Michael Pollan Quotes:

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.169, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Wall, Animal, Long, Meat Industry, Healthy Eating

I'm not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that's something we can all do more and do better.

Topics: Children, Thinking, Talking

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

Topics: Environment, Lawns, Totalitarianism, Totalitarian Regimes

One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.

source: - "Michael Pollan: Eating Is a Political Act". Interview with Mark Eisen, www.alternet.org. November 7, 2008.

Topics: Powerful, Issues, People

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.12, Penguin

Topics: Order, Healthy, Confusing, Slow Food, Eating Food

One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.

Topics: Ignorance, World, Eating

Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these

Topics: Health, Grandmother, Great Men, Healthy Living, Inspirational Health

Eat with consciousness. When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you're eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it is, it's enormously satisfying.

Topics: Appreciation, Consciousness, Eating

In 2008, a year of supposed 'food crisis', we grew enough food to feed 11 billion people. Most of it was not eaten by humans as food, however.

Topics: Years, People, Enough

I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.

Topics: Writing, Trying, Firsts, Carnivores

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.6, Penguin

Topics: Plant, Made

I try very hard to tell stories and not lecture. I try to approach things as an amateur and not an expert, so that when I'm doing something, I'm starting out in a place a lot like where my readers start out - which is to say, naïve.

Topics: Trying, Experts, Stories

It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

Topics: Fitness, Car, Window, Health And Nutrition, Health Nutrition

In a way, the more techniques you apply, the less important the ingredients are. It shouldn't be that way, but you can get away with it. But if you're highlighting this astounding artichoke, it's got to be an astounding artichoke.

Topics: Important, Way, Ingredients, Highlighting, Artichokes

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.

Topics: Healing, Cake, Chocolate

If you're going to change the food system, there is a lot that you, the consumer, can do on your own; but in the end, it will be very important to make changes at the national level.

Topics: Important, Levels, Making Changes

Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.

source: - "Fresh". Documentary, News, www.imdb.com. 2009.

Topics: Real, Cost, Subsidies, Cheap Food

People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.

source: - Source: leitesculinaria.com

Topics: Agriculture, Profound, People

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.48, Penguin

Topics: Doctors, Pay, Grocers

It's very important to get out, to do reporting. It's also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I think that's helped me, and I come at it as someone who sees nature wherever he looks, and that helps.

Topics: Thinking, Interesting, Important

Most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation.

Topics: Important, Corporations, Cooks

One of the skills of a journalist, though, is to find people who can teach him what he needs to know. So instead of taking courses, I've been very lucky in that I found teachers - scientists, especially - who were willing to teach me what I needed to know, whether it was about genetically modified crops or how photosynthesis works, and so on. I just find my teachers and don't have to pay for my education.

Topics: Teacher, Skills, People, Photosynthesis, Genetically Modified

For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.

Topics: Ordinary, Forget, Moments

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Topics: Food, Too Much, Healthy Eating

Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.

Topics: Middle, Periphery, Shops

There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.60, Penguin

Topics: Long, Special, Occasions, Special Occasion

We could have a greener economy, even a greener consumer economy by changing the rules - whether it's by taxing carbon or trading carbon, I'm not sure what - but in the end there's just a fundamental problem with the sheer amount we're consuming.

Topics: Fundamentals, Problem, Economy

[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.

Topics: Government, Accountability, Regulation, Government Regulation

I still think we have a long way to go on rebuilding a culture of cooking. Everyday simple cooking.

Topics: Simple, Thinking, Long, Long Way To Go

When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.

Topics: Taste, Chickens

It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.

Topics: Cooking, Important, Sugar

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

Topics: Writing, Pieces, Sides, Genetically Modified, Genetically Modified Food

I really do think that cooking is very important. It's really important for the farmers because it means you're going to be buying real food and not processed food, so that means the farmers will capture more of your food dollar.

Topics: Real, Mean, Thinking, Processed Food, Real Food

A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

Topics: Struggle, Animal, Law, Moral Struggle

People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it's a really good idea if you can exert the kind of discipline needed.

Topics: Snacks, Ideas, People, Eating A Lot

I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.

