Top 100 Pollan Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.
A. J. Jacobs
#3. 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
#4. Michael Pollan is a champion. In all ways. A man of great integrity, humor, and common sense and kindness.
Maira Kalman
#5. Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.
Michael Pollan
#6. 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
#7. We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.
Michael Pollan
#8. 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.
Michael Pollan
#9. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.
Michael Pollan
#10. How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?
Michael Pollan
#11. The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet.
Michael Pollan
#12. A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.
Michael Pollan
#13. But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
Michael Pollan
#14. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well.
Michael Pollan
#15. People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.
Michael Pollan
#16. Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.
Michael Pollan
#17. 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
#18. The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
Michael Pollan
#19. Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.
Michael Pollan
#20. When eating sonewhere other than at a tablem stick to fruits and vegetables.
Michael Pollan
#21. Umami ... is the quasi-secret heart and soul of almost every braise, stew, and soup.
Michael Pollan
#22. If you're a politician it's very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.
Michael Pollan
#23. It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.
Michael Pollan
#24. 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
#25. (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
#27. 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
#28. Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.
Michael Pollan
#29. Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or,
Michael Pollan
#30. My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.
Michael Pollan
#31. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.
Michael Pollan
#32. If you walk five blocks north from the wholefoods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight way, you'll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few homeless people.
Michael Pollan
#33. Today promised not to be about the ecstasy of life on a farm. Today was the day we were "processing" broilers or, to abandon euphemism, killing chickens.
Michael Pollan
#34. 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
#35. Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than two hundred years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650 - very promising, and very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them operate on you? I think I'll wait awhile.
Michael Pollan
#37. The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.
Michael Pollan
#38. Think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.
Michael Pollan
#39. Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.
Michael Pollan
#40. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction.
Michael Pollan
#41. Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.
Michael Pollan
#42. There's something magical that happens when people eat from the same pot. The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.
Michael Pollan
#43. Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.
Michael Pollan
#45. Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.
Michael Pollan
#46. 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
#48. 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
#49. I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.
Michael Pollan
#50. 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.
Michael Pollan
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Michael Pollan
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.
Michael Pollan
#57. The only one I have any trust in is storytelling - there's a couple I have a lot of trust in.
Michael Pollan
#58. Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
Michael Pollan
#59. 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
#60. We used to eat economically. One of the things that happened is that we lost the cultural skills that used to allow people to eat well cheaply. For example making three or four meals from a chicken, rather than buying chicken breasts.
Michael Pollan
#61. Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.
Michael Pollan
#62. Happiness is definitely a priority in our household. That the kids are happy and everybody is comfortable. Self-esteem is very important.
Tracy Pollan
#63. 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
#64. The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.
Michael Pollan
#65. I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.
Michael Pollan
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a plain old onion.
Michael Pollan
#70. [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
#72. James Patterson has a way with female characters. He understands women in a way that a lot of male writers don't.
Tracy Pollan
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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.
Michael Pollan
#76. 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
#77. The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.
Michael Pollan
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. We could have a greener economy, even a greener consumer economy by changing the rules - whether it's by taxing carbon or trading carbon, I'm not sure what - but in the end there's just a fundamental problem with the sheer amount we're consuming.
Michael Pollan
#83. S policy: "no snacks, no seconds, no sweets - except on days that begin with the letter S.
Michael Pollan
#84. If you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't be eating it.
Michael Pollan
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture.
Michael Pollan
#88. 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.
Michael Pollan
#89. A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space
a place not just set apart but reverberant
and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Michael Pollan
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Madison, Deborah. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Nabhan,
Michael Pollan
#93. Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food,
Michael Pollan
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. [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
#97. Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.
Michael Pollan
#98. 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
#99. Forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.
Michael Pollan
#100. You have just dined," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." The
Michael Pollan
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