Pollan Quotes & Sayings

Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal - unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of "manufacturing a controlled substance." Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge. — Michael Pollan

Immersed this spring in research for this chapter, I was sorely tempted to plant one of the hybrid cannabis seeds I'd seen for sale in Amsterdam. I immediately thought better of it, however. So I planted lots of opium poppies instead. I hasten to add that I've no plans to do anything with my poppies except admire them - first their fleeting tissue-paper blooms, then their swelling blue-green seedpods, fat with milky alkaloid. (Unless, of course, simply walking among the poppies is enough to have an effect, as it was for Dorothy in Oz.) — Michael Pollan

The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal. — Michael Pollan

The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth. — Michael Pollan

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

One of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. Because — Michael Pollan

Think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees. — Michael Pollan

[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

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

We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration. — Michael Pollan

The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics. — Michael Pollan

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

We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too. — Michael Pollan

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

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

The grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief. — Michael Pollan

The issue of snacking is complicated. In principle, "grazing" is probably a good idea. It would even out the insulin spikes and things like that from eating large meals. The problem is it makes it harder for people to control the amount they're eating. — Michael Pollan

Most recently, as the medical value of marijuana has been rediscovered, medicine has been searching for ways to "pharmaceuticalize" the plant - find a way to harness its easily accessible benefits in a patch or inhaler that doctors can prescribe, corporations patent, and governments regulate. Whenever possible, Paracelsus's lab-coated descendants have synthesized the active ingredients in plant drugs, allowing medicine to dispense with the plant itself - and any reminders of its pagan past. — Michael Pollan

It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined. — Michael Pollan

Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts. — Michael Pollan

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

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

Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating. — Michael Pollan

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness. — Michael Pollan

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. — Michael Pollan

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

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution. — Michael Pollan

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification. — Michael Pollan

Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, shining wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It's the smell of fresh soil in the spring, but fresh soil somehow distilled or improved upon, as if that wild, primordial scene has been refined and bottled: eau de pomme de terre. You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there's the cozy kitchen to, for the smell of potatoes is, at least by now, to us, the smell of comfort itself, a smell as blankly welcoming as spud flesh, a whiteness that takes up memories and sentiments as easily as flavors. To smell a raw potato is to stand on the very threshold of the domestic and the wild. (241) — Michael Pollan

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life - the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids - is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air. — Michael Pollan

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. — Michael Pollan

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter. — Michael Pollan

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

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

What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship? — Michael Pollan

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

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin — Michael Pollan

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

One thing that makes me very happy is to see the growing activism among chefs in America. Chefs like Tom Colicchio, Bill Telepan, and Rachel Ray and food writers like Michael Pollan have gone to Congress, indeed sometimes even have testified before Congress, have lent this support to Mrs. Obama's effort to combat childhood obesity. — Jose Andres

Huxley suggests that the reason there aren't nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past. — Michael Pollan

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

To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic? I — Michael Pollan

It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) . — Michael Pollan

Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom. — Michael Pollan

It may be that a taste for Bittor's cooking, for his obsessive, slightly mad investigation into the nature of wood and fire and food, has been prepared by our culture's ongoing attempt to transcend all those things, not just with molecular gastronomy, but with artificial flavors and colors, synthetic food experiences of every kind, even the microwave oven. High and low, this is an age of the jaded palate, ever hungry for the next new taste, the next new sensation, for mediated experiences of every kind. — Michael Pollan

The real food is not being advertised — Michael Pollan

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

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue. — Michael Pollan

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

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy. — Michael Pollan

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around. — Michael Pollan

I think that there's some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don't have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television-we've turned cooking into a spectator sport ... My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table. — Michael Pollan

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

Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: they can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain. — Michael Pollan

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

I wondered if this wasn't a case of making the ideal an enemy of the good, but Salatin was convinced that industrial organic was finally a contradiction in terms. I decided I had to find out if he was right. — Michael Pollan

Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment. — Michael Pollan

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

pile, I started to see the golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots, floating in the puddles of rainwater, pancaked on the steel rails. Most of this grain is destined for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it particularly clean. Even so, it was hard not to register something deeply amiss in the sight of so much food lying around on the wet ground. — Michael Pollan

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

I had actually wanted to say something more, to express a wider gratitude for the meal we were about to eat, but I was afraid that to offer words of thanks for the pig and the mushrooms and the forests and the garden would come off sounding corny, and, worse, might ruin some appetites. The words I was reaching for, of course, were the words of grace. But as the conversation at the table unfurled like a sail amid the happy clatter of silver, tacking from stories of hunting to motherlodes of mushrooms to abalone adventures, I realized that in this particular case, words of grace were unnecessary. Why? Because that's what the meal itself had become, for me certainly, but I suspect for some of the others, too: a wordless way of saying grace. — Michael Pollan

A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals. — Michael Pollan

[David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries. — Michael Pollan

The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style. — Michael Pollan

Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved. — Michael Pollan

You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories). — Michael Pollan

The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful. — Michael Pollan

I get so much out of being married and raising my kids - that's really important to me. — Tracy Pollan

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

In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a "dead concept," but equally unhealthy
were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-abrac
and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time. — Michael Pollan

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. — Michael Pollan

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

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

You are what what you eat eats. — Michael Pollan

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

If people eat healthy food, they will save enough to compensate for the food price being healthier and spending less on healthcare. — Michael Pollan

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again. — Michael Pollan

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

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef. — Michael Pollan

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

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

Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. — Michael Pollan

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not. — Michael Pollan

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands ... Relations are what matter most. — Michael Pollan

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

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

There are fundamental tensions between the biological reality of the planet and the economic reality. To some extent you can adapt the economy, create a new set of rules and incentives to send it down a better track, but finally people in the first world are going to have to consume a whole lot less. — Michael Pollan

To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call "freedom." Cooking — Michael Pollan

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

To join the makers of the world is always to feel at least a little more self reliant, a little more omnicompetent. For everyone to bake his own bread or brew his own beer is, we're told, inefficient, and by the usual measures it probably is ... But though it is certainly cheaper and easier to rely on untold, unseen others to provide for our everyday needs, to live that way comes at a price, not least to our sense of competence and independence. We prize these virtues, and yet they have absolutely nothing to do with the efficiencies of modern consumer capitalism. Except perhaps to suggest that there might be some problems with modern consumer capitalism. — Michael Pollan

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. — Michael Pollan

People say they don't have time to cook, yet in the last few years we have found an extra two hours a day for the internet. — Michael Pollan

The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, a giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn ...
Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn ... There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well ...
And us? — Michael Pollan

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

What would shopping this way mean in the supermarket? Well, imagine your great grandmother at your side as you roll down the aisles. You're standing together in front of the dairy case. She picks up a package of Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt tubes - and has no idea what this could possibly be. Is it a food or a toothpaste? And how, exactly, do you introduce it into your body? You could tell her it's just yogurt in a squirtable form, yet if she read the ingredients label she would have every reason to doubt that that was in fact the case. Sure, there's some yogurt in there, but there are also a dozen other things that aren't remotely yogurtlike, ingredients she would probably fail to recognize as foods of any kind, including high-fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin, carrageenan, tricalcium phosphate, natural and artificial flavors, vitamins, and so forth. — Michael Pollan

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

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them. — Michael Pollan

The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else. — Michael Pollan

A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius. — Michael Pollan

Food is a costly antidepressant. — Michael Pollan