Michael Pollan on SummaryShelf

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The 99-cent hamburger is not actually cheap. It only looks cheap at the register, because its real price gets paid somewhere else—in polluted water, in rising rates of obesity and diabetes, and in tax dollars quietly funneled to industrial farms. That is the argument at the center of Pollan’s book, and the reason it holds together is a single crop. Corn is the hidden ingredient in most of what Americans eat. One in four supermarket items contains a corn derivative, and corn turns up everywhere from chicken nuggets to the high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens processed food. This didn’t happen because we love corn. It happened because farm policy encourages overproduction, which drives prices so low that corn becomes the cheapest possible way to add calories to anything. Pollan puts it bluntly: the price of a fast-food hamburger “simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost—to soil, oil, public health, the public purse,” costs charged invisibly to the taxpayer through subsidies, to the health care system through illness, and to the environment through pollution.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sometime in the twentieth century, we stopped eating food and started eating nutrients. People who once thought in terms of bread, apples, and fish began thinking in terms of carbohydrates, vitamins, and saturated fat. Michael Pollan calls this shift nutritionism, and his charge is blunt: it made us sicker. Once eating became about isolated nutrients rather than whole foods, manufacturers could stamp a health claim on almost anything, and Americans dutifully followed the advice into obesity and diabetes. His remedy fits on a bumper sticker — eat food, not too much, mostly plants — but the story of how we lost the plot is worth understanding first.

How to Change Your Mind

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Psychedelics do their work by quieting the brain circuit that maintains your sense of being a separate self. That circuit, the default mode network, normally filters incoming reality and keeps you running in familiar grooves of thought. When psilocybin or LSD turns it down, the brain lets in more raw sensory input and regions that usually keep to themselves begin talking to each other in new ways. Colors intensify, the boundary between you and the world softens, and the rigid mental loops that hold people inside depression or addiction can finally loosen. Brain scans back this up: the more completely that ego-maintaining network goes quiet, the more profound and therapeutically useful the experience tends to be. As one good rule of complex systems has it, a good way to understand something is to disturb it and watch what happens.