Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan

"If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have."
43 Quotes
"If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have."
Michael Pollan
"French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way."
Michael Pollan
"A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet."
Michael Pollan
"People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue."
Michael Pollan
"The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them."
Michael Pollan
"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."
Michael Pollan
"In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn."
Michael Pollan
"My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it."
Michael Pollan
"In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a Mc Donald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn."
Michael Pollan
"At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind."
Michael Pollan
"Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal."
Michael Pollan
"Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before."
Michael Pollan
"Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand."
Michael Pollan
"Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved."
Michael Pollan
"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."
Michael Pollan
"Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature."
Michael Pollan
"As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection."
Michael Pollan
"Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment."
Michael Pollan
"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"
Michael Pollan
"When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we’re being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this is a fault of our own vocabulary. We don’t have a very good vocabulary to describe what others species do to us, because we think we’re the only species that really does anything."
Michael Pollan
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