Michael Pollan Quotes

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

...think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.

When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.

Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.

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.

Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can't pronounce.

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

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

We're spending, on average, 27 minutes a day cooking and about four minutes cleaning up, so basically about a half hour. Any one of TV shows takes twice as long to watch as that, which I think is very interesting because the main excuse people give for not cooking is they don't have time to cook, but somehow they're finding time to watch other people cook or eat on TV.

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

Eating is a political act.

Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig - an animal easily as intelligent as a dog - that becomes the Christmas ham.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.

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.

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.

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.

Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.

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.

Are we, finally, speaking of nature or culture when we speak of a rose (nature), that has been bred (culture) so that its blossoms (nature) make men imagine (culture) the sex of women (nature)? It may be this sort of confusion that we need more of.

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

One of the problems is that the US government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health.

One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.

Stop eating before you're full.

Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic.

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.

If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.

Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.

If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.

we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.

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.

The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.

While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187

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.

Cooking meat over a fire is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men.

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.

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.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.

Lawns are a form of television

The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.

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

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

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.