Tamar Adler - Tumblr Posts
Michael Pollan Quote
From “This is Your Mind on Plants” (2021)
Would people have ever discovered coffee or tea, let alone continued to drink them for hundreds of years, if not for caffeine? There are countless other seeds and leaves that can be steeped in hot water to make a beverage, and some number of them surely taste better than coffee or tea, but where are the shrines to those plants in our homes and offices and shops? Let’s face it: The rococo structures of meaning we’ve erected atop those psychoactive molecules are just culture’s way of dressing up our desire to change consciousness in the finery of metaphor and association. Indeed, what really commends these beverages to us is their association not with wood smoke or stone fruit or biscuits, but with the experience of well-being—of euphoria—they reliably give us.