Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Author and activist in the sustainable food movement, known for the maxim 'eat food, not too much, mostly plants.'
On the island
Eight records
This is the Banana Boat song, which is a work song, traditional work song. And my parents were a huge Harry Belafonte fan... I just remember as a little kid dancing in the den as they would put on this LP.
In middle school, I had a couple teachers who were just brilliant English teachers. And in this class with Mrs. Zaslow, she played us The Sound of Silence. And we read it as a poem. And it was my first kind of recognition that music and literature had this close connection and that you could find poetry in places other than books.
Around the time I was 13, after the Summer of Love, which was 1967, the kind of urban hippie experience turned sour in many ways. And there were a lot of drugs and overdoses and crime. And so a lot of people moved to the country and moved on to communes. And this is kind of an anthem of that movement, which I was, even though I wasn't ready to move to the country, I was very intrigued by the dream.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
We're going to hear the song played at our wedding. And this was the first song. This is our first dance. We love the album by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. So it was obvious to us that Cheek to Cheek would be the first song.
Jerry Garcia and David Grisman
I want to play Shady Grove by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. While I was working on these pieces, Isaac was born. And, you know, when you have a little kid, music becomes an issue in the car. Are you going to be able to listen to your music or are you going to have to listen to their music? And Jerry Garcia, of course, from The Grateful Dead, and I was a big deadhead. And Dave Grisman did this wonderful collaboration album that Isaac loved. So this was our common denominator. And I can't hear this song without thinking of car trips with Isaac in the back seat.
Well, I thought I would play one of my favorite artists, which is Joni Mitchell, and a song that means a lot to me, and it did way back when when I first heard it in college, and that's California. You know, we moved to California. This was a big change in our lives when Isaac was 11, and we were going out just to try it. We'd never lived on the West Coast. And I've just kind of rediscovered Joni Mitchell more recently, and I listened to her a lot. But this one is just so up, and I can see California sunshine when I hear this song.
Well, it's a Beatles song, Tomorrow Never Knows, the one that is sometimes cited by psychedelic researchers in preparing people for their experiences. The Beatles were huge for me. I actually had a Nehru jacket at the time that Sgt. Pepper came out. That was the fashion. They had started that fashion because of the cover image on Sgt Pepper. And my mother for Hanukkah got me a Nehru jacket that I was so proud of. And this very mysterious song, it would take me years to understand it.
Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008Favourite
Bach's cello suite in D minor, number two in D minor, played by Yo-Yo Ma. I listened to this piece while I was dissolved, while I didn't have a self. When your ego dissolves, there's no wall between you and the world. You merge with whatever is around you. And at various moments, I felt like I could feel Yo-Yo Ma's bow, you know, the horsehair bow, going across my body, or I was inside that vault of space inside the cello. And it was just this experience of complete oneness with a piece of music. And it was the most profound listening experience I had had before because I became music. And I know how crazy that sounds. I played this for my dad when he was dying. We sat with him for those last couple days. And the communication that took place was through music. And I knew he loved Yo-Yo Ma and cello music. So this brings me back to that room, you know, in January of 2018. It's a very profound piece.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:58Why do you put yourself through these [immersive writing] challenges?
People like to learn with you rather than be lectured at. And I also find that there's a quality of wonder that you get when you do something for the first time that you're never going to have again. And so it gives you an opportunity to see something even more clearly than people who are expert at it and do it all the time and that you could interview about it. And that might involve building a cottage, buying a cow and following it through the meat system. It would give me a point of view I couldn't get any other way.
Presenter asks
6:06Is [your mother's permissiveness] a gift to you, do you think?
It was a huge gift. Your parents believing in you is so important to taking chances and risks and failure. And my father, too, who was a lawyer who hated the law, just put no kind of career pressure on me to do this thing or that because he felt he had chosen badly in some ways. Partly because of the pressure he felt from his parents. And they put enormous pressure on him to be the student council president, to go to law school, to, you know, he just had it. And he hated it. And he wasn't going to make the same mistake with us.
Presenter asks
18:59Once you came to conclusions [about food production], how did you make the switch from being an observer to becoming a campaigner?
