Skip to content

Portrait of Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan

(1955) Writer United States

584 quotes in 1778 categories

Michael Pollan urges people to learn where their food comes from so they can choose better. He points out that foods meant for special occasions, like soda and fries, have become everyday staples. He also shares that ancient Greek called cooks, butchers, and priests the same word, linking cooking to magic.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

Michael Pollan is a writer from the United States, best known for Omnivore's Dilemma. A Natural History of Four Meals.

Quick Facts About Michael Pollan

Born: February 6, 1955
Nationality: United States
Profession: Writer
Notable works: Omnivore's Dilemma. A Natural History of Four Meals
Spouse: Judith Belzer

About Michael Pollan

Michael Kevin Pollan is an American journalist, specializing in food, who is a professor and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University. Concurrently, he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism where in 2020 he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, in which he leads the public-education program.

Awards & Honors

Guggenheim Fellowship Orwell Award Nierenberg Prize LennonOno Grant for Peace

Quotes by Michael Pollan

“TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE.”

Food

Image

The real food is not being advertised

Food

Image

Eat a wide variety of species.

Image

“EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN.”

Image

Do all your eating at a table.

Eating

Image

Eating is a political act.

Eating

Image

Nature abhors a garden.

Abhors

Image

“A good pot holds memories.”

Image

“DON’T LOOK FOR THE MAGIC BULLET IN THE TRADITIONAL DIET.”

Diet

Image

You have to draw lines between being a journalist and an activist.

Activist

Image

“COOK AND, IF YOU CAN, PLANT A GARDEN.”

Image

Corporations cook very differently from how people do.

Image

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

Food

Image

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

Food

Image

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

Apples

Image

It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

Image

To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we're…

Diet

Image

The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

Image

“To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic? I”

Authentic

Image

I'm not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that's something…

Image

The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the…

Change the world

Image

In the end I'm still a writer. I'm still a journalist, and my first responsibility is to my readers. That's where I…

Books

Image

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

Image

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

Image

“A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages…

Diet

Image

People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it's a really…

Discipline

Image

It's very important to get out, to do reporting. It's also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I…

Image

The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the…

Image

There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn…

Mind

Image

“Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment…

Ignorance

Image

“The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art…

Art

Image

The almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and…

Almighty

Image

“This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting,…

Consciousness

Image

“It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of…

Art

Image

“An act as quotidian and practical as making your own sauerkraut represents nothing less than a way of engaging with the world.…

Image

“A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging,…

East coast

Image

The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock. The…

Ability

Image

The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the…

Diet

Image

“Okay, but what about microbial disease? “To declare war on ninety-nine percent of bacteria when less than one percent of them threaten…

Image

“Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that…

Food

Image

Michael Pollan by topic

Food (310) Health (55) People (50) Nature (49) Eating (48) Cooking (35) Time (32) Gardening (32) Thinking (24) World (23) Plant (21) Animal (21) Life (20) Food chain (20) Writing (19) Inspirational (19)