Michael Pollan Quotes

For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.

Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.

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

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

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

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

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

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

Stop eating before you're full.

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

Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.

We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

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

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

When chopping onions, just chop onions.

It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.

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.

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

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

There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.

So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

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

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

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.

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.

Don't eat any foods you've ever seen advertised on television.

Eating is a political act.

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

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

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

The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.

We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.

You want to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you'll be really straight with them at all times.

Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved.

The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.

A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

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

For great many species today, fitness means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.

We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration.

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