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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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24b468c
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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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food
health
homemade
obesity
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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
food
local
sustainable
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Michael Pollan |
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bc5cef6
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For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences. Speaking of lines, psychedelics in the 1960s did draw
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Michael Pollan |
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aefe7d0
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It's often said that a political scandal is what happens when someone in power inadvertently speaks the truth.
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Michael Pollan |
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d758ab6
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One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful--wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It's so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near..
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Michael Pollan |
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4b8895b
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When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long way,
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Michael Pollan |
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38dab41
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EAT WELL-GROWN FOOD FROM HEALTHY SOILS.
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Michael Pollan |
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89c8696
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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 do this for myself.
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Michael Pollan |
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3429bc1
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REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM.
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Michael Pollan |
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39bb9da
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I would never have found it if not for psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one's repertoire of conscious states.
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Michael Pollan |
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71cc169
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Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark card flow wi..
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psychedelics
science
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Michael Pollan |
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f5b7777
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And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness,
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Michael Pollan |
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d63ff3f
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A month before our breakfast, Griffiths had received the Eddy Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, perhaps the most prestigious lifetime achievement prize in the field.
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Michael Pollan |
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ac5cae8
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Carhart-Harris suspects that the loss of a clear distinction between subject and object might help explain another feature of the mystical experience: the fact that the insights it sponsors are felt to be objectively true--revealed truths rather than plain old insights. It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person's opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on ..
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Michael Pollan |
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74660c3
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I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time and that certain ideas I had long thought about and written about--having to do with the subjectivity of other species and the way they act upon us in ways we're too self-regarding to appreciate--had taken on the flesh of feeling and reality. I looked through the negative spaces formed by the hydrangea leaves to fix my gaze on the swamp maple in the middle of the mea..
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Michael Pollan |
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81fba23
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Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities -- call them spirits if you like -- other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.
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noetics
psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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bf70520
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The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.
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meditation
psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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cc9bc4d
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This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald's with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, of course, and the food industry energetically pursues them both at the same time.
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Michael Pollan |
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f3f847d
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YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO.
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Michael Pollan |
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84b2901
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IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER.
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Michael Pollan |
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57296bb
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EAT LIKE AN OMNIVORE.
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Michael Pollan |
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3b35f91
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century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.
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Michael Pollan |
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8ebeea3
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People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets.
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Michael Pollan |
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4cce890
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When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms--about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it's possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food (and healt..
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Michael Pollan |
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2ced0eb
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In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.
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Michael Pollan |
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146e44a
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Indeed, the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet.
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Michael Pollan |
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b9078d3
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Can a recognition of one's shallowness qualify as a profound insight?
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Michael Pollan |
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e0678ba
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Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place.
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Michael Pollan |
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a2738e6
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The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.
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Michael Pollan |