Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands... Relations are what matter most."
52 Quotes
"More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands... Relations are what matter most."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don’t object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don’t want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"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."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"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."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
". . . .how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"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."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken Mc Nuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"But 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."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
"A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country"
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
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