Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the...
Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than two hundred years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650—very promising, and very interesting to watch, but are yo...
Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share, he explains in another one. I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called...
It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, . . that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.
Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion.
In recent years, psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless, as one psychoanalyst has put it. If psychedelic therapy proves successful, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the...
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...
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...
How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?
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...
For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.
Each of the tastes has been selected by evolution for its survival value. Either it guides us toward nutrients we need to survive, or it steers us away from ingesting things that might endanger us.
EAT SLOWLY.
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...
But surely the most important of all the relationships sponsored by this work is the one between those of us who elect to do it and the people it gives us the opportunity to feed and nourish and, when...
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...
Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only good to eat—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, good to think, for among all the many other t...