Michael Pollan famous 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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Wall #Animal #Long

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Children #Thinking #Talking

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
-- Michael Pollan

#Environment #Lawns

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Order #Healthy #Confusing

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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
-- Michael Pollan

#Health #Grandmother #Great Men

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Writing #Trying #Firsts

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

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Trying #Experts #Stories

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

#Fitness #Car #Window

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Important #Way #Ingredients

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Real #Cost #Subsidies

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Agriculture #Profound #People

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Thinking #Interesting #Important

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

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Teacher #Skills #People

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Ordinary #Forget #Moments

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
-- Michael Pollan

#Food #Too Much #Healthy Eating

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

#Middle #Periphery #Shops

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

#Long #Special #Occasions

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Government #Accountability #Regulation

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

#Simple #Thinking #Long

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

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Writing #Pieces #Sides

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Real #Mean #Thinking

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Struggle #Animal #Law

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Snacks #Ideas #People

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Two #Care #Patient

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

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Vegetables #People #Population

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

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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?
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Thinking #Numbers #Care

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Order #Growth #Fundamentals

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

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Cooking #Faces #Problem

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

#Animal #Hunting #Views

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Self #Understanding #Taught

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

#Long #Want #Junk

High-quality food is better for your health.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#School #Training

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

#Issues #People #Environmental

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Vegetables #Meat #Energy

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

#Food #Agriculture #Division

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

#Children #Issues #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
-- Michael Pollan

#Numbers #Ingredients #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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Garden #Tree #Wagers

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.
-- Michael Pollan

#Reality #Track #People