Michael Pollan Quotes

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a p...

Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting ...

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surge...

Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the f...

I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. Th...

Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that f...

Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret...

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of c...

Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians -- we just want to opt out. That's all the Ind...

The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.

Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to cons...

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkab...

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages...

Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of proces...

It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to c...

Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds o...

Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple...

Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 per...

[David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as lo...

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the retur...

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply wo...

By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurr...

In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between thei...

[Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Ha...

When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.

Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere ne...

There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter...

By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kern...

But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.

A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Com...

What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protei...

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us ag...

Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the ...

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his se...

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse o...

we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the righ...

Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other indus...

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a rumina...

Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a ...

Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the h...

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most ...

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zer...

But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in ...

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would ...

As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the...

. . . .how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to...

So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control...

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperf...

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

It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, ...

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dio...

The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld su...

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground o...

Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but al...

Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch...

Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close ...

The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.” Although ...

Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a...

It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of ...

Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s poi...

For great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind...

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature ...

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and...

Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard ...

Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowled...

Memory is the enemy of wonder

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn'...

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our m...

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not...

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reve...

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to count...

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and surv...

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries witho...

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family ...

You are what what you eat eats.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than fi...

[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a m...

You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils i...

While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time ...

Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on h...

Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of ...

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “...

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive ide...

That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of...

Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for ...

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products ever...

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

Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist

Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these ch...

Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appoi...

In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same -- mageiros -- and the ...

The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, i...

The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb an...

Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.

Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationship...

Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-...

If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagi...

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cult...

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than prepari...