Michael Kevin Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author and journalist, who is currently the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. (Michael Pollan Quotes)
“A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be as small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day’s Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony, “Where’s the beef?,” and of course the notion of the meme itself.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“A single unmowed lawn ruins the whole effect, announcing to the world that all is not well here in utopia.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“Among the many, many things the green thumb knows is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging, redeems this season’s deaths and disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“As grandmothers used to say, ‘Better to pay the grocer than the doctor”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“Be the kind of person who takes supplements – then skip the supplements.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Be the kind of person who takes supplements—then skip the supplements.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“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.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Can recognition of one’s shallowness qualify as a profound insight?”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring – to the carelessness of both producers and consumers.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“Coffee and tea have not only benefited by gratifying human desire, as have so many other plants, but these two have also assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilization in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism, and dominated by a species that by now can barely get out of bed without their help.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Cooking is no longer obligatory, and that marks a shift in human history, one whose full implications we’re just beginning to reckon.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn’t disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you’d be willing to share.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.” (Michael Pollan Quotes)
Michael Pollan
A Place of My Own
“Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the first time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with nature.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Evidently, normal everyday consciousness is not enough for us humans; we seek to vary, intensify, and sometimes transcend it, and we have identified a whole collection of molecules in nature that allow us to do that.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“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?”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“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.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“Government regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“Great cooking is all about the three ‘p’s: patience, presence, and practice.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“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 that the supermarket and the “home-meal replacement” have succeeded in obscuring. yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one’s pronouncements.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“Here in my garden the second law of thermodynamics is repealed. Here there is more every year, not less. Here it is ever early, never late. Here, in the ungainly form of a Sibley squash, newness comes into the world.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“Here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.” (Michael Pollan Quotes)
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“I’ve begun to wonder if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set. Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“If the omnivore’s dilemma is to determine what is good and safe to eat amid the myriad and occasionally risky choices nature puts before us, then familiar flavor profiles can serve as a useful guide, a sensory signal of the tried and true. To an extent, these familiar blends of flavor take the place of the hardwired taste preferences that guide most other species in their food choices. They have instincts to steer them; we have cuisines.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access “cosmic consciousness,” or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it’s not hard to imagine you’re looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“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.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Is there another flower that has had anywhere near the opium poppy’s impact on history and literature? In the nineteenth century, especially, the poppy played as crucial a role in the course of events as petroleum has played in our own century: opium was the basis of national economies, a staple of medicine, an essential item of trade, a spur to the Romantic revolution in poetry, even a casus belli.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner?”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Lawns are a form of television”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“Lewis Mumford once wrote that somewhere in the nineteenth century it became necessary to know how to read before one could truly see a building.”
Michael Pollan
A Place of My Own
“Memory is the enemy of wonder”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands….. Relations are what matter most.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“Most recently, as the medical value of marijuana has been rediscovered, medicine has been searching for ways to “pharmaceuticalize” the plant—find a way to harness its easily accessible benefits in a patch or inhaler that doctors can prescribe, corporations patent, and governments regulate. Whenever possible, Paracelsus’s lab-coated descendants have synthesized the active ingredients in plant drugs, allowing medicine to dispense with the plant itself—and any reminders of its pagan past.” (Michael Pollan Quotes)
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Much of gardening is a return, an effort at recovering remembered landscapes.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“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 Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much—the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime!—without suffering complete annihilation.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“One of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Our everyday waking consciousness “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we’re eating animals.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Plants are so unlike people that it’s very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Psychedelic therapy creates an interval of maximum plasticity in which, with proper guidance, new patterns of thought and behavior can be learned.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“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 reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Resistance is essentially a form of coevolution that occurs when a given population is threatened with extinction.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“Societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it. That’s why in a society’s choice of psychoactive substances we can read a great deal about both its fears and its desires.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Something like 90 percent of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda). Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. It’s so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste but doesn’t end there. Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain type of perfection… The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds; the most persuasive talk; the loveliest views, the most refined people.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“That anyone should need to write a book advising people to “eat food” could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“That’s how evolution works: nature’s most propitious accidents become evolutionary strategies for world domination.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“That’s pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“The billions we spend on anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen is money spent to undo the effects of too much omega-6 in the diet.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.” Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but “health” is simply not one of them, because it is given.” (Michael Pollan Quotes)
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The energy that cup of coffee or tea has given you has been borrowed, from the future, and must eventually be paid back. What’s more, there is interest to be paid on that loan, and it can be calculated in the quantity, and quality, of your sleep.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“The green thumb is equable in the face of nature’s uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“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 have nothing valuable to say about your health.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The reason I didn’t have a normal, dad-built tree house is that, as I’ve indicated, I didn’t have anything even approaching that kind of dad. He was, and remains, one of the world’s great indoorsmen, a delegator of all conceivable outdoor tasks—lawn mowing, car washing, gutter cleaning, and tree-house building. By the time I was ten, which was when I’d kicked off my campaign for a tree house in the woods behind our ranch, he didn’t even own the tools needed to build one, having “accidentally” nailed his tool chest behind the walls of a cedar closet he’d tried to build for my mother in the basement. Whether consciously or not, my father had clearly wanted to make sure the cedar closet would be his last do-it-yourself project, and it was.”
Michael Pollan
A Place of My Own
“The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate. The mouth cannot express it in words.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“The virus altered the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“The widespread use of caffeine is, arguably, one of those developments in human history, like the control of fire or the domestication of plants and animals, that helped lift us out of the state of nature, providing a new degree of control over biology, in this case our own.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“The workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“There is a lot more religion in science than you might expect.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“There is another word for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is wonder.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“There’s nothing really quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking all you want, but you will never get it back.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It’s not as though the rest of us don’t countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“To an extent, this is what all psychedelics do—not so much change how we feel inside (as stimulants or depressants reliably do) as imbue the world around us with never-before-appreciated qualities.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest – on behalf of the senses and the microbes – against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities, rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste nothing like mine or anyone else’s.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“To plant trees,” Russell Page wrote in his memoir, “is to give body and life to one’s dreams of a better world.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“To trim, I decided, is human, which probably explains the modernists’ contempt for it. Because if we’re not using trim to hide our poor craftsmanship, we’re using it to proclaim our fine craftsmanship—either way, sloth or pride, trim embodies the most human of failings and thereby spoils the supreme objectivity that modernists strove for.”
Michael Pollan
A Place of My Own
“Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“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.”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.”
Michael Pollan
A Place of My Own
“Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.” (Michael Pollan Quotes)
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“We don’t usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use of it as an addiction, but that is only because coffee and tea are legal and our dependence on them is socially acceptable.”
Michael Pollan
This Is Your Mind on Plants
“We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“We need, and now more than ever, to learn how to use nature without damaging it.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”
Michael Pollan
Food Rules
“When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens, too.”
Michael Pollan
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
“When chopping onions, just chop onions.”
Michael Pollan
Cooked
“When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Whenever history and culture seem stifling, weeds begin to look good.”
Michael Pollan
Second Nature
“While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“You are what what you eat eats.”
Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food
“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
Read more Author Quotes like this
