This Is Your Mind On Plants by Michael Pollan

I have found the author's thoughts and books about our relationship with food and farming to be thought provoking and maybe the single best way to think about how to improve our health as it pertains to eating than any other thing that I have read. He makes you think all the while not stirring up too much dust. This book, which concerns our species’ symbiotic entanglements with three other potent plant-derived substances – opium, caffeine and mescaline – is a further development of a lifelong inquiry, which began, he writes, when he took up gardening as a teenager and attempted to grow cannabis. So a bit more dust is stirred than in other works, but he does not in any way glorify drug use, nor does he encourage their use. He is a gardener, and he presents this project as a natural evolution of his “abiding interest in how we interact with other plant and animal species and how they get ahead in nature by gratifying our desires”. The desire to change consciousness was a fundamental element of that relationship, he suggested. His essays on perhaps the three most dramatically efficacious medicinal compounds proceed in a similar way, weaving personal experimentation with each of the compounds into informed histories of the ways in which they have taken such a hold of different human cultures. At the root of each case study is a pair of questions: the first asks why, as a species, we have gone to extraordinary lengths to propagate and disseminate these consciousness-changing molecules, and the second is why they are subject to paranoia and regulation in differing degrees.