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Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into
food.
Michael Pollan
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Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.
Michael Pollan
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If we address frankly what is evoked by cheese, I think it becomes clear why so little is said. So what does cheese evoke? Damp dark cellars, molds, mildews and mushrooms galore, dirty laundry and high school locker rooms, digestive processes and visceral fermentations, he-goats which do not remind of Chanel... In sum, cheese reminds of dubious, even unsavory places, both in nature and in our own organisms. And yet we love it.
Michael Pollan
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Think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.
Michael Pollan
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The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.
Michael Pollan
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Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.
Michael Pollan
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Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.
Michael Pollan
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In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.
Michael Pollan
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Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.
Michael Pollan
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Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.
Michael Pollan
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The industrialization — and brutalization — of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.
Michael Pollan
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Be the kind of person who takes supplements - then skip the supplements.
Michael Pollan
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Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.
Michael Pollan
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Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it
Michael Pollan
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To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe.
Michael Pollan
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The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.
Michael Pollan
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One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.
Michael Pollan
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You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).
Michael Pollan
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When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
Michael Pollan
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Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
Michael Pollan
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Michael Pollan
Creative Commons
Born:
February 6, 1955
(age 69)
Bio:
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Known for:
The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006)
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008)
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013)
Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (2009)
Most used words:
food
eat
health
nature
people
animals
culture
percent
eating
organic
moral
calories
time
garden
corn
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