99+ Michael Pollan Quotes on Eating, Americans and Community - Quotes.pub

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One of the last nights we were together, he said, ‘Honey, don’t push me. I’m finding my way.’” At the same time, he sought to comfort her. “This is simply the wheel of life,” she recalls him saying. “’You feel like you’re being ground down by it now, but the wheel is going to turn and you’ll be on top again.

When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic – that is, more spiritual – idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

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.

What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence – a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.

Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too.

How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can’t concentrate? That’s pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.

The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.

I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in the United States and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.

Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map – and not the only map.

Schwartz said that several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. “You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.

You want to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you’ll be really straight with them at all times.

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.

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.

The issue of snacking is complicated. In principle, “grazing” is probably a good idea. It would even out the insulin spikes and things like that from eating large meals. The problem is it makes it harder for people to control the amount they’re eating.

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what’s on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don’t buy industrial meat.

I agree insofar as we eat too much meat. We’re eating about 200 pounds per person per year. That’s about 9 ounces a day. That’s probably more than is good for us and it’s certainly more than is good for the environment.

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it’s not the other way around.

But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.

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.

I mean, we’re really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices – visual, olfactory, and tactile – to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

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.

Without the potatoe, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.

Cooking – of whatever kind, everyday or extreme – situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.

I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who’s too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

We used to eat economically. One of the things that happened is that we lost the cultural skills that used to allow people to eat well cheaply. For example making three or four meals from a chicken, rather than buying chicken breasts.

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

Leave something on your plate... ‘Better to go to waste than to waist.

I think there’s a real tension between capitalism and morality. That’s not to say these systems aren’t powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that’s just a pipe dream.

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.

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.

Sigmund Freud wrote that “there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego.” Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I’m writing about.

Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.

In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.

If you’re a politician it’s very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.

If you’re cooking food, you don’t have to count calories.

I think that the American diet is a very large part of the reason we’re spending 2.3 trillion dollar per year on health care in this country. 75% of that money goes to treat chronic diseases, preventable chronic diseases, most of those are linked to diet.

Fairness forces you – even when you’re writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done – to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

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.

The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.

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.

I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.

The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.

People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it’s a really good idea if you can exert the kind of discipline needed.

An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

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