Michael Pollan Quotes

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.

Do all your eating at a table.

Corporations cook very differently from how people do.

...think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.

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

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

People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.

To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

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

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.

Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.

Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food.

Lawns are a form of television

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

I'm kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.

The only one I have any trust in is storytelling - there's a couple I have a lot of trust in.

I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.

There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.

I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in this country and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.

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

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.

Pay more, eat less. Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.

Avoid food products that make health claims. at meals and eat them only at tables. And no, a desk is not a table.

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.

My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices.

Even people who like the kind of food on offer, are coming to recognize that eating from this food chain is not conducive to good health.

The first step towards solving the omnivore's dilemma is knowledge: eating with full consciousness. When that happens, I have a lot of confidence that people will make good choices.

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.

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.

Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.

You have to draw lines between being a journalist and an activist.

My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.

Memory is the enemy of wonder

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

It's brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.

The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.

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

Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.

Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.

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

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

As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor

Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]