In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.
Immersed this spring in research for this chapter, I was sorely tempted to plant one of the hybrid cannabis seeds I'd seen for sale in Amsterdam. I immediately thought better of it, however. So I plan...
If you walk five blocks north from the wholefoods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight way, you'll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tatt...
IT WAS AT THIS POINT that the idea of shaking the snow globe, as one neuroscientist described the psychedelic experience, came to seem more attractive to me than frightening, though it was still that...
I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.
How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world’s greatest success stories. I say...
Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to th...
He writes in his book that mycelia—the vast, cobwebby whitish net of single-celled filaments, called hyphae, with which fungi weave their way through the soil—are intelligent, forming a sentient membr...
Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection th...
Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay aw...
For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a...
Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
Do mesmo modo, muito do que sabemos sobre os benefícios para a saúde de uma dieta vegetariana se baseia em estudos dos adventistas do sétimo dia, que distorcem o quadro nutricional abstendo-se de álco...
Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and value or they can nourish a food chain organized around values—values...
Cream—the richest, sweetest part of milk—is of course our first flavor, the taste, in a spoon, of life’s first freshness and innocence, long before we ever encounter the taste of cooked food. And what...
Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always...
Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between...
By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Ni...
As I’ve heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it’s not YOUR time.
And I remember Bill asking, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘I’m experiencing a lot of guilt.’ Bill replied, ‘That’s a very common human experience,’ and with that, the whole image of being hanged pixilated and th...