For decades, the bond between humans and plants, encompassing food, caffeine, and magic mushrooms, has fascinated investigative journalist and author Michael Pollan.
Pollan's early books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany Of Desire, provoked a national conversation about what we eat and where it comes from. They also inspired the 2008 documentary Food Inc., which peeled back the curtain on America's food industrial complex.
More recently, Pollan's interest in plants led him into the world of mind-altering psychedelics. In How To Change Your Mind; What The New Science Of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, And Transcendence, Pollan explores their therapeutic potential, remarking that the outcomes in addressing certain types of depression, anxiety, and addiction are nothing short of astonishing. He discussed the book on Life Examined.
"I think we will come to understand that there's a common denominator to the kinds of disorders psychedelics address effectively," says Pollan. "It does seem to increase the kind of the plasticity of the brain and allows us to give up old narratives that are destructive, whether behaviorally or mentally, and write some new ones."
As part of his research, Pollan experimented with both LSD and psilocybin.
"My own psychedelic experiences, some of which were profoundly spiritual, I came to understand spirituality is essentially egolessness… It was an experience where, when the walls of the ego come down, there's nothing between you and the world and there's this wonderful sense of merging into something larger and greater than yourself."
Pollan's most recent book, This is Your Mind on Plants, challenges our commonly held views on drugs and psychoactive plants, including our use of caffeine. "90% of people on our planet have a daily relationship with caffeine," Pollan says. "That includes our children, if we're letting them drink soda."
In regards to Food, Inc. 2, which came out last year, Pollan revisits the conglomerates that provide us with so much of our food and discovers that the pandemic exposed even more cracks in the system.
"Something really interesting and revealing happened in America, which is that the food system fell apart," says Pollan. "In a weird, paradoxical way, you have the split screen and on one screen were empty supermarket shelves and people buying, hoarding, whatever they could find in the supermarket, and then on the other side of the screen, you had farmers destroying their crops, spilling milk out onto the ground that they couldn't sell, and euthanizing animals, pigs, and chickens by the thousands. How could both these things be true?"
Today, there has been a noticeable shift in how we procure our food, with many opting for farmers' markets, CSA memberships, and organic produce — a transformation described as a blossoming trend by Pollan. He says, "It hasn't disturbed the giant multinational companies that are running the bulk of the food system. Their power has only grown and the risks that come with that power have also only grown."
Although the prospect of significant change in food systems may appear bleak, Pollan injects a note of optimism. "The food movement boasts influential allies," he says, citing "Biden's antitrust policies" and "Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey, who sits on the Agriculture Committee." Senator Booker, Pollan says has "connected the dots and understands that the public health challenges of his constituents are connected to the agricultural policies that are dictating what kind of food we're growing."
In "This is Your Mind on Plants," author Michael Pollan gave up caffeine for six months, prompting him to wonder whether his normal self is caffeinated and whether anything else feels suboptimal. Photo courtesy of Tabitha Soren.
