Michael Pollan Quotes

High-quality food is better for your health.

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

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

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

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.

When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

Nature abhors a garden.

Eat only until you're 4/5 full. An ancient Japanese injunction.

Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.

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.

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)

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

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.

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

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

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

[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.

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

Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others

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

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.

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.

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.

The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.

Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

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.

Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can't pronounce.

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

Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.

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

Why don't we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.

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

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

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

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.

The real food is not being advertised.

Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so.

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

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.

The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.

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.

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

At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.

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