Dear Friends,
(18:17) Pretty much all farmers hate Project 2025, with Brad Wilson;
(45:33) Iowa Food System Coalition, with Aaron Lehman.
Our mushroom logs. Strictly for culinary purposes.
Our deep dive this week is into US farm policy and the farm component of Project 2025. We also learn about a coalition of Iowa growers and eaters working to build greater food security. Brad Wilson and Aaron Lehman are my guests for those conversations.
What I focus on in this week’s blog is mushrooms. Not the kind seen in the pic of the shiitake logs Kathy and I raise. The other kind. The kind you don’t want to serve for dinner.
In my early 20s, I was briefly fascinated by a series of books written by Carlos Castaneda. Castaneda wrote about a shaman’s use of plant-based psychedelics (specifically peyote and jimsonweed) to aid truth-seekers in their quest for spiritual growth. Regardless of the veracity of Castaneda’s work (a 1973 Time story described him as “an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a tortilla”), I found the content of his writing fascinating, even alluring.
That said, I was never tempted to experiment with psychedelic plants. For me life was, and continues to be, interesting enough without the ingestion of mind-altering substances.
But my perception of the topic received a jolt during this week’s conversation with Dr. Charles Goldman, my good friend and frequent cohost.
Charles is a cancer surgeon and recently retired as the head of palliative care at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. In the course of our discussion about psilocybin (a.k.a., magic mushrooms), Charles shared a perspective I’d never considered: Perhaps a psychedelic experience with psilocybin doesn’t simply alter one’s perception but actually allows one to access elements within the brain that normally are suppressed in preference to our frontal lobe “executive” functions. Perhaps psilocybin allow users to experience things that are just as “real” as the day-to-day human experience but are simply not interpretable via logic and cognition.
We discuss a recent story from The Guardian, about a cancer patient named Thomas Hartle, who “had his first psilocybin session in 2020. Hartle claims to have felt himself disappear: an experience as close to death as one can have while still being alive. After it was over, instead of being afraid of the inevitable outcome of his stage four colon cancer illness, he felt relief. ‘It gave me a taste of what life after life could be like,’ he said. ‘Instead of the idea that the lights shut off, the party’s over, it was like a transition from one state to another. That was really comforting to me.’”
Fascinating. If psilocybin actually enhance one’s brain function, and that enhancement opens a door to what happens to us after death, that’s pretty important stuff.
So I’m again curious about, but still not inclined to experiment with, psilocybin or any other mind-altering substance. I’m fortunate to be in great health, though fully aware that could change instantly. For now, I believe my life will be more positively enhanced by ingesting shiitakes during an upcoming dinner experience than psilocybin during a session of afterlife curiosity.
Thanks for reading, listening, and doing your part for a better world.
Ed Fallon
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Ed Fallon