Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.
Michael PollanThe problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.
Michael PollanThereโs an assumption that if someone writes in the first person itโs self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. Itโs not a tool to understand myself.
Michael PollanThis for many people is what is most offensive about huntingโto some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.
Michael PollanThe 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