I’ve become much more conscious about consciousness over the past few years. I know many of us have since the pandemic — reflecting not just on mental health, but on the larger themes tangled up with it. Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, has certainly spurred more of that internal reflection.
If you know Pollan’s work, you’ll know his trajectory: food systems, then plants and psychedelics, and now the fabric of consciousness itself. Each book peels back another layer of how we perceive our world and our relationship with it.
As a lifelong reflective, somewhat spiritual, life sciences, F&B and sustainability person, I’ve long found his lens incredibly insightful and grounding.
But this one goes somewhere entirely different.
If you’d like a taste before committing to the book, his recent conversation with Ezra Klein is a brilliant place to start — link below.
Pollan’s central claim, drawing on neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Mark Solms, and Anil Seth, is this:
Consciousness doesn’t originate in the thinking brain. It originates in the body. In feelings.
Hunger, pain, discomfort, pleasure. Upper brainstem, not the cortex.
As he puts it: the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around. We are not a support system for three pounds of tofu in our heads.
Feelings come first. Thoughts are second.
He cites research showing that people whose stomachs were chemically settled felt less moral disgust when shown disturbing images. Our moral intuitions are channelled through the gut. We think with our body before our brain.
This matters because it reframes something our industry has understood intuitively for a long time — that the best hospitality experiences are felt before they’re thought about.
The temperature, sound, and lighting of a room. The smell of fresh bread. The weight of a good towel. Feeling welcome and remembered with authenticity and warmth.
Our industry often quotes Maya Angelou: “People may forget what you said and what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.”
We seek to deliver delight and comfort. But in an industry with some of the most emotionally intelligent people on earth, we don’t nearly spend enough time talking about the broader spectrum of feelings.
At a time when every professional conversation seems to lead to AI, Pollan’s exchange with Klein about what AI feelings would actually be worth is especially useful food for thought.
The argument: feelings have no weight if you have no vulnerability — no capacity to suffer, no mortality.
Otherwise a feeling is just more information.
Our imperfect, complex, mortal nature makes us who we are.
Machines can simulate thought. They can produce language that sounds conscious. But any feelings a chatbot reports are, in Pollan’s word, weightless — because there’s no body underneath them. No hunger. No mortality. No skin in the game.
What does courage, love, grief, gratitude, or fear mean for an LLM? They may be able to track and represent these states, but the association will always be hollow.
This distinction matters for hospitality.
Our industry exists in the gap between what can be digitised and what can’t. A booking engine can be automated. A revenue management system can be optimised. A tech stack can be engineered to remember your pillow preference across twenty venues. We can send targeted Piña Colada ads when you’re by the pool.
But the experience of sitting in a garden at dusk eating something picked that morning, listening to birdsong, feeling the temperature shift in the air, catching the scent of jasmine that spurs a childhood memory — that is irreducibly physical. It has depth.
It requires a body, a place, and a relational context connected to emotion.
And in a world of increasing digitisation, I believe we need these moments to re-centre ourselves in the real — or risk losing ourselves altogether.
“Consciousness is under siege. I think that it’s the last frontier for some of these companies that want to sell our time.” — Michael Pollan
Pollan goes further. He argues that technology companies captured our attention first (social media), and are now going after our emotional attachments (chatbots, AI companions). He quotes Reed Hastings saying Netflix’s primary competitor is sleep — which he calls one of the most dystopian things he’s ever heard a CEO say.
His concept of “consciousness hygiene” — protecting your awareness from being colonised, through meditation, nature, boredom, digital detox, psychedelic experience — maps directly onto the surge we’re seeing in wellness tourism, particularly for nervous system regulation.
The numbers are striking:
The global wellness economy hit $6.8 trillion in 2024 — larger than tourism and IT combined
Wellness tourism alone reached $894 billion, growing 25–27% faster than general tourism over the past decade
Wellness travellers spend 41% more per international trip than the average tourist
The Global Wellness Summit named “Analog Wellness” a defining trend — a direct response to what they called “the online world’s manipulations and general brain-rotting” (their words, not mine)
The average worker receives 275 digital interruptions per day; global screen time averages nearly seven hours
Pinterest searches for “digital detox ideas” surged 72% in 2025
People aren’t just tired of screens. They’re looking for something screens can’t provide — effective ways to feel great again.
The shift from spa-as-amenity to consciousness-as-proposition is happening across specific properties, and the depth of what’s being offered is remarkable.
In our region alone:
RAKxa Integrative Wellness, Bangkok — Thailand’s first integrative medical retreat, partnered with Bumrungrad International Hospital. DNA diagnostics, hormonal rebalancing, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy across ten-plus doctor-led programmes.
Kamalaya Koh Samui — won Best Integrative Wellness Retreat at the 2025 Spa & Wellness Summit; offers an 8–21 night brain enhancement protocol.
Chiva-Som, Hua Hin — moved into genomic testing for personalised longevity pathways.
But it’s the properties rooted in cultural wisdom that are most compelling.
