Top 100 Michael Pollan Quotes
#1. But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
Michael Pollan
#2. 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.
Michael Pollan
#3. Umami ... is the quasi-secret heart and soul of almost every braise, stew, and soup.
Michael Pollan
#4. Two of the most nutritious plants in the world - lamb's quarters and purslane - are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.
Michael Pollan
#5. Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.
Michael Pollan
#6. My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.
Michael Pollan
#7. 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.
Michael Pollan
#8. The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.
Michael Pollan
#9. Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.
Michael Pollan
#10. Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.
Michael Pollan
#12. Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner?
Michael Pollan
#13. Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.
Michael Pollan
#14. I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.
Michael Pollan
#15. Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.
Michael Pollan
#17. 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
Michael Pollan
#18. Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associate d microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology - that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.
Michael Pollan
#19. What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence - a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.
Michael Pollan
#20. He showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "celebration.
Michael Pollan
#21. Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.
Michael Pollan
#22. A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.
Michael Pollan
#23. What memoir of childhood doesn't at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut lawn or a boxwood hedge, to leap the fence of years?
Michael Pollan
#24. [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.
Michael Pollan
#25. Forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.
Michael Pollan
#26. 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
Michael Pollan
#27. 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.
Michael Pollan
#28. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!
Michael Pollan
#29. Boiled food is life,' Levi-Strauss writes, 'roast food death.' He reports finding countless examples in the world's folklore of 'cauldrons of immortality,' but not a single example of a 'spit of immortality.
Michael Pollan
#30. 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.
Michael Pollan
#31. 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.
Michael Pollan
#32. 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.
Michael Pollan
#33. I'm very hopeful that we'll see some change in our food system. I don't know how far we'll go, or how quickly we'll get there, but there is no question that a significant percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with the food system.
Michael Pollan
#34. We're in the explanation business, and if the answers to the questions we explore got too simple, we'd be out of work.
Michael Pollan
#35. In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.
Michael Pollan
#36. The interesting thing I learned was that if you're really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmers and the best decisions for the environment-and that there is no contradiction there.
Michael Pollan
#37. The mysteries of germination and flowering and fruiting engaged me from an early age, and the fact that by planting and working an ordinary patch of dirt you could in a few months' time harvest things of taste and value was, for me, nature's most enduring astonishment.
Michael Pollan
#38. If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
Michael Pollan
#39. 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.
Michael Pollan
#40. Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.
Michael Pollan
#41. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks
sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
Michael Pollan
#42. The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.
Michael Pollan
#44. 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.
Michael Pollan
#47. There is another word for this extremist noticing - this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind - and that word, of course, is wonder.
Michael Pollan
#48. 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.
Michael Pollan
#49. 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.
Michael Pollan
#50. 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.
Michael Pollan
#51. Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.
Michael Pollan
#52. Rule No. 41. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
Michael Pollan
#53. The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.
Michael Pollan
#54. 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.
Michael Pollan
#55. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
Michael Pollan
#56. For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed ...
Michael Pollan
#57. 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.
Michael Pollan
#58. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. They have to get on a bus and take a long ride to get to a source of fresh produce.
Michael Pollan
#59. The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.
Michael Pollan
#60. That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.
Michael Pollan
#61. The greatest biodiversity of an species is typically found in the place where it first evolved
where nature first experimented white all the possibilities what an apple, or a potato or peach, could be.
Michael Pollan
#62. 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.
Michael Pollan
#63. It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly. Unitasking.
Michael Pollan
#64. The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.
Michael Pollan
#65. All the arguments about nutrition are really about what is the problem ingredient in the western diet. Is it the fat? Is it the lack of fiber? Is it the refined carbohydrates?But we don't have to worry about it. We just have to try to get off that diet to the extent we can.
Michael Pollan
#66. One of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. Because
Michael Pollan
#67. California's Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that - to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too.
Michael Pollan
#68. 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.
Michael Pollan
#69. At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.
Michael Pollan
#70. Johnny Appleseed was revered . he was ... an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
Michael Pollan
#71. So: Ask yourself not, Am I full ?
but, Is my hunger gone?
That moment will arrive several bites sooner.
Michael Pollan
#72. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born in 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. (An African American child's chances are two in five.)
Michael Pollan
#73. It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us. One
Michael Pollan
#74. 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?
Michael Pollan
#75. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.
Michael Pollan
#76. The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.
Michael Pollan
#77. 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?
Michael Pollan
#78. 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.
Michael Pollan
#79. Any food product that feels compelled to tell you it's natural
in all likelihood is not.
Michael Pollan
#80. The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal.
Michael Pollan
#81. People eating the western diet of heavily processed food, of lots of meat and added sugar and added fat, and very little whole grains and fruits and vegetables.Populations who eat that way have seriously high incidences of chronic diseases.
Michael Pollan
#82. Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.
Michael Pollan
#83. The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.
Michael Pollan
#84. What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?
Michael Pollan
#85. I still think we have a long way to go on rebuilding a culture of cooking. Everyday simple cooking.
Michael Pollan
#86. Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead.
Michael Pollan
#87. 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.
Michael Pollan
#88. I agree insofar as we eat too much meat. We're eating about 200 pounds per person per year. That's about 9 ounces a day. That's probably more than is good for us and it's certainly more than is good for the environment.
Michael Pollan
#89. We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are - the environment, your health, animal welfare - the answers are going to be different for every person.
Michael Pollan
#90. 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.
Michael Pollan
#93. 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.
Michael Pollan
#94. Farms produce a lot more than food; they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.
Michael Pollan
#95. 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.
Michael Pollan
#96. Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.
Michael Pollan
#97. 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.
Michael Pollan
#98. For as you go on, you'll be getting more calories, but not necessarily more pleasure.
Michael Pollan
#99. It's very important to get out, to do reporting. It's also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I think that's helped me, and I come at it as someone who sees nature wherever he looks, and that helps.
Michael Pollan
#100. The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.
Michael Pollan
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