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,
What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.
What opened up before me was, for lack of a better word, a space, but not our ordinary concept of space, just the pure awareness of a realm without form and void of content. And into that realm came a...
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?
We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relatio...
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 o...
Two of the most nutritious plants in the world —lamb’s quarters and purslane—are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.
This was before the importance of set and setting was understood. I was brought to a basement room, given an injection, and left alone. A recipe for a bad trip, surely, but Richards had precisely the...
This points to the second possible explanation for the noetic sense: when our sense of a subjective I disintegrates, as it often does in a high-dose psychedelic experience (as well as in meditation by...
This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quic...
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.
There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.
There is a lot more religion in science than you might expect.
The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you...
The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And th...
The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce- doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have budget or packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they...
The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the -ism suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing...
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 dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style.
The banquet is in the first bite.