The Datai Langkawi offers a half-day Malay Wellness Journey through 10-million-year-old rainforest — Mandi Embun (bathing in morning dew), Senaman Tua (breathwork from traditional Malay practice), and Mandi Maul Hayat (immersion in quartz-rich creek water). Centuries-old practices, expressed through the specific landscape where they originated.
COMO Shambhala Estate, Ubud has spent 25 years developing a “living foods” philosophy — minimising cooking to maintain the life force of ingredients, sourcing locally with minimum delay from field to table. Every dish designed to support brain health and recovery.
Aman runs retreats with Buddhist monks — Geshe Yong Dong leading Tsa Lung breathwork from Tibetan tradition across properties in Phuket, Cambodia, and Bhutan.
Buahan, A Banyan Tree Escape, Ubud — no walls, no doors, zero-waste kitchen sourcing within one hour, alongside traditional Balinese medicine and spiritual healing with local priests.
Desa Potato Head, Bali — Asia’s first carbon-neutral hospitality company — has shifted explicitly from sustainability to regeneration: syntropic farms producing nearly 10,000 kilograms of produce since 2023, and over 74,000 meals donated to local communities.
These are not wellness programmes bolted onto hotels. They are integrated deep into identity.
A recent Preferred Hotels & Resorts study found that nearly 70% of luxury travellers say modern hotels have lost their soul to standardisation. The industry has started calling it the “beige-ification of travel.”
Roughly 75% won’t pay premium rates for accommodation that feels generic. Over 90% want experiences that immerse them in local history and culture.
There’s good logic in standardisation where it makes sense — it reduces operational risk, ensures consistency, makes scaling easier. But when wellness becomes another standardised programme from Bali to Barcelona, we lose precisely what makes these experiences meaningful.
The properties getting this right are those where the wellness offering is inseparable from the place. The Datai’s programme works because of that specific rainforest and that specific cultural tradition. COMO Shambhala’s food philosophy works because of those specific ingredients in that specific soil. NIHI Sumba — named world’s best hotel twice by Travel + Leisure — works because every villa, every experience, and nearly every staff member is from that island.
Pollan’s distinction between spotlight and lantern consciousness is useful here.
Drawing on psychologist Alison Gopnik’s research: adults develop narrowed, goal-directed “spotlight” attention — efficient, productive, focused. Children have 360-degree “lantern” awareness — open, absorptive, alive to everything.
The best hospitality experiences move us from spotlight to lantern. They slow us down. They widen what we notice. They return us to a state of receptive awareness that routine and screens have narrowed.
As a toddler-dad, I see this daily. It’s incredibly refreshing to be near.
But this works best when the environment is real. When the sensory experience is rooted in something authentic and specific. Beige doesn’t generate lantern consciousness. Place does.
We inspire and heal with depth of storytelling — with history, with unique experience. All of which ensures guests return, and encourage others to celebrate the land and the people as much as they learned to do on their trip.
These are the foundations of Regenerative Tourism.
Pollan’s career began with food. Everyone knows The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Then In Defense of Food — with its deceptively simple instruction:
eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Then psychedelics. Now consciousness.
His friend Gerald Marzorati identified the throughline early: Pollan’s writing has always been about the relationship between humans and plants. Every book grows out of the one before.
“Some sourdough starter you carry into the next one.” — Michael Pollan
If consciousness originates in feelings, and the most fundamental feelings are hunger and satiation, then eating is the most basic consciousness practice we have. What we eat, where it comes from, how it was grown, how it arrives on the plate — these aren’t peripheral to the consciousness conversation. They’re central to it.
Our industry feeds people and gives them safe places to sleep in beautiful places. That is the oldest thing we do. And if Pollan is right that consciousness starts in the body, then the food we serve isn’t separate from the transformative wellness experiences we’re building around it. It’s the foundation.
I’ve long believed tourism and hospitality are gateways to education. There is something in our programming that knows to sit around a table or a fire to share stories. To learn. To listen. To celebrate.
And I’ve often said: everyone is interested in how to make their own yoghurt or beer at home. Not so interested in laser physics.
The supply chain that produces the food → the ecosystem that supports the supply chain → the cultural knowledge that informs how it’s prepared → the guest whose body receives it and whose consciousness responds — hopefully sharing more stories of how they were moved.
All connected. All part of the same system.
Our industry has an extraordinary opportunity here.
Not to become wellness companies — most of us aren’t, and shouldn’t be. But to recognise that what we’ve always done well, when we do it well, is create the conditions for conscious experience. Real food. Real places. Real connection. Authentic experiences.
In a world where attention, emotion, and increasingly our sense of self are being competed for by companies with very different intentions — that matters more than it used to.
For now, I’d simply encourage anyone in hospitality to spend time with the Pollan conversations. Whatever you think about psychedelics, plant-forward eating, or philosophy — his argument about embodied experience is one our industry should hear.
Looking forward to what’s next.
— Andrew
Link to the promised Pollan × Klein interview here.
Andrew Cameron is the founder of Enzyme Consulting, a Singapore-based advisory practice working at the intersection of regenerative hospitality, systems thinking, and sustainable procurement.
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