be. Is it a food or a toothpaste? And how, exactly, do you introduce it into your body? You could tell her it's just yogurt in a squirtable form, yet if she rea..
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Michael Pollan |
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31a6661
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Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner?
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Michael Pollan |
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af52d71
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Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only "good to eat"--tasty, safe, and nutritious--but also, in the words of Claude Levi-Strauss, "good to think," for among all the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas."
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Michael Pollan |
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689e985
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if the therapy works as it's supposed to, there won't be a lot of repeat business.
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Michael Pollan |
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0998bfa
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More than any USDA rule or regulation, this transparency is their best assurance that the meat they're buying has been humanely and cleanly processed. "You can't regulate integrity," Joel is fond of saying; the only genuine accountability comes from a producer's relationship with his or her customers, and their freedom "to come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around. If after seeing how we do things they want to buy food from us, that s..
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Michael Pollan |
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87127e6
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And I remember Bill asking, 'What's going on?' "'I'm experiencing a lot of guilt.' Bill replied, 'That's a very common human experience,' and with that, the whole image of being hanged pixilated and then just disappeared, to be replaced by this tremendous sensation of freedom and interconnectedness. This was huge for me. I saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would let go. A little older and wiser, now I can..
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Michael Pollan |
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1c3f218
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Today these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order..
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Michael Pollan |
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2cf4531
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Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much--the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime!--without suffering complete annihilation.
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Michael Pollan |
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c209f8d
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In recent years, "psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless," as one psychoanalyst has put it. If psychedelic therapy proves successful, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the brain and the mind in the practice of psychotherapy. At least that's the promise."
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Michael Pollan |
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7482929
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Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
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Michael Pollan |
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aeed979
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a .22 shell is used to fire stainless-steel projectiles dipped in a DNA solution at a stem or leaf of the target plant. If all goes well, some of the DNA will pierce the wall of some of the cells' nuclei and elbow its way into the double helix: a bully breaking into a line dance. If the new DNA happens to land in the right place--and no one yet knows what, or where, that place is--the plant grown from that cell will express the new gene. Th..
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Michael Pollan |
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3f6663e
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All he would tell me is that the experience, which took place in his meditation practice, acquainted him with "something way, way beyond a material worldview that I can't really talk to my colleagues about, because it involves metaphors or assumptions that I'm really uncomfortable with as a scientist."
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Michael Pollan |
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28d8cb6
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Much of gardening is a return, an effort at recovering remembered landscapes.
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Michael Pollan |
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e04831e
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Jesse's curiosity about psychedelics was first piqued during a drug education unit in his junior high school science class. This particular class of drugs was neither physically nor psychologically addictive, he was told (correctly);
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Michael Pollan |
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0c88a55
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Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. 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 consumers and producers.
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food-system
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Michael Pollan |
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fd85f3e
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Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients' recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)
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Michael Pollan |
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36f3091
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Improving the soil improved the man.
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Michael Pollan |
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0ba08e5
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If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't. .
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Michael Pollan |
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b0a566b
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What memoir of childhood doesn't at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut lawn or a boxwood hedge, to leap the fence of years?
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Michael Pollan |
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097b78b
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It's literally a reboot of the system--a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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b012517
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By the early 1970s, when I went to college, everything you heard about LSD seemed calculated to terrify. It worked on me: I'm less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked. I also had my own personal reason for steering clear of psychedelics: a painfully anxious adolescence that left me (and at least one psychiatrist) doubting my grip on sanity.
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Michael Pollan |
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3cb63ac
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Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an "experience of the numinous" to help them negotiate the second half of their lives."
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Michael Pollan |
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5647666
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By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time,
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Michael Pollan |
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cd4c9fb
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it would be a big mistake if medicalization is all that happens." Why a mistake? Because Bob Jesse was ultimately less interested in people's mental problems than with their spiritual well-being--in using entheogens for the betterment of well people."
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Michael Pollan |
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04d0184
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The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom--a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)
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Michael Pollan |
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9f185f2
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Eventually the potato's undeniable advantages over grain would convert all of northern Europe, but outside of Ireland the process was never anything less than a struggle. ... Louis (XVI) hatched an ingenious promotional scheme. He ordered a field of potatoes planted on the royal grounds and then posted his most elite guard to protect the crop during the day. He sent the guards home at midnight, and in due course the local peasants, suddenly..
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plant
science
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Michael Pollan |
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785046c
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I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley
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Michael Pollan |
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337123e
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psychedelic therapy creates an interval of maximum plasticity in which, with proper guidance, new patterns of thought and behavior can be learned.
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Michael Pollan |
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edd394f
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psilocybin was introduced to the West by a vice president of J. P. Morgan
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Michael Pollan |
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0b155d7
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We don't die well in America. Ask people where do you want to die, and they will tell you, at home with their loved ones. But most of us die in an ICU. The biggest taboo in America is the conversation about death. Sure, it's gotten better; now we have hospices, which didn't exist not so long ago. But to a doctor, it's still an insult to let a patient go.
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Michael Pollan |
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b24ecc2
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Yet the new research into psychedelics comes along at a time when mental health treatment in this country is so "broken"--to use the word of Tom Insel, who until 2015 was director of the National Institute of Mental Health--that the field's willingness to entertain radical new approaches is perhaps greater than it has been in a generation. The pharmacological toolbox for treating depression--which afflicts nearly a tenth of all Americans an..
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Michael Pollan |
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d970081
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He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.* The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don't merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry--the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt ..
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Michael Pollan |
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8ea0e84
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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 novelties are almost bound to have whatever qualities it takes to prosper in the tree's adopted home.
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Michael Pollan |
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55ff182
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With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn't a people on Earth who doesn't use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn't use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. (As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimo to fermented grain, he immediately joined the consciousne..
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Michael Pollan |