Best 377 quotes of Michael Pollan on MyQuotes

Michael Pollan

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    Michael Pollan

    A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

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    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

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    Michael Pollan

    A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

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    Michael Pollan

    All money for agricultural extension, land grant universities has been toward developing industrial food. Lots of money has been invested toward maximizing yield. If you took even a small amount of that money and put it toward organic research, I don't have any doubts you could match those yields.

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    Michael Pollan

    All the arguments about nutrition are really about what is the problem ingredient in the western diet. Is it the fat? Is it the lack of fiber? Is it the refined carbohydrates?But we don't have to worry about it. We just have to try to get off that diet to the extent we can.

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    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?

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    Michael Pollan

    A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

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    Michael Pollan

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

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    Michael Pollan

    Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

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    Michael Pollan

    Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.

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    Michael Pollan

    Any food product that feels compelled to tell you it’s natural in all likelihood is not.

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    Michael Pollan

    Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.

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    Michael Pollan

    Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

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    Michael Pollan

    ...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.

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    Michael Pollan

    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.

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    Michael Pollan

    A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

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    Michael Pollan

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

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    Michael Pollan

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

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    Michael Pollan

    Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup

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    Michael Pollan

    Be the kind of person who takes supplements - then skip the supplements.

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    Michael Pollan

    Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

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    Michael Pollan

    But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

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    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.

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    Michael Pollan

    Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.

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    Michael Pollan

    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.

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    Michael Pollan

    Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

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    Michael Pollan

    Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

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    Michael Pollan

    Corporations cook very differently from how people do.

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    Michael Pollan

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    Do all your eating at a table.

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    Michael Pollan

    Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Don't eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

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    Michael Pollan

    Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

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    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

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    Michael Pollan

    Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.

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    Michael Pollan

    Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does

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    Michael Pollan

    Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

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    Michael Pollan

    Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

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    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.

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    Michael Pollan

    Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.

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    Michael Pollan

    Eating is a political act.

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    Michael Pollan

    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.