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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 68e7bf6 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 573fa0d | The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 184abbf | 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,.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 75f3425 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 00e62b2 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| d2eedcc | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| e790a6e | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 7f23bf1 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| d8a6bc8 | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 10ffb65 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 1e869a6 | 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 .. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 59c0f8c | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 8d45dbb | 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. | food-industry organic | Michael Pollan | |
| c236e0a | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 7c1fa1a | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 01ecae3 | 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." | forgetting life pain | Michael Pollan | |
| 4912b8d | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| f5794c5 | Be the kind of person who takes supplements--then skip the supplements. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 8503d69 | My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition. | worry | Michael Pollan | |
| fe4d8be | 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." -- | Michael Pollan | ||
| 2cae6ef | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 31a6661 | 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? | Michael Pollan | ||
| af52d71 | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 689e985 | if the therapy works as it's supposed to, there won't be a lot of repeat business. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 0998bfa | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 87127e6 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 1c3f218 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 2cf4531 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| c209f8d | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 7482929 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| aeed979 | 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.. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 3f6663e | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 28d8cb6 | Much of gardening is a return, an effort at recovering remembered landscapes. | Michael Pollan | ||
| e04831e | 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); | Michael Pollan | ||
| 0c88a55 | 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. | food-system | Michael Pollan | |
| fd85f3e | 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.) | Michael Pollan | ||
| 36f3091 | Improving the soil improved the man. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 0ba08e5 | If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't. . | Michael Pollan | ||
| b0a566b | 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? | Michael Pollan | ||
| 097b78b | It's literally a reboot of the system--a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics | Michael Pollan | ||
| b012517 | 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. | Michael Pollan | ||
| 3cb63ac | 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." | Michael Pollan | ||
| 5647666 | By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time, | Michael Pollan | ||
| cd4c9fb | 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." | Michael Pollan |