Cooked: A Natural History Of Transformation
In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, published in 2013, Pollan explores the methods by which cooks mediate “between nature and culture.” The book is organized into four sections corresponding to the classical elements of Fire , Water , Air , and Earth . The book also features Samin Nosrat, who later became known for the bestselling cookbook Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and as “the chef who taught Michael Pollan how to cook.” A 2016 Netflix documentary series created by Alex Gibney is based on the book, starring Michael Pollan and Isaac Pollan.
Publishers Weekly10 May 2021
Pollan centers this lucid exploration of the psycho-social impact of mind-altering plants on his personal experiences with opium, mescaline, and, most intensely, caffeine. He starts with an extended version of his 1997 Harper’s piece about brewing opium tea from poppies, which produced mild euphoria “the tea seemed to subtract things: anxiety, melancholy, worry, grief” apart from his apprehension over the DEA’s crackdown on poppy horticulture. The second chapter, an expanded version of a piece first published as an Audibles Original, describes a monthslong abstention from caffeine, which precipitated persistent feelings of mental dullness, and his triumphal return to coffee drinking . Pollan connects these experiences to the importance of ubiquitous caffeine consumption during the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism. Less successful is Pollan’s final chapter, in which he imbibes mescaline during a Native American peyote ceremony, with the predictable outcome of maudlin, psychedelic emoting . Blending artful exposition of the evolution and neurochemistry of botanical drugs, erudite history, and precise and evocative prose, this is an insightful take on plants’ beguiling sway over the human psyche.
From The #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Michael Pollan A Radical Challenge To How We Think About Drugs And An Exploration Into The Powerful Human Attraction To Psychoactive Plants
In his latest exploration of the enduring relationship between the human and natural worlds, Michael Pollan dives deep into how psychoactive plantsspecifically opium, caffeine and mescalineimpact our brains and our cultures. Pollan is a master of breaking down complex science into an engaging story and challenging long-held societal beliefs. His newest offering, which follows his examination of the science of psychedelics in 2018s How to Change Your Mind, aims to unpack our ideas about what constitutes a drug and, fundamentally, why we seek them. Time Magazine
In this paradigm-shifting cultural history, Pollan challenges our ossified taboos about psychoactive plants, charting our powerful attraction to these substancesand exposing the arbitrariness of our self-imposed restrictions.From the war on drugs to cultural appropriation of mind-altering substances like ayahuasca, Pollan deftly explores the links between set and setting. Esquire
The omnivorously curious Pollan pivots off his provocative How to Change Your Mind with an enthralling odyssey into a trio of mind-altering drugs found in plants: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. In this wide-ranging, deliciously written study, he asks, why does one power us up each morning while the other two are shrouded in taboo? Youll never look at a Starbucks Pikes Peak the same way again. Oprah Daily
A lucid look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering ones mind. Kirkus Reviews
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Michael Pollan Wants To Change Your Mind
Recalling the era of Timothy Leary and rethinking the bad rap on psychedelic drugs
POLLAN: Peyote only grows in a very narrow band in Texas along the Rio Grande. Theres a literal appropriation happening when non-Native people harvest or buy peyote. By doing so, they are diminishing a very precious resource that belongs to Native Americans. Its a resource that is critical to their well-being.
Theres also the issue of non-Native people imitating the Native American ceremony. There are deep principles of psychedelics use that are shared across indigenous populations. At a peyote ceremony, there is always an elder involved. Its done with great reverence, and a sense of clear intention. While writing this book, I heard many stories of non-Native people conducting peyote ceremonies that, without these principles, trivialize the Native American Church and further diminish the resource.
GAZETTE:Youve said that drugs are generally defined by being helpful or harmful to society. Can a drug change its identity?
POLLAN: The identity of drugs is always changing. Look at cannabis. Marijuana is now legal for recreational use in 19 states. That was a drug that was very much at the heart of the drug war. I think its also happening with psychedelics. In the 1960s, they were considered disruptive, but today, were facing a serious mental health crisis and psychedelics may offer some relief.
How Cult Of Grit Masks Myths About Us Society
In 2019, nearly 50,000 Americans died from opioid-related overdoses. In 2020, a record year for drug overdoses, that number rose to nearly 70,000, an increase driven in part by limited health care resources, shortages of overdose antidotes, and increased isolation during the pandemic. Its not surprising that many people think of opium as a menace and nothing else.