Topics: Discovery, Answers, Facts

The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.

source: - Source: indianapublicmedia.org

Topics: Two, Care, Patient, Food Industry

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

Topics: Food, Home, Stories

People eating the western diet of heavily processed food, of lots of meat and added sugar and added fat, and very little whole grains and fruits and vegetables.Populations who eat that way have seriously high incidences of chronic diseases.

Topics: Vegetables, People, Population, Incidence, Processed Food

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

Topics: Food, Garden, Might

There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.

Topics: Certain

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

source: - Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.20, Penguin

Topics: Selfish, Practice, People

One of the reasons we eat fast food is that we don't have to cook fast food. We are out-sourcing cooking to corporations, they tend to cook with far too much salt, fat, and sugar.

Topics: Cooking, Sugar, Corporations

Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care.

Topics: Thinking, Numbers, Care, Flipped

If you're a politician it's very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.

Topics: Order, Growth, Fundamentals, Economic Order

Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.

Topics: Growing, Ingredients, States

The longer I've looked at these questions, of the American diet and the public health crisis that we face because of that diet, the more I've come to the conclusion that the collapse of cooking is a big part of the problem.

Topics: Cooking, Faces, Problem, American Diet

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

Topics: Animal, Hunting, Views, Killing It

I've always been interested in plants because I'm a gardener, so I have a basic understanding of botany and things like that, but it's all self-taught.

Topics: Self, Understanding, Taught, Botany, Self Taught

Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Topics: Long, Want, Junk

High-quality food is better for your health.

Topics: Quality

I have no scientific training at all. I was an English major in school. Everything I learned about science I've learned as a journalist would, finding out what I needed to know.

Topics: School, Training, English Major

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

Topics: Issues, People, Environmental, Slow Food, Environmental Issues

Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.

Topics: Vegetables, Meat, Energy, Solar Energy, Eating Meat

Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.

Topics: Food, Agriculture, Division, Organic Agriculture

Students are very engaged by the issues, and it's not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.

Topics: Children, Issues, Choices, Food Choices

Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup

Topics: Numbers, Ingredients, Syrup, Corn Syrup

I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear.

Topics: Teacher, Writing, Class

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

Topics: Garden, Diversity, Conformity

I realize that at a certain point if we're going to change our food system, it's going to be the next generation that's going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.

Topics: Animal, Issues, Impact

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.

Topics: Garden, Tree, Wagers, Planters, Tree Planting

There are fundamental tensions between the biological reality of the planet and the economic reality. To some extent you can adapt the economy, create a new set of rules and incentives to send it down a better track, but finally people in the first world are going to have to consume a whole lot less.

Topics: Reality, Track, People

Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.

Topics: Family, Food, Community, Nourishment

Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

source: - Source: www.omnivoracious.com

Topics: People, Pleasure

It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.

source: - "Michael Moss, Michael Pollan Go Food Shopping, Make Lunch Together", www.huffingtonpost.com. May 1, 2013.

Topics: Vegetables, Talking, Waiting

The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.

Topics: Three, World, Vote

Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.

source: - Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.1, Penguin

Topics: Cooking, Important, Scratches

Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.101, Penguin

Topics: Rotting, Real Food, Incapable

Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.

source: - Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.118, Penguin

Topics: Missing, Recipes, Ingredients

People say they don't have time to cook, yet in the last few years we have found an extra two hours a day for the internet.

Topics: Years, Two, People

Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.11, Penguin

Topics: Television

We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

Topics: Stories, Said, Courses

If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.12, Penguin

Topics: Strong, Want, Claims

A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.

source: - "Michael Pollan’s ‘Hummer-Driving Vegan’ Claim Debunked" by Kyle Cassidy, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

Topics: Carbon Footprint, Beef, Vegan, Prius

You are what what you eat eats.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.112, Penguin

Topics: Food, Healthy Eating, Eating, Real Food

If people eat healthy food, they will save enough to compensate for the food price being healthier and spending less on healthcare.

source: - Source: www.theguardian.com

Topics: People, Healthy, Healthcare, Spending Less, Healthy Food

Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.

Topics: Bread

One surprise is how deeply the food system is implicated in climate change. I don't think that has really been on people's radar until very recently. 25 to 33 percent of climate change gases can be traced to the food system. I was also surprised that those diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us - heart disease, cancer, diabetes - were virtually unknown 150 years ago, before we began eating this way.

source: - "Michael Pollan Fixes Dinner". Interview With Clara Jeffery, www.motherjones.com. March/April 2009.

