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A renaissance is underway in the scientific study of psychedelics, both as a mode of therapy for mental illness and as a tool for understanding the mind. Tim Ferriss takes up these issues and more in a conversation with Michael Pollan.
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“The biggest misconception people have about psychedelics is that these are drugs that make you crazy,” says Michael Pollan, author of the new book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. “We now have evidence that that does happen sometimes — but in…
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The human digestive tract has about the same number of neurons as the spinal column. What are they there for? The final word isn’t in yet, but Michael Pollan thinks their existence suggests that digestion may be more than the rather mundane process of breaking down food into chemicals. And, keeping those numerous digestive neurons…
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Sure, I’m on a food binge. But not what is usually meant when one hears the words “food” and “binge” put together. Readers can’t but help having noticed the cookbooks creeping into The Rolling Shelves, and the increasing number of food-related books that have come my way. A couple of weeks ago, I ran the…
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In his 1996 book Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, the great food anthropologist Sidney Mintz concluded that the United States had no cuisine. Interestingly, Mintz’s definition of cuisine came down to conversation. For Mintz, Americans just didn’t engage in passionate talk about food. Unlike the southwest French and their cassoulet, most Americans don’t obsess and quarrel…
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Michael Pollan has built a reputation as a sleuthing agro-journalist. In his writing for The New York Times Magazine and a quartet of books, he’s trailed a steer from birth to dinner plate, traced America’s obesity epidemic to corn subsidies, and narrowly, fumblingly outwitted a small-town cop who came uncomfortably close to his marijuana patch.…
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It became obvious to journalist Michael Pollan in the summer of 2002 that America had a national eating disorder. That July, The New York Times Magazine published an article titled “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”? which reported that a growing number of respected nutritional researchers were beginning to conclude that perhaps…
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On the long trip from the soil to our mouths, a trip of 1,500 miles on average, the food we eat often passes through places most of us will never see. Michael Pollan has spent much of the last five years visiting these places on our behalf. “Industrial food,” as Pollan defines it, “is food…