Michael Pollan, whose books include The Omnivores Dilemma, How to Change Your Mind, and, most recently, This Is Your Mind on Plants, reminds us that opium can sometimes be a blessing. Many surgical procedures would be unbearable without it, and an opioid prescription can ease a patients suffering during palliative care. Opium, like all drugs, requires context, he notes.
In his latest work, Pollan, the Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer and Professor of the Practice Non-Fiction, writes about three drugs derived from plants: opium in poppies, caffeine in coffee beans and tea leaves, and mescaline in peyote. We asked him about the research behind the book and the changing nature of how we think about and use drugs. The interview was edited for clarity and length.
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Aww22 This Is Your Mind On Plants
Chaired by Ben Brooker.Following his New York Times bestselling How to Change Your Mind on the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Michael Pollans new book is This is Your Mind on Plants, a radical challenge to how we think about plants. Exploring the powerful attraction we have to psychoactive plants, Michael asks why they are subject to such paranoid and arbitrary regulation, and in wildly differing ways. Examining opium, mescaline and caffeine, he posits societies condone the mindchanging plants that help uphold societys rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.
A Homegrown Garden Of Mind
Michael Pollan is at it again: taking drugs and spinning wild, mesmerizing yarns about being human in a plant world. In his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, he grows opium poppies and mescaline cacti in his garden, heroically tries to avoid caffeine, and, in general, participates with gusto in our species age-old labor of helping the cleverest of plants propagate their genes. He weaves together botany, brain sciences, evolutionary biology and political economy into a sort of grand unified theory of drugs. And, of course, he experiments on himself, with intellectually delectable results. While not as revelatory as Pollans major works, this is a wonderful and compelling read that will leave you thinking long after you set it down.
Pollan is an astonishingly good writer, at times intimate and vulnerable, at times curious and expository, always compelling and credible. Reading his writing can be kind of like taking a psychedelic a literary onomatopoeia. When I put the book down I felt temporarily smarter, more capable of deeper perception of myself and the world around me. Its a wonderful and important gift.
This Is Your Mind on Plants
Penguin Press. 274 pp. $28
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This Is Your Mind On Plants
His book This Is Your Mind on Plants was released on July 6, 2021, and explores in particular opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Pollan is trying to start a post war on drugs conversation that better takes into account how different one drug is from another and figures out cultural containers for each of them, to use them safely and productively. The book ends with a ceremony around the use of San Pedro , a relatively fast growing Andeancactus that contains mescaline.
Pollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a former executive editor for Harper’s Magazine. His first book, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, was published in 1991.
Pollan has contributed to Greater Good, a social psychology magazine published by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. His article “Edible Ethics” discusses the intersection of ethical eating and social psychology.
In his 1998 book A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, Pollan methodically traced the design and construction of the out-building where he writes. The 2008 re-release of this book was re-titled A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams.
Pollan wrote and narrated an audiobook, Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World, for Audible.com
In 2014, Pollan wrote the foreword in the healthy eating cookbook The Pollan Family Table. The book is co-authored by his mother, Corky Pollan, and sisters, Lori Pollan, Dana Pollan, and Tracy Pollan.
This Is Your Mind On Plants By Michael Pollan Review The Trip Of A Lifetime
This fascinating insight into our relationship with mind-altering plants weaves personal experimentation with cultural history
Michael Pollan has written for many years, brilliantly, about our relationship with food and farming, in particular for the New York Times. In 2018, in what seemed like a midlife departure, he published a book on the new science of psychedelics, which was a personal report on renewed scientific interest in experiments with LSD and Ayahuasca, after decades of taboo. Pollan saw no change of direction in that project, however he insisted to me at the time that it was simply a natural evolution of his abiding interest in how we interact with other plant and animal species and how they get ahead in nature by gratifying our desires. The desire to change consciousness was a fundamental element of that relationship, he suggested. This book, which concerns our species symbiotic entanglements with three other potent plant-derived substances opium, caffeine and mescaline is a further development of a lifelong inquiry, which began, he writes, when he took up gardening as a teenager and attempted to grow cannabis.
Some plants offer bees a shot of caffeine as they collect nectar, which makes them an even more efficient pollinator
This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan is published by Allen Lane . To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Michael Pollan Explores The Mind
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THIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTSBy Michael Pollan
In his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan wagers that the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic narratives has opened a space in which we can tell some other, much more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind-altering plants and fungi with which nature has blessed us. Taking this as his cue, Pollan then turns to his own narratives of gardening and self-experimentation. As he does, he also masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.
