Top 100 Michael Pollan Food Quotes
#1. 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
#2. My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.
Michael Pollan
#3. Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.
Michael Pollan
#4. All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.
Michael Pollan
#5. Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
Michael Pollan
#6. Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.
Michael Pollan
#7. In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
Bee Wilson
#9. 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
#10. Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these
Michael Pollan
#11. 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.
Michael Pollan
#12. 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.
Michael Pollan
#13. I really do think that cooking is very important. It's really important for the farmers because it means you're going to be buying real food and not processed food, so that means the farmers will capture more of your food dollar.
Michael Pollan
#14. So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.
Michael Pollan
#15. 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
#16. 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.
Michael Pollan
#17. As the EPA sees it, Bt has always been a safe pesticide, the potato has always been a safe food, so put the two together and you've got something that should be safe both to eat and to kill bugs with.
Michael Pollan
#18. I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who's too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.
Michael Pollan
#19. It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
Michael Pollan
#20. If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.
Michael Pollan
#21. My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.
Michael Pollan
#22. Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)
Michael Pollan
#23. It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease].
Michael Pollan
#25. 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
#26. Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
Michael Pollan
#27. Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.
Michael Pollan
#28. At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.
Michael Pollan
#29. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.
Michael Pollan
#30. Students are very engaged by the issues, and it's not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.
Michael Pollan
#31. We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.
Michael Pollan
#32. I realize that at a certain point if we're going to change our food system, it's going to be the next generation that's going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.
Michael Pollan
#33. People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.
Michael Pollan
#34. 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
#35. But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.
Michael Pollan
#36. Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).
Michael Pollan
#37. If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat
Michael Pollan
#38. We spend a remarkably small, shamefully small, percentage of our income on food. We manage to spend money on lots of other things. All up and down the social ladder you find people with plenty of money for cell phones, home entertainment systems, all other forms of entertainment.
Michael Pollan
#39. The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.
Michael Pollan
#40. 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.
Michael Pollan
#42. 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
#43. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
Michael Pollan
#44. Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.
Michael Pollan
#45. 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.
Michael Pollan
#46. 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
#47. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize these four crops - five altogether, but one is cotton - and these are the building blocks of fast food. One of the ways you democratize healthy food is you support healthy food.
Michael Pollan
#48. How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein
Michael Pollan
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.
Michael Pollan
#52. 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
#53. 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.
Michael Pollan
#54. 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.
Michael Pollan
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.
Michael Pollan
#58. Suffering ... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
Michael Pollan
#59. 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
#60. [From a typical McDonald's meal] this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%).
Michael Pollan
#61. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?
Michael Pollan
#62. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
Michael Pollan
#63. Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.
Michael Pollan
#64. For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.
Michael Pollan
#65. A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country
Michael Pollan
#66. A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
Michael Pollan
#67. 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.
Michael Pollan
#68. There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.
Michael Pollan
#69. Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.
Michael Pollan
#70. In fact, just heading toward veganism lifts a not insignificant burden from the earth. According to food pundit Michael Pollan, who's not a vegetarian, if everybody did even "Meatless Monday," it would be the environmental equivalent of taking 20 million midsize cars off the road.
Victoria Moran
#71. 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
#72. 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.
Michael Pollan
#73. (Sir Albert)Howard put it this way:Artificial manures (synthetic fertilizers)lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.
Michael Pollan
#74. 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
#75. Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.
Michael Pollan
#76. By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle
Michael Pollan
#77. The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.
Michael Pollan
#78. Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.
Michael Pollan
#79. [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.
Michael Pollan
#80. It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) .
Michael Pollan
#81. What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.
Michael Pollan
#82. 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.
Michael Pollan
#83. You are what you eat is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.
Michael Pollan
#85. The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's ... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.
Michael Pollan
#86. The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce - doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
Michael Pollan
#87. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring - to the carelessness of both producers and consumers.
Michael Pollan
#88. 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
#89. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
Michael Pollan
#90. Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.
Michael Pollan
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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.
Michael Pollan
#95. 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
#97. 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.
Michael Pollan
#98. [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
#99. Food processing began as a way to extend the shelf life of food by protecting it from these competitors. This is often accomplished by making the food less appealing to them, by removing nutrients from it
Michael Pollan
#100. Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food,
Michael Pollan
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