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5ec92d3
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It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) .
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Michael Pollan |
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Amanda Feilding, who was born in 1943, is an eccentric as only the English aristocracy can breed them. (She's descended from the house of Habsburg and two of Charles II's illegitimate children.) A student of comparative religion and mysticism, Feilding has had a long-standing interest in altered states of consciousness and, specifically, the role of blood flow to the brain, which in Homo sapiens, she believes, has been compromised ever sinc..
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Michael Pollan |
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afca12e
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Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come--whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-cir..
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Michael Pollan |
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ec7307a
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The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn't very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn't exist, not when generations of plant-worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, t..
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Michael Pollan |
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91a0a7e
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Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don't. What does growing some of your own food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating? Everything. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for your sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of i..
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Michael Pollan |
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8b33841
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Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself. There
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Michael Pollan |
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77fee96
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Timothy Leary, always happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced him to put his supply of Sandoz psilocybin pills under the control of Health Services: "Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them." --
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Michael Pollan |
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10ad11e
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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 of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water--of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make c..
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Michael Pollan |
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3078b0b
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It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, . . that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.
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Michael Pollan |
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76d7c4a
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I hope whatever you're doing, / you're stopping now and then / and / not doing it at all.
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Michael Pollan |
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5610396
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If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access "cosmic consciousness," or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience."
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Michael Pollan |
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2a1c3d0
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But however it worked, it worked, or certainly seemed to: by the end of the decade, LSD was widely regarded in North America as a miracle cure for alcohol addiction.
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Michael Pollan |
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ec3a995
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The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet.
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Michael Pollan |
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031c008
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Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.
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Michael Pollan |
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be59545
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Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity.
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homemade
obesity
health
food
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Michael Pollan |
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a5ae5f4
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SHOP THE PERIPHERIES OF THE SUPERMARKET AND STAY OUT OF THE MIDDLE.
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Michael Pollan |
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2b71293
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Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.
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farm
local
sustainable
food
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Michael Pollan |
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b8be329
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PAY MORE, EAT LESS.
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Michael Pollan |
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997e33d
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EAT MEALS.
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Michael Pollan |
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a27f2e2
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DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE.
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Michael Pollan |
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1243055
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DON'T GET YOUR FUEL FROM THE SAME PLACE YOUR CAR DOES.
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Michael Pollan |
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b62a24b
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TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE.
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Michael Pollan |
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aeff1e6
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CONSULT YOUR GUT.
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Michael Pollan |
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f11367b
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EAT SLOWLY.
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Michael Pollan |
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fa6a2e0
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REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM
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Michael Pollan |
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649072f
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farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself.
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Michael Pollan |
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a589e90
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The philosophical implications of "predictive coding" are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories."
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reality
perception
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Michael Pollan |
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c3ec1c1
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If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.
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environment
home
kitchen
food
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Michael Pollan |
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140003f
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For what is the environmental crisis, if not a crisis of the way we live? The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us... If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.
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environmentalism
environment
cooking
home
kitchen
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Michael Pollan |
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2bc6560
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Isn't it curious how in so many of our pastimes and hobbies we play at supplying one or another of our fundamentally creauturely needs--for food, shelter, even clothing?
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Michael Pollan |
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f502473
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imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is n..
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Michael Pollan |
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164e561
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Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.
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Michael Pollan |
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ad78476
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Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.
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Michael Pollan |
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2805285
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David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries.
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Michael Pollan |
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02ab302
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Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine.
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Michael Pollan |
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d26d063
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From a typical McDonald's meal] this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%).
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Michael Pollan |
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3f56565
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We simply don't have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words.
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Michael Pollan |
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2484053
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To eat corn directly is to consume all the energy in the corn, but when you feed that corn to an animal, 90% of its energy is lost... what this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories in our meal, tens of thousand corn calories could have been used to feed many more people.
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Michael Pollan |
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6a4a99a
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All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.
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Michael Pollan |
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59ba065
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Since the revival of sanctioned psychedelic research beginning in the 1990s, nearly a thousand volunteers have been dosed, and not a single serious adverse event has been reported.
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Michael Pollan |
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1670d44
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The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shap..
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Michael Pollan |
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4eb1c08
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The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the..
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Michael Pollan |
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65dadfd
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Despite his behaviorist orientation as a scientist, Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology--the subjective experience of consciousness.
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Michael Pollan |
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27bc232
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Maybe the problem with "the box" is that it is singular."
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Michael Pollan |