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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
"If origin defines race, then the entire human race is African."
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
"Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars."
"The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive."
"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."
"I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it."
"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."
"He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
"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."
"Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities."
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."
"My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it."
"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."
"Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring."
"The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own."
"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."
"Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important."
"We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding."
"Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life-the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids-is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air."
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