Michael Pollan Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

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.

Shake the hand that feeds you.

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

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?

... 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.

You are what what you eat eats.

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

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.

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

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

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

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

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

The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.

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

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.

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

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

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

Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.

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

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

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

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?

The banquet is in the first bite.

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

The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.

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.

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.

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.

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

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

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