Michael Pollan Quotes

The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style.

The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce - doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a...

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 only discordant note in the conversation came when I casually dropped the slang expression for psilocybin when asking him about going hunting for ’shrooms. I really, really hate that word, he said...

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 true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.

There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.

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...

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 psil...

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.

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...

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?

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 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...

Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches’ magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after...

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...

You are what you eat eats.

You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat...

You have just dined, Emerson once wrote, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

You have just dined, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. The