Top 100 Pollan's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.
Michael Pollan
#4. As I've heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it's not YOUR time.
Michael Pollan
#5. It's not that I'm necessarily looking for things that are so dark and emotional. But if I see something where the character goes through enormous change, it's very appealing to play all those levels, and that is probably going to involve some dark moments.
Tracy Pollan
#6. 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
#7. But that's the challenge
to change the system more than it changes you.
Michael Pollan
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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.
Michael Pollan
#11. 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
#12. I get so much out of being married and raising my kids - that's really important to me.
Tracy Pollan
#13. Possibly none at all: it's a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn't necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge.
Michael Pollan
#14. 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
#15. The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style.
Michael Pollan
#16. Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.
Michael Pollan
#17. Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.
Michael Pollan
#19. I wasn't a very good waitress, always spilling things on people and forgetting things. I once spilled ashes all over Mike Wallace's table.
Tracy Pollan
#20. 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
#21. I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear.
Michael Pollan
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
Michael Pollan
#26. My family absolutely comes first, and I don't mean that in a Pollyanna way. It's the focus of my life because it's what makes me happy.
Tracy Pollan
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I'm not a writer, but I'm very good at editing. That's my specialty. I can read something and tell you everything that's wrong with it and what's great about it and what needs to change, but it's hard for me to organize my thoughts.
Tracy Pollan
#32. There's nothing really quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking all you want, but you will never get it back.
Michael Pollan
#33. 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
#34. Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.
Michael Pollan
#35. Worrying won't prevent the worst outcome. I've learned to live in the moment, which is not my natural tendency. I've always thought that if I worried about something enough, it wouldn't happen. I forgot to worry about Parkinson's.
Tracy Pollan
#36. I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.
Michael Pollan
#38. 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.
Michael Pollan
#39. 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
#40. This, for many people, is what's most offensive about hunting - to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing
Michael Pollan
#41. 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
#42. There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.
Michael Pollan
#43. It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.
Michael Pollan
#44. In a way, the more techniques you apply, the less important the ingredients are. It shouldn't be that way, but you can get away with it. But if you're highlighting this astounding artichoke, it's got to be an astounding artichoke.
Michael Pollan
#45. Eat with consciousness. When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you're eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it is, it's enormously satisfying.
Michael Pollan
#46. It's astonishing, actually, how much anger an animal's assault on your garden can incite.
Michael Pollan
#47. Any food product that feels compelled to tell you it's natural
in all likelihood is not.
Michael Pollan
#48. 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
#49. Because of diabetes and all the other health problems that accompany obesity, today's children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The
Michael Pollan
#50. 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
#51. 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.
Michael Pollan
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. [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
#55. The only one I have any trust in is storytelling - there's a couple I have a lot of trust in.
Michael Pollan
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.
Michael Pollan
#59. 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
#60. The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.
Michael Pollan
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
Michael Pollan
#65. S policy: "no snacks, no seconds, no sweets - except on days that begin with the letter S.
Michael Pollan
#66. Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.
Michael Pollan
#67. People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.
Michael Pollan
#68. 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
#69. But don't take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
Michael Pollan
#70. A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.
Michael Pollan
#71. 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
#72. How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?
Michael Pollan
#73. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.
Michael Pollan
#74. 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
#75. We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.
Michael Pollan
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. When something's got to give, family always wins. I couldn't live with myself if it was the other way.
Tracy Pollan
#79. How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say
Michael Pollan
#80. I'm very grounded - that's how I would put it. If you met my mother, you'd probably say the same thing about her. I had a very sane upbringing, though some very insane things happened.
Tracy Pollan
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.
Michael Pollan
#84. [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
#85. We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.
Michael Pollan
#86. 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
#87. It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) .
Michael Pollan
#88. The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.
Michael Pollan
#89. Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life "so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again." It is the brain's own drug for coping with the human condition.
Michael Pollan
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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.
Michael Pollan
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. There's an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it's self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It's not a tool to understand myself.
Michael Pollan
#98. Madison, Deborah. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Nabhan,
Michael Pollan
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
