“I mean, we’re really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.”
— Michael Pollan
“Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily – they nourish us psychologically.”
— Michael Pollan
“Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we’re eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It’s as important as the kind of car you drive – whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.”
— Michael Pollan
“We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding.”
— Michael Pollan
“Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.”
— Michael Pollan
“To a very great extent, it’s the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture – that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product.”
— Michael Pollan
“High-quality food is better for your health.”
— Michael Pollan
“I think cooking is really key because it’s the only way you’re going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don’t cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar – much more than you would ever use at home.”
— Michael Pollan
“To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we’re also going to be a lot healthier.”
— Michael Pollan
“Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important.”
— Michael Pollan
“The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.”
— 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.”
— Michael Pollan
“The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.”
— Michael Pollan
“People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.”
— Michael Pollan
“A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.”
— Michael Pollan
“French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn’t start out that way.”
— Michael Pollan
“If we’re eating industrially, if we’re letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we’re going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we’re going to have.”
— Michael Pollan
“The first step in reforming appetite is going from processed food to real food. Then, if you can afford organic or grass-fed, fantastic. But the first step is moving from processed industrial food to the real thing.”
— Michael Pollan
“Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It’s cheaper than McDonald’s in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is – you know, it’s an industry kind of ruining North Carolina.”
— Michael Pollan
“In corn, I think I’ve found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald’s meal, virtually all the carbon in it – and what we eat is mostly carbon – comes from corn.”
— Michael Pollan
“My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.”
— Michael Pollan
“In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel – it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.”
— Michael Pollan
“At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.”
— Michael Pollan
“Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence develops: I’ll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal.”
— Michael Pollan
“Every major food company now has an organic division. There’s more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.”
— Michael Pollan
“Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.”
— Michael Pollan
“Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved.”
— Michael Pollan
“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”
— Michael Pollan
“Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don’t realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.”
— Michael Pollan
“As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.”
— Michael Pollan