Topics: Cancer, Heart, Thinking

We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.9, Bloomsbury Publishing

Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.151, Penguin

Topics: Practice, Principles, Population, Okinawa

Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.51, Penguin

Topics: Meals, Enjoy

Why don't we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.

Topics: Fun, Attention, Pay, Auto Mechanic, Babysitter

Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.

Topics: Quality, Poor, Wealthy, High Quality

Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.125, Penguin

Topics: Car, Doe, Fuel

I think that the American diet is a very large part of the reason we're spending 2.3 trillion dollar per year on health care in this country. 75% of that money goes to treat chronic diseases, preventable chronic diseases, most of those are linked to diet.

source: - Source: indianapublicmedia.org

Topics: Country, Thinking, Years, American Diet

Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It's the single most important thing you can do for your health.

Topics: Cooking, Important, Might, Public Health

Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.18, Penguin

Topics: Made, Caps

What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.11, Penguin

Topics: Civilization, People, Sick, Extraordinary Achievement

The real food is not being advertised.

source: - "Michael Pollan:'Don't Buy Any Food You've Ever Seen Advertised'". Interview with Amy Goodman, www.alternet.org. May 14, 2009.

Topics: Real, Real Food

If you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't be eating it.

Topics: Eating, Ifs

Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

source: - "Unhappy Meals". www.nytimes.com. January 28, 2007.

Topics: Cereal, Lucky Charms, Puff, Cocoa, Whole Grains

... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Profound, Mind, Culture, Mind And Body

The interesting thing I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmers and the best decisions for the environment-and that there is no contradiction there.

Topics: Interesting, Decision, Environment

All the arguments about nutrition are really about what is the problem ingredient in the western diet. Is it the fat? Is it the lack of fiber? Is it the refined carbohydrates?But we don't have to worry about it. We just have to try to get off that diet to the extent we can.

source: - Source: indianapublicmedia.org

Topics: Worry, Trying, Fiber, Carbohydrates

America ships tons of sugar cookies to Denmark and Denmark ships tons of sugar cookies to America. Wouldn't it be more efficient just to swap recipes?

Topics: America, Environmental, Sugar Cookies

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not

source: - "Food Chains, Dead Zones, and Licensed Journalism". Interview with Russell Schoch, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2005.

Topics: Thinking, Objectivity, Perfect

There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig - an animal easily as intelligent as a dog - that becomes the Christmas ham.

source: - "An Animal's Place" by Michael Pollan, www.nytimes.com. November 10, 2002.

Topics: Dog, Intelligent, Compassion, Miserable Life, Schizoid

When chopping onions, just chop onions.

source: - "Michael Pollan Gets Cooked". Interview with Tanya Steel, www.epicurious.com.

Topics: Onions, Chopping

Farms produce a lot more than food; they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.133, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Community, Landscape, Kind

The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.116, Penguin

Topics: Block, Vitamins And Minerals, Body, Soy, Staples

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.61, Penguin

Topics: Healing, Cake, Chocolate, Chocolate Cake

Stop eating before you're full.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.50, Penguin

Topics: Eating

Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.206, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Cost, Tables, Matter

Shake the hand that feeds you.

source: - "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto". Book by Michael Pollan, 2008.

Topics: Food, Hands, Healthy Eating

We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

source: - Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.115, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Problem, Solutions

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.73, Penguin

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Fitness

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

source: - "Don't give up". www.theguardian.com. June 5, 2008.

Topics: Zero, Garden, Thinking, Planting A Garden, Great Garden

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Technology, Animal, Diversity, Mono, Food Chain

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

source: - "Michael Pollan's "Botany of Desire"". "The PBS NewsHour" with Gwen Ifill, www.pbs.org. June 28, 2001.

Topics: Apples, Seeds

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

source: - Michael Pollan (2001). “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, p.178, Random House

Topics: Forget, Operations, Underrated

One of the problems is that the US government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health.

