The usual antonym for the word spiritual is material. That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inc...
The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
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 new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn’t very well pret...
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 fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food's food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is...
The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to argue with; it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap...
Some researchers attribute the increase in gluten intolerance and celiac disease to the fact that modern brands no longer receive a lengthy fermentation.
So perhaps Leary's real sin was to have the courage of his convictions--his and everyone else's in the psychedelic research community. It's often said that a political scandal is when someone in power...
Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists reach the public) to explain th...
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, m...
Science has trouble with this interpretation, however, because, whatever the perception is, it can’t be verified by its customary tools. It’s an anecdotal report, in effect, and so has no value. Scien...
R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it refle...
Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.
Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors access to realms of supernatural power, catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection, and brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated...
Possibly none at all: it’s a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn’t necessarily mean it confer...
Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don’t. What does growing some of your own food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating? Everything. To take p...
Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective [...] To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of dis...