Michael Pollan quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michael Pollan on Wise Famous Quotes.

All these activities are forms of adult play that also serve as ceremonial acts of remembering - who we are, where we came from, how nature works.

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.

The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead." This

Do all your eating at a table.

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

To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic? I

Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.

Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

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

Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.

Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.

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

The transformation which occurs in the cauldron is quintessential and wondrous, subtle and delicate. The mouth cannot express it in words.

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

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.

Our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows. -Martin Renner

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.

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

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

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

So: Ask yourself not, Am I full ?
but, Is my hunger gone?
That moment will arrive several bites sooner.

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

Suffering ... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country, ...

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

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

Shake the hand that feeds you.

In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same - mageiros - and the word shares an etymological root with "magic.

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

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.

But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

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

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

How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?

A good pot holds memories.

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

Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.

We're in the explanation business, and if the answers to the questions we explore got too simple, we'd be out of work.

One of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. Because

Lawns are a form of television

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.

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

Be the kind of person who takes supplements
then skip the supplements.

Johnny Appleseed was revered . he was ... an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).

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

I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who's too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.

Not that I'm against meat eating. But I think we're eating too much.

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.

Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.

Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.

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

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?

(Wes Jackson calls our species "homo the homogenizer.")

The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal.

The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it.

Food is a costly antidepressant.

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

Cooking meat over a fire is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men.

The banquet is in the first bite.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.

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

[Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process.

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

Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.

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

Corporations cook very differently from how people do.

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed ...

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1

I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.

As I've heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it's not YOUR time.

Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.

We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.

Memory is the enemy of wonder

People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

When eating sonewhere other than at a tablem stick to fruits and vegetables.

The grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.

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

The real food is not being advertised

In the end I'm still a writer. I'm still a journalist, and my first responsibility is to my readers. That's where I have to draw the line.

Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.

Writing is about music ... finding the music of a sentence ...

Leave something on your plate ... 'Better to go to waste than to waist

So that's us: processed corn, walking.

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

Umami ... is the quasi-secret heart and soul of almost every braise, stew, and soup.

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

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

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

(Americans spend less time cooking than people in any other nation, but the general downward trend is global.)

As fire's presence in our everyday lives has diminished, the social magnetism of the cook fire seems, if anything, to have only grown more powerful.

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

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

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