Topics: Block, Distance, Mean, Inner City, Organic Food

You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.82, Penguin

Topics: Thinking, Vegetables, Oil, Soy, Sweeteners

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.59, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Country, Syrup, Healthy Eating

Eat only until you're 4/5 full. An ancient Japanese injunction.

source: - Source: www.omnivoracious.com

Topics: Ancient

Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.98, Penguin

Topics: Land, People, Social, Reaching Back

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.122, Penguin

Topics: Vegetables, Soybeans, Corn, Sweeteners

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.156, Penguin

Topics: Food, Animal, Community, Real Food

Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.115, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Pests, Disease, Way

For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.206, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Grace, Needs, World

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.39, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Happy Life, Thinking, Unhappy, Unhappy Life

Any food product that feels compelled to tell you it’s natural in all likelihood is not.

Topics: Natural, Feels, Compelled

The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat.

source: - Source: www.motherjones.com

Topics: Eggs, Agriculture, Needs, Eggs In One Basket

While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187

Topics: Food, Phones, Two, Broadband

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

source: - "Michael Pollan's 'Botany of Desire'". "PBS NewsHour" with Gwen Ifill, www.pbs.org. June 28, 2001.

Topics: Relationship, Mean, World, Modification

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life-the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids-is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.15, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Taken, Mean, Simple, Organic Compounds, Carbohydrates

Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so.

source: - "In Defense of Food: Author, Journalist Michael Pollan on Nutrition, Food Science and the American Diet". Interview with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. February 13, 2008.

Topics: Thinking, Interesting, Want

The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.

source: - Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.192, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Doe, Recognition, Mystery

This, for many people, is what's most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.182, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Hunting, People, Animal Rights

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

source: - Michael Pollan (2001). “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, p.20, Random House

Topics: Past, Garden, Century

If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, Penguin

Topics: Apples, Hungry, Enough

The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.

Topics: Environment, Passing, Passings, Passing Through

The banquet is in the first bite.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.111, Penguin

Topics: Firsts, Banquets, Bites

If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.

Topics: Cooking, Calories, Ifs

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.43, Penguin

Topics: Greek

Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.113, Penguin

Topics: Blow, Corn Syrup, Differences, Syrup, Oreos

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.37, Penguin

Topics: Campaigns, Unions, Tests

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.16, Penguin

Topics: Long, Community, Together

But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.86, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Challenges

Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

source: - Michael Pollan (2001). “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, p.44, Random House

Topics: Sweet, Wind, Apples, Cider, Apple Cider

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

source: - Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.112, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Weed, Men, Firsts

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

source: - "The Cheapest Calories Make You the Fattest: A food-chain journalist looks for stories in our meals". Interview with Helen Wagenvoord, michaelpollan.com. September 30, 2004.

Topics: Land, Energy, Soybeans

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.

Topics: Appreciation, Mistake, Ignorance, Pesticides, Nitrogen

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Topics: Animal, Circles, People

The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.

Topics: Agriculture, Subsidies, Poverty, Correlation

We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.

source: - "Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma". Interview with Anne E. McBride, leitesculinaria.com. March 20, 2007.

Topics: Priorities, Different, Ethical

Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.

Topics: Healthy, Toxic, Needs, Catching Up

It's been a mystery to me and a disappointment why conversation about health care reform hasn't turned more attention to the subject of food.

source: - Source: indianapublicmedia.org

Topics: Disappointment, Reform, Attention, Health Care Reform

...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.11, Penguin

Topics: Country, Years, Three, Preventing

Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others

source: - Michael Pollan (2013). “A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder”, p.9, Random House

Topics: Self, Shapes, Size, Estimation

Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.

Topics: Real, Corn Syrup, Oil, Syrup, Real Food

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

Topics: Lines, Today, Eating, Good Place

We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are - the environment, your health, animal welfare - the answers are going to be different for every person.

Topics: Animal, People, Giving

Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.

Topics: Mom, Culture, Fancy

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

source: - Michael Pollan (2001). “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, p.18, Random House

Topics: Beautiful, Design, Miracle, Design In Nature

There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.

Topics: Sacrifice, Eating Well, Pleasure

My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.

Topics: Motivated, Good Food, More Money

When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

Topics: Eye, Cooking, Alive, Nutrients

Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associate d microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology - that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.

