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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d1c0714 | For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed... | Michael Pollan | ||
| 94da66e | 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. | depression flower sensual | Michael Pollan | |
| b9c5469 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 1e61b2a | 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. | food sustainability | Michael Pollan | |
| a9ff3b6 | 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?!)" | Michael Pollan | ||
| 6cc25a0 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 7f07397 | You have just dined," Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 59a81f8 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| bb57021 | 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. | vegetarian | Michael Pollan | |
| ac892d7 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| d46678a | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 9428f27 | 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. | metabolism plants secondary-metabolites | Michael Pollan | |
| 5e12f03 | 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." | evolutionary-process fitness | Michael Pollan | |
| 23f133d | 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]. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 7ea355f | 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. | biology botany | Michael Pollan | |
| 28f5ea8 | Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth | Michael Pollan | ||
| 957a333 | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 31504c6 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 9c70679 | The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate. The mouth cannot express it in words. | Michael Pollan | ||
| e7e3174 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 4b1eb3a | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| dc01053 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| a615d9a | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| a025037 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| ab52b8e | 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." | organic-farming pesticides sustainability | Michael Pollan | |
| 787e57b | the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 678c15a | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| d72b601 | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 3d3b125 | 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." | drugs eden knowledge | Michael Pollan | |
| 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 8d6f9e7 | In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 5703ef1 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| f687cc0 | 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 .. | Michael Pollan | ||
| e6f3f20 | In fact, just heading toward veganism lifts a not insignificant burden from the earth. According to food pundit Michael Pollan, who's not a vegetarian, if everybody did even "Meatless Monday," it would be the environmental equivalent of taking 20 million midsize cars off the road." | Victoria Moran | ||
| 8656168 | early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, | Michael Pollan | ||
| 374f9d9 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 971b7b6 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 00e7e00 | 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. | johny-appleseed | Michael Pollan | |
| b6dff31 | You're not seriously telling us that LSD is less harmful than alcohol, are you?' Of course I am! | Michael Pollan | ||
| ce10ec4 | 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. | field food-for-thought nature wheat | Michael Pollan | |
| 593e4ab | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 88a03c9 | 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. | food origins | Michael Pollan | |
| fc8aeb2 | 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.. | food | Michael Pollan | |
| 0b285f5 | consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we--and it--like to think. Carhart-Harris | Michael Pollan |