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Nature Quotes by Michael Pollan

49 Nature quotes by Michael Pollan

All Nature quotes Michael Pollan’s page

A steaming breakfast on the stove shows how our meals turn nature into culture and shape our bodies and minds. Pollan points out that plants act like alchemists, turning water, soil and sunlight into useful substances. He also reminds us that science and farming are part of human nature, with both benefits and sacrifices.

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Nature abhors a garden.

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A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

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

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

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The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

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“Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”

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It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

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

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“All these activities are forms of adult play that also serve as ceremonial acts of remembering—who we are, where we came from,…

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Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as…

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Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved.

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Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

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There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of…

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Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize…

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“So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this…

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“Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction…

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... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming…

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In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New…

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The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control…

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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…

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“Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of…

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“Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another…

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“I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so much a goal of his farming,…

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“either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the…

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

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“Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green…

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“The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for…

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“In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens --…

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

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

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

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Are we, finally, speaking of nature or culture when we speak of a rose (nature), that has been bred (culture) so that…

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“Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the…

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For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature,…

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People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox…

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More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into…

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“...every new genetically engineered plant is a unique event in nature, bringing its own set of genetic contingencies. This means that the…

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“The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore…

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A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You…

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Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we…

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More by Michael Pollan

“In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin,…

My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the…

The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.

Every peasant cuisine has incredible ingenious tricks for getting a lot of nutrition out of a small amount of ingredients. There are people who…

“In ancient Greece, the word for “cook,” “butcher,” and “priest” was the same—mageiros—and the word shares an etymological root with “magic.”

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 have to…

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance…

“The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.” Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay…

“Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.”

Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure…

Eat with consciousness. When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you're eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it…

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

“...whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their…

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

“CONSULT YOUR GUT.”