The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate. The mouth cannot express it in words.
The premise behind the approach was that our fear of death is a function of our egos, which burden us with a sense of separateness that can become unbearable as we approach death. We are born into an...
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 eac...
The great advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do
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.
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)...
The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pre...
Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immun...
One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens.
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.
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?
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.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James placed alcohol at the very center of the religious experience. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate...
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.
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.
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 forest...
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 ha...
Hand taste, however, involves something greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it—the care an...
Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.
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 psyched...