“It appears to be a universal human desire. Every culture on Earth, with the exception of the Inuit in Greenland, has used some plant to change consciousness, whether it was as profound as a psychedelic experience or as routine as a caffeine experience.” says Michael Pollan. Graphic by KCRW’s Gabby Quarante.
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 the wonder of plants, what we eat, and where our food comes from. They also inspired the 2008 documentary Food Inc., which peeled back the curtain on the complexities of America’s food industrial complex.
More recently, Pollan’s keen interest in the plants we consume has also led him into the world of psychedelics and mind-altering plants. 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.
“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.”
Pollan’s research also allowed him to experiment 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 pervasive 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, the sequel to Oscar-nominated Food Inc. that came out last year, Pollan revisits food 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.”
Though the prospect of significant change in food systems may appear bleak, Pollan injects a note of optimism by highlighting that “the food movement boasts influential allies”, 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.” 
“We get stuck. We get stuck in narratives, we get stuck in habits, kinds of behavior, and anything that allows us to get out of those grooves. Shake the snow globe is another snowy metaphor that’s been proposed and is very helpful. It’s a shock to the system, but it allows the system to reset in another way” Michael Pollan on the potential benefits of psychedelics. Photo courtesy of Tabitha Soren. In This is Your Mind on Plants, author Michael Pollan says “I gave up caffeine for a period of time for this book. I got off it for about six months and the entire time, I didn’t feel quite myself and that made me wonder, so my normal self is a “caffeinated self” and anything else feels kind of suboptimal?”
Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.
More from Life Examined
Latest
Featured
The best of what to see, hear, eat, do, and more.
Get the latest from KCRW in your inbox 3x a week.