The book begins with the essay Opium Made Easy that Pollan wrote 24 years ago for Harpers Magazine. In the essay, Pollan chronicles his own attempts to grow and partake in the opium flowing inside the bulbous pods of the poppy flowers planted in his Connecticut garden. He asks and partially answers what should be a simple question: when and whether this activity is illegal. The essay is a window into a heightened moment in the American war on drugs, but its real power comes not from its main text but instead from the artful addition of a new insertion and an epilogue.
Broadcast: Thursday July 28
Michael Pollan talked with Dave Miller in 2018 about his book, “How to Change Your Mind,” about the cultural and scientific history of psychedelic drugs, as well as his own personal experience with guided tripping.
Allison Frost / OPB
Michael Pollan has spent much of his career writing about the sometimes surprising relationship between plants and humans. His newest book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, focuses on three different plants and how they affect our brains. Opium, coffee, and mescaline could all be considered powerful drugs, or simply beautiful plants, or something much more mystical. We talk to Pollan in front of an audience at the Newmark Theatre in Portland, as part of an event put on by Powells Books.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Michael Pollan: It was my favorite drug.
Dave Miller: I think a lot of peoples. Although a lot of people wouldnt say my favorite drug, they would just say my daily drink, which we can talk about.
Pollan: Thats the point that I wanted to put it in that context, because it is a drug.
Miller: You talked to a number of caffeine researchers who said to you, if you really want to understand what caffeine is, the effects it has on you, you have to stop taking it. And after procrastinating for a while, after not not taking it for a while, you eventually did. What was your experience like?
Pollan: Yes.
Miller: So are the results in?
Pollan: In a profound way.
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This Is Your Mind On Plants By Michael Pollan Ebook Details
Before you start Complete This Is Your Mind on Plants PDF EPUB by Michael Pollan Download, you can read below technical ebook details:
- Full Book Name: This Is Your Mind on Plants
- Book Genre: Autobiography, Environment, Food, Food and Drink, Health, History, Memoir, Nature, Nonfiction, Plants, Psychology, Science
In Defense Of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, released on January 1, 2008, explores the relationship with what he terms nutritionism and the Western diet, with a focus on late 20th century food advice given by the science community. Pollan holds that consumption of fat and dietary cholesterol does not lead to a higher rate of coronary disease, and that the reductive analysis of food into nutrient components is a mistake.
Throughout the book, Pollan questions the view that the point of eating is to promote health, pointing out that this attitude is not universal and that cultures that perceive food as having purposes of pleasure, identity, and sociality may end up with better health. He explains this seeming paradox by vetting, and then validating, the notion that nutritionism and, therefore, the whole Western framework through which we intellectualize the value of food is more a religious and faddish devotion to the mythology of simple solutions than a convincing and reliable conclusion of incontrovertible scientific research.
Pollan spends the rest of his book explicating his first three phrases: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He contends that most of what Americans now buy in supermarkets, fast food stores, and restaurants is not in fact food, and that a practical tip is to eat only those things that people of his grandmother’s generation would have recognized as food.
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Brief Summary Of Book: This Is Your Mind On Plants By Michael Pollan
Here is a quick description and cover image of book This Is Your Mind on Plants written by Michael Pollan which was published in 2021-7-6. You can read this before This Is Your Mind on Plants PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom.
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugsopium, caffeine, and mescalineand throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
How To Change Your Mind
In 2018, Pollan wrote How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, a book about the history and future of psychedelic drugs. The book became a No. 1 New York Times best-seller. He argues that psilocybin and LSD are not drugs that make people crazy, which he calls the biggest misconception people have about psychedelics, but rather drugs that can help a person become “more sane” by, for example, eliminating a fear of death. While promoting his book on TV, he explained that along with LSD and psilocybin, his research included ingesting ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT, and that he experienced a dissolution of ego. Based on his 2018 book Pollan leads the way in the Netflix docuseries How to Change Your Mind exploring the history and uses of psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and mescaline.
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This Is Your Mind On Plants By: Michael Pollan
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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants — and the equally powerful taboosOf all the things humans rely on plants for–sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber–surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: people around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. We don’t usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So then what is a “drug?” And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs — opium, caffeine, and mescaline — and throws the
