Michael Pollan Quotes

182 quotes in 2501 categories

• 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… All
• At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the… Any
• When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery… All
• For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment,… Approach
• Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Dieting
• He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you… Americans
• 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,… Adapted
• While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of… Ability
• The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive. Active
• You are what what you eat eats. Eat
• ... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of… Bodies
• Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Eat
• The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun… Bother
• So that's us: processed corn, walking. Corn
• But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those… Americans
• It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins. Begins
• Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens… All
• 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… Calories
• Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism). Appleseed
• [Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and… Accountability

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