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"Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo."
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Exlpore more Anthropology quotes
"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."
"If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African."
"It's always amusing to look at how something early in the 20th century was written in anthropology and how it's written now. There's been an enormous shift in how it's done, but yet you can't put your finger on someone who actually did it."
"Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities."
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
"It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today."
"Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology."
"If there's ever a place where you can't argue that you can put the facts over here and the text over there and see if they fit, it is surely in anthropology."
"Man is at the bottom an animal midway a citizen and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top."
"Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is."
Explore more quotes by Michael Pollan
"Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before."
"Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine."
"Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again."
"Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature."
"My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition."
"By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved."
"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."
"I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification."
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