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" Eat all the junk food you want - as long as you cook it yourself. That way, it'll be less junky, and you won't eat it every day because it's a lot of work. "
Michael Pollan
Work
You
Long
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" It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement. "
Michael Pollan
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" As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. "
Michael Pollan
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" 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 the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn. "
Michael Pollan
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" If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have. "
Michael Pollan
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" Even if you don't think you can cook well, you can cook better than the food industry. "
Michael Pollan
Well
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" I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not. "
Michael Pollan
I Think
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Goal
" Oddly enough, government policy helped get the fast food outlets into the city. Very well-intentioned small business administration loans to encourage minority business ownership. The easiest business to get into is opening a fast-food franchise in the inner city. "
Michael Pollan
City
Government
Small
" We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain. Food comes to us ready-made in packages that obscure as much information as they reveal. "
Michael Pollan
Food
Long
End
" To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture - that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product. "
Michael Pollan
Chicken
Great
Grow
" Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. "
Michael Pollan
Food
Too Much
Healthy
" A cow out on grass is just an incredible thing to behold... Cows and other ruminants can do things we just can't do. They have the most highly evolved digestive organ on the planet, called the rumen. And the rumen can digest grass. It takes grass, cellulose in grass, and turns it into protein, very nutritious protein. We can't do that. "
Michael Pollan
Cow
Grass
Incredible
" Is there any practice less selfish, any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love? "
Michael Pollan
Selfish
Practice
People
" Soon after the inauguration, the Obamas gave Big Food a case of heartburn when, in the spring of 2009, Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn, a symbolic but nevertheless powerful act that thrilled the food movement. "
Michael Pollan
Garden
Powerful
White
" I don't think of myself as a spiritual person. "
Michael Pollan
Myself
Spiritual
Think
" Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before. "
Michael Pollan
Food
Company
More
" Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can. "
Michael Pollan
Food
Say
You
" It's no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television - or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. "
Michael Pollan
Disaster
Television
Child
" When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes thereafter, that's a kind of reminder to focus on the experience, enjoy those first bites, and as you get into the 20th bite, you're talking calories and not pleasure. "
Michael Pollan
Enjoy
Experience
Focus
" Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about. "
Michael Pollan
Finding
Experience
Stand
" For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry - before you eat and then again along the way. "
Michael Pollan
You
Comfort
Eating
" There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day. "
Michael Pollan
Easy
Day
Every Day
" The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them. "
Michael Pollan
Diet
Economics
Food
" We spend our lives in front of screens, and cooking is one of the best antidotes. "
Michael Pollan
Lives
Front
Cooking
" Hillary Clinton is not strongly identified with reforming the industrial food system. The Clintons were involved with Walmart and Tyson in Arkansas. Though as a senator, Hillary was pretty good at reaching out to the small farmers in Upstate New York. "
Michael Pollan
New York
Small
Good
" You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned. "
Michael Pollan
Cannot
You
Seeds
" Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north. "
Michael Pollan
Never
Balance
Without
" In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn. "
Michael Pollan
Corn
Pollution
Food
" This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness. "
Michael Pollan
Change
Nature
Human Nature
" To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we're also going to be a lot healthier. "
Michael Pollan
Vegetables
Meat
Side
" Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat. "
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Environmental
Problems
Change