Michael Pollan Quotes

We forget how much time it can take simply to avoid cooking: all that time spent driving to restaurants or waiting for our orders, none of which gets counted as 'food preparation'. And much of the half-hour saved by not cooking is spent watching screens.

Evolution doesn’t depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.

…the microwave is an individualistic serial machine – it can only do one at a time so if you've got four people eating four different entrees, each has to be individually heated. So our microwave dinner, which was supposed to save us so much time, took about an hour to get to the table.

The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever.

The Greeks believed that true beauty (as opposed to mere prettiness) was the offspring of these two opposing tendencies, which they personified in Apollo and Dionysus, their two gods of art. Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance, when our dreams of order and abandon come together. One tendency uninformed by the other can bring forth only coldness or chaos—the stiffness of a Triumph tulip, the slackness of a wild rose.

At a certain point, a point already long past, the farmer’s attempt at the perfect control of nature evolved into the control of the farmer by the corporations that promoted that dream in the first place. It is only because that dream is so elusive that the control of farmers by its merchants became so inescapable.

Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so.

Beauty and nature often shows up in the vicinity of sex—think of the plumage of birds or mating rituals through out the animal kingdom. “Sexual selection”—that is, evolution’s favoring of features that increase a plant’s or animal’s attractiveness and therefore it's reproductive success—is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers, maybe also sports cars and bikinis. In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by sex.
There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms, is the good.) Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. Gorgeous plumage, lustrous hair, symmetrical features are “certificates of health,” as one scientist puts it, advertisements that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites and is not otherwise under stress. A fabulous tail is a metabolic extravagance only the healthy can afford.

The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don’t merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to life our sadness or worry—the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt of swallowing a pill containing nothing but sugar and belief. What all this suggests is that 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.

Aldous Huxley did his best to argue us out of the view that a chemically conditioned spiritual experience is false—and he did so long before we knew anything about cannabinoid or opioid receptor networks….He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.†
†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.

Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.

The tulip’s genetic variability has in fact given nature—or, more precisely, natural selection—a great deal to play with. From among the chance mutations thrown out by a flower, nature preserve the rare ones that confer some advantage—brighter color, more perfect symmetry, whatever. For millions of years such features were selected, in effect, by the tulip’s pollinators—that is, insects—until the Turks came along and began to cast their own votes.… 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. Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited us and our desires—even our most idiosyncratic notions of beauty—to advance their own interests. Depending on the environment in which a species finds itself, different adaptations will avail. Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that's been shaped by human desire.

For look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature’s double nature—that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiring toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were names the Greeks gave to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?

The images and words brought back from these journeys—visits with the souls of the dead and unborn, visions of the afterlife, answers to life's questions—were powerful enough to compel belief in a spirit world and, in some cases, to serve as the foundation of whole religions. Of course, plant drugs are not the only technologies of religious ecstasy; fasting, meditation, and hypnotic trances can achieve similar results. But often these techniques have been used to explore spiritual territory first blazed by the entheogens.
What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. (Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.)

The industrialization — and brutalization — of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.