Michael Pollan made a name for himself, or perhaps a bigger name, for his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which came off like such an attack on our modern diets that he wrote a brief companion book called In Defense of Food. In defense of Pollan, however, his writing goes well beyond those two books or that subject; he can be a gifted writer on many matters of food and food science, and is not the scold that Omnivore’s Dilemma might lead you to believe that he is. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is a history of food and food science, and an explanation of how we used fire and heat to change the way we ate, in turn changing the trajectory of our species. His most recent book, a collection of two previously published essays plus a third, is called This is Your Mind on Plants, and covers three psychoactive compounds or chemicals produced by the plant world: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.
By far, my favorite part of this book was the portion on caffeine, which was originally released as an Audible original and excerpted by The Guardian as part of its longread series a few months ago. Pollan was a caffeine addict, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, and as part of his research into the chemical’s effects on our brains and our lives, chose to give it up completely before gradually reintroducing it into his life. He spoke to Dr. Matthew Walker, author of How We Sleep, who is a scold, at least on this topic, and among other things claims that caffeine’s half-life is around 6 hours, so a quarter of the caffeine you consumed in a cup of joe at 9 am is still in your system at 9 pm. (Estimates of its actual half-life vary, but it may be closer to 5 hours, which would push up that latter time to 7 pm.) Caffeine in the afternoon, which we often consume to combat our bodies’ evolved tendency towards biphasic sleep, is especially harmful; the iced coffee you have at 2 pm would still leave more than a quarter of its caffeine in your system at 11 pm, a typical bedtime for adults who have kids or at least have to work in the morning.
Most people understand on some level that caffeine can harm your sleep quantity and quality, but Pollan also points out how much we depend on caffeine each day for simple alertness, to feel like we think clearly, to clear the fog of sleep – or, of course, the fog of caffeine withdrawal. There is even research showing that caffeine can help certain types of recall and improve our reaction times in certain physical tasks, although viewers of Good Eats know that caffeine may make you work faster, but it doesn’t make you work smarter. Pollan gives a breezy history of caffeine and its two major delivery systems (tea and coffee), including descriptions of their ties to colonialism, exploitation of native peoples, and slavery, before bringing us back to the narrative of his caffeine withdrawal and reintroduction.
The opium essay appeared in slightly redacted form in Harper’s in the late 1990s, and is less about what the drugs derived from opium do than Pollan’s own misadventures in growing poppies in his own garden, only to discover that he may be violating federal law by doing so. Opium is a latex taken from the seed capsules of the Papaver somniferum plant, although Pollan claims that there are other poppies that can produce some of the same compounds, just in smaller quantities. The drugs we associate with poppies are opiates, alkaloids found within the latex, including morphine and codeine; or derivative products, such as heroin (made through acetylation of morphine) or oxycodone (synthesized from thebaine in the latex). You can consume the raw latex, which is supposed to be unspeakably bitter, and will cause nervous system depression. Pollan didn’t end up doing that, although he certainly thought about it, and wrote about thinking about it, and expunged a few pages until releasing the full article here. He describes the conversations from the time around what it was safe to write, while his editor at the time, John R. MacArthur, has disputed Pollan’s version of events. Anyway, Pollan drank some opium tea, and said it tasted awful but felt nice.
Then there’s mescaline, which, of these three drugs, has the unusual characteristic of offering very little downside to the user. Its use is highly restricted, because Drugs Are Bad! even though there’s a small body of evidence that mescaline, derived from a cactus that grows in the American southwest, and psilocybin, produced by several hundred species of fungi mostly in the Psilocybe genus, may help people with severe depression or anxiety. The majority of Pollan’s essay here revolves around mescaline’s somewhat recent history of use in religious ceremonies among certain indigenous American tribes, the ridiculous laws around its use, and environmental and cultural concerns around it. He eventually tries some as well, and has what sounds like a very pleasant experience of heightened awareness with mild hallucinations, not something that might fit the stereotype of a trip. I have never tried either of these psychotropics, and Pollan’s narrative made me slightly more curious about them.
Pollan the anti-scold is an insightful, conversational writer who is unafraid to educate his readers but never loses sight of the need to entertain at the same time. There might be a bit too much of him in the opium section – the idea of DEA agents bashing down his door because he had two poppies in his garden might come across as paranoid – but despite his first-person writing in the remaining two sections, he takes care not to let his persona take over. His thoughtfulness in describing the mescaline ceremony he witnesses, for example, does him credit; he’s just trying to get high, so to speak, not to appropriate anyone’s culture. It’s a short book, compiling some pieces you may have read before, but an enjoyable diversion, and one more tiny brick in the wall for drug decriminalization.
Next up: Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, because Mike Schur told me to read it.