The keepsakes
It's an interesting thing that happens. If you specialize in an area, as I did for several years, eventually you're going to come to conclusions, right? And it becomes kind of disingenuous to write as the person who doesn't have an opinion. I saw how our food was produced, and some of the way it was being produced was simply wrong. It was unhealthy, it was bad for the animals, it was bad for the land, and it was bad for the eater. So I started becoming somewhat more opinionated in my writing. And fortunately, the editors at the New York Times were willing to let me take a stance on some of these issues. Part of that was the industry was still asleep. They didn't realize that this criticism was building, and they would eventually fight back. And then we had a a backlash from the industry that made me really feel like a campaigner.
Presenter asks
22:30What would you say to someone who says they'd love [to cook] but don't have the time or resources?
Well, I don't know what those resources are. I mean, if you have a pot and a pan, that's pretty much all you need. I mean, you don't need a lot of resources to cook. I think what you need is time. I think, though, we have lost the skills. There are very satisfying and inexpensive meals you can make in 20 minutes. But also, cooking is about communion. It's about family. There's so much else that happens at the dinner table. So, with the full understanding that people can't do it every day, I think if you can put a meal on the table, home cooked, once or twice a week, you've struck a blow for your health, you've struck a blow for sustainable agriculture, and you've struck a blow for a happier family.
Presenter asks
24:35Why did you want to look into [psychedelic drugs as potential treatment for mental health conditions]?
My basic underlying interest, which grows out of my gardening, is in plants and all the different ways we use plants and they use us. Along the way, I started hearing about this research that psilocybin, which is the chemical in magic mushrooms, was being used to treat people for mental illness. And in one particular study I read about, it was being used with cancer patients to help them deal with their predicament and their fear of death and their fear of recurrence. And they were getting these wonderful results. The idea that psychedelics could be used to treat mental illness was such a mind-blowing idea to me that I decided I should write about this.
Presenter asks
25:32Were you frightened about trying [psychedelics] illegally?
Oh, yeah, I was terrified. I didn't know what I would discover about myself. I had always been afraid of psychedelics. I hadn't used them when I was a teenager. And, you know, bad things can happen. But I also felt that I could not understand what these patients were telling me without having the experience myself. I had to try it and see what it was like. So I tried as best I could to imitate what was going on in the drug trials, which is to say, I didn't do it on my own. I worked with a guide, a very experienced person who trained as a therapist, who, yes, was working underground.
“People like to learn with you rather than be lectured at. And I also find that there's a quality of wonder that you get when you do something for the first time that you're never going to have again.”
“There's something about gardening that leaves the mind very free to wander. Whatever people tell you, it's not that hard. It doesn't take up all your mental space when you're weeding or seeding or deadheading. And so you have a lot of kind of extra space to think.”
“[My father] was a nonconformist. He had a great independent streak, and he was a contrarian. And the most memorable example of that was when I was only four or five... in America, the front lawn is a very important institution... and my dad was either a nonconformist or lazy, and you can put either interpretation on this, but he just wouldn't mow his lawn... And at a certain point one summer, the lawn was like two feet high. It was a meadow, and it was the only one... And we could feel the hot breath of condemnation from the neighbors.”
“I had at the peak of this experience something called ego dissolution... In my case, I felt myself explode in a cloud of blue post-it notes, like confetti. And then it all fell to the ground and mushed into this puddle of blue paint. And that was me. But I was observing this from some perspective I had never had before. I think most of us think we're identical to our ego, and we listen to that voice in our head, which can be highly self-critical or mean or whatever. You know, it's a very selfish voice very often. And I learned from that experience that I'm not identical to my ego, that there are other perspectives in my head, and that I can ignore my ego sometimes.”
“I listened to this piece [Bach's cello suite] while I was dissolved, while I didn't have a self. When your ego dissolves, there's no wall between you and the world. You merge with whatever is around you. And at various moments, I felt like I could feel Yo-Yo Ma's bow, you know, the horsehair bow, going across my body, or I was inside that vault of space inside the cello. And it was just this experience of complete oneness with a piece of music. And it was the most profound listening experience I had had before because I became music.”