Top 66 Michael Pollan Quotes

It’s the embrace of corn-based ethanol that has driven up all food prices. It’s not making agriculture more sustainable.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

We love salt, fat and sugar. We’re hard-wired to go for those flavors. They trip our dopamine networks, which are our craving networks.

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.

I don’t think of myself as a spiritual person.

Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.

As soon as you plow, you’re releasing carbon.

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

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.

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.

The way you support farmers is by shopping and buying raw ingredients.

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.

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.

I hope that if you’re cooking two nights a week, you can try for three.

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

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. And in the inner city, people don’t have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

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.

I’ve been amazed to learn all of the links between microbial health and our general health. This all started by trying to understand fermentation. The fermentation outside your body, and its relation to the fermentation inside your body. The key to health is fermentation, it turns out.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I’m writing about.

If you’re eating grassland meat, your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.

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.

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

To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen.

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.

I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

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.

In the amount of time it takes to microwave a TV dinner, you can put something much tastier on the table, I promise.

Bayer’s planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and agrochemical markets.

The euphemistically named CropLife America speaks for the pesticide industry.

Restaurants serve supersize portions to make you feel you’re getting your money’s worth.

A lot of what you see in the supermarket I would argue is not really food. It’s what I call edible, food-like substances.

Eat a wide variety of species.

While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.

You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it’s a lot of sugar. It’s just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.

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.

Is there any practice less selfish, any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?

The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It’s where we learn to share; it’s where we learn to argue without offending. It’s just too critical to let go, as we’ve been so blithely doing.

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

Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

Hillary Clinton is not strongly identified with reforming the industrial food system. The Clintons were involved with Walmart and Tyson in Arkansas. Though as a senator, Hillary was pretty good at reaching out to the small farmers in Upstate New York.

McDonald’s is in a unique position. They can decide they don’t want meat with hormones in it, and that will be the end of hormones in meat. I actually think exerting pressure on McDonald’s is probably just as important as on the Department of Agriculture.

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.

If you made all the French fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they’re so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you’re willing to prepare them – chances are good it won’t be every day.

You don’t need to know what an antioxidant is to eat well.

My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with the natural world. To go back even further, I got interested in gardens because I was interested in nature and wilderness and Thoreau and Emerson.

For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you’re eating, and ask yourself if you’re really hungry – before you eat and then again along the way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes thereafter, that’s a kind of reminder to focus on the experience, enjoy those first bites, and as you get into the 20th bite, you’re talking calories and not pleasure.

When you cook, you get to shop. You get to vote if you want the pastured raised pork or the organic grain. You can get to help produce your agricultural system, and you give that up when you outsource your cooking. You become dependent on what’s offered – and that’s a shame.