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" I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility. "

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" I'm very picky about the meat I eat. I eat grass-fed beef, which is now becoming more common. Yes, it's still more expensive, but it's a very sustainable product. "

Michael Pollan

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Meat

Now

" Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north. "

" Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you. "

" The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism. "

" I think cooking is really key because it's the only way you're going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don't cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar - much more than you would ever use at home. "

" I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not. "

" I've been amazed to learn all of the links between microbial health and our general health. This all started by trying to understand fermentation. The fermentation outside your body, and its relation to the fermentation inside your body. The key to health is fermentation, it turns out. "

" Restaurants serve supersize portions to make you feel you're getting your money's worth. "

" In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda. "

" 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. "

" To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen. "

" Food choices are something fundamental you can control about yourself: what you take into your body. When so many other things are out of control and your influence over climate change - all these much larger issues - it's very hard to see any results or any progress. But everybody can see progress around food. "

" Our big problem is that high-calorie, special-occasion foods like cakes, fried foods, etc. have become so cheap and easy that we eat them every day. Make them special again by cooking them yourself. You won't do it every day, I promise. "

" Even if you don't think you can cook well, you can cook better than the food industry. "

" People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue. "

" I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist. "

Michael Pollan

See

Way

" Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon. "

" Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable. "

" You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It's a shame. It's the media and the food industry: they've fed our panic around time. "

" Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food. "

" Eat a wide variety of species. "

" 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. "

" Is there any practice less selfish, any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love? "

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

" 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. "

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

" Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around. "