Topics: Community, Groups, Individual, Landmarks, Human Health

Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can't pronounce.

source: - Source: www.omnivoracious.com

Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.48, Penguin

Topics: America, Income, Citizens

Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.

source: - Source: indianapublicmedia.org

Topics: Impact, America, Meat, Soy, South America

Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.205, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Way, Eating, Knows

I think that there's some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don't have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television-we've turned cooking into a spectator sport. ...My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table.

Topics: Sports, Nice, Thinking, Very Nice, Cooking Shows

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: Young Readers Edition”, p.156, Penguin

Topics: Way, Killing, Chickens

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.

Topics: Animal, Meat, Eating, Propositions

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.43, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Beef, Research, Growing

Nature abhors a garden.

source: - "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World". Book by Michael Pollan, www.nytimes.com. 2001.

Topics: Garden, Gardening

But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Topics: Lying, Animal, Hair, Sacrilege, Isotopes

The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves.

Topics: Animal, Ninety Nine, Oil, Slaughterhouses

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.

Topics: Land, Development, Way

Don't eat any foods you've ever seen advertised on television.

Topics: Television

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

Topics: Demand, Sensitive, Consumers, Food Industry

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.183, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Dream, Reality, Denial, Denial Of Reality

Eating is a political act.

Topics: Political, Eating, Eco

...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.

source: - Michael Pollan (2006). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, p.180, Penguin

Topics: Cooking, Energy, East, Lettuce

Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

source: - "Why Bother?". www.nytimes.com. April 22, 2008.

Topics: Powerful, Garden, Carbon Footprint, Planting A Garden

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

Topics: Writing, Found, Findings

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.9, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Nature, Verbs, Passive

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.

Topics: Moving, Garden, Ideas, Indomitable

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

Topics: Thinking, Ideas, People, Healthy Eating, Food Choices

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

Topics: Leader, Agendas, Way

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.

Topics: Progress, Culture, Landscape

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

source: - Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.244, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Garden, Space, Twists, Privileged

One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.

source: - Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.195, Penguin

Topics: Vegetables, Eating, Illness

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.14, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Corn Syrup, Nuggets, Soft Drinks, Syrup, Supermarkets

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

source: - "Food Chains, Dead Zones, and Licensed Journalism". Interview with Russell Schoch, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2005.

Topics: Writing, Atheism, Littles

Those externalized costs have always included labor. It is only the decline over time of the minimum wage in real dollars that's made the fast food industry possible, along with feedlot agriculture, pharmaceuticals on the farm, pesticides and regulatory forbearance. All these things are part of the answer to the question: Why is that crap so cheap? Our food is dishonestly priced. One of the ways in which it's dishonestly priced is the fact that people are not paid a living wage to process it, to serve it, to grow it, to slaughter it.

Topics: Real, Agriculture, People, Pesticides, Food Industry

Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.90, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Clouds, White, Bird, White Clouds

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

source: - Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.17, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Garden, Sight, Vegetables, Slender, Clutch

California’s Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that - to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too.

source: - "Vote for the Dinner Party". www.nytimes.com. October 10, 2012.

Topics: California, Labels, Genetically Modified

Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost. If that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal.

Topics: Simple, Reality, Land, Wholesome Food

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe.

source: - Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.254, Penguin

Topics: Rolling, Flavor, Lawns, Lodges, Microbes

At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: Land, Body, Soil, Food Chain

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.

source: - Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.17, Penguin

Topics: Editors, Careers, Tree, Newspaper Editors, Nutritionist

For though we may be the Earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role - that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

source: - Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.115, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Topics: Weed, Roles, Earth

Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.

source: - Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.149, Bloomsbury Publishing

Topics: People, Tears, Tissues

Even people who like the kind of food on offer, are coming to recognize that eating from this food chain is not conducive to good health.

source: - Source: indianapublicmedia.org

Topics: People, Kind, Eating, Food Chain

The food system is a very complex beast. There are people who are going to get their food at Wal-Mart or at Safeway; they're not going to the farmers' market. Those people need choices too.

source: - "Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma". Interview with Anne E. McBride, leitesculinaria.com. March 20, 2007.

Topics: People, Choices, Needs, Farmers Markets

Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.

source: - Source: indianapublicmedia.org

Topics: Challenges, Environmental, Meat, Environmental Challenges

The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.

source: - Source: www.motherjones.com

Topics: Oil, Soy, Fast Food