It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
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 PollanWhen a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.
Michael PollanI think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.
Michael Pollan