Michael Pollan Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

Michael Pollan
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
In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

Michael Pollan
Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.

Michael Pollan
Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.

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

Michael Pollan
Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.

Michael Pollan
Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.

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.

Michael Pollan
Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it

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

Michael Pollan
Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.

Michael Pollan
Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

Michael Pollan
Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food,

Michael Pollan
Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost,

Michael Pollan
Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so.

Michael Pollan
That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

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

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

Michael Pollan
I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.

Michael Pollan
There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.

Michael Pollan
The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

Michael Pollan