There are those that would argue that fast foods are quasi foods a few chemical steps removed from being plastic or even poison and that the careful, conscious preparation of comestibles is by far preferred. With a few exceptions I am a member of that club. Take for example hallucinogenic preparations known to be used by the ancient Maya.
Unquestionably complex and varied, they used carefully prepared concoctions of datura and alcohol, mixtures using fermented bark, recipes with psychoactive mushrooms and even potions with powerful alkaloids from the glands of Bufo Marinus, the Wad Frog, to induce hallucinatory experiences.
How archaeologists know these recipes is another question but take the Wad Frog/alkaloids potion as an example. The gist of the preparation goes something like this. The frogs are submerged in a bath of H2O, with water lily pads and other botanical agents. This produces a release of hallucinatory alkaloids from the frogs gland into the liquid. This liquid is then placed in an enema sack or clyster. Ancient paintings depict the anal delivery of the psychoactive potion via these enema sacks or clysters.
Terrance McKenna, the psychonaut and ethnobotanist would have us believe that psychedelic mushrooms were introduced to planet earth when their spores fell to earth from outer space. This apparently occurred many centuries ago and why, after the arrival of the Spanish, with their beasts of burden a new variety of hallucinatory mushrooms were found growing in the dung heaps of horses and mules. One such variety is known as “Pajaritos”. They are a tiny, delicate, white stemmed tu-tued skirted mushroom. A jungle guide, who no doubt was speaking from experience, informed me that simply ingesting 4 or 5 of these skirted babies would be sufficient to duplicate the objectives of the ancient ceremonial Mayan Vision Quest.
I really have have no intentions but if my goal was to commune with the Serpent God of Mayan cosmology, scale his back, reach the Sun, and get back to the Beginning, I’m not going the enema route, I’m gonna grab some Pajaritos, the fast food path.