I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time and that certain ideas I had long thought about and written about—having to do with the subjectivity of other species and the...
How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?
How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?
He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.* The brain can...
Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same h...
Gopnik has tested this hypothesis on children in her lab and has found that there are learning problems that four-year-olds are better at solving than adults. These are precisely the kinds of problems...
Goldsmith has so far raised three million pounds to fund and organize psilocybin trials (starting with treatment-resistant depression) at multiple sites in Europe. Already he is working with designers...
GMO seed is just the latest chapter in an old story: Farmers eager to increase their yields adopt the latest innovation, only to find that it’s the companies selling the innovations who reap the most...
Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.
For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love? So
Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].
Eating in our time has gotten complicated — needlessly so, in my opinion. I will get to the needlessly part in a moment, but consider first the complexity that now attends this most basic of creaturel...
Could it be that the cannabinoid network is precisely the sort of adaptation that natural selection would favor in the evolution of a creature who survives by hunting? A brain chemical that sharpens t...
Cooking, according to the hypothesis, is not merely a metaphor for the creation of culture, as Lévi-Strauss proposed; it is its evolutionary prerequisite and biological foundation. Had our protohuman...
Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity, so rare in modern life, to work directly in our own support, and in the support of the people we feed. If this is not making a living, I don’t know what is....
By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle
But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food compa...
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.
Because of diabetes and all the other health problems that accompany obesity, today’s children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than...
Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exh...