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" 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. "

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" Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It's cheaper than McDonald's in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is - you know, it's an industry kind of ruining North Carolina. "

Michael Pollan

Kind

Barbecue

Food

" McDonald's is in a unique position. They can decide they don't want meat with hormones in it, and that will be the end of hormones in meat. I actually think exerting pressure on McDonald's is probably just as important as on the Department of Agriculture. "

" Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature. "

" While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. "

" The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies. "

" High-quality food is better for your health. "

" We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human. "

" You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have - while we have consciousness, toolmaking, language, they have biochemistry. "

" Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness - which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness - is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. "

" If you fill your Agriculture Committee with representatives of commodity farmers, and you don't have urbanites, you don't represent eaters, okay? You don't have people from New York City on these committees, you are going to end up with the kind of farm bills we have: a piece of special interest legislation. "

" 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. "

" I don't think of myself as a spiritual person. "

" You can't be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa, he was singing a different tune. "

" My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me. "

" Basically, farm chemicals are labor-saving devices, and farmers who don't use them - weed killers especially - have to work harder or hire more help. "

Michael Pollan

Work

Help

" My mode as a writer is to layer different perspectives: the scientific, the philosophical, the political, the journalistic. When you layer them, you get a really wholesome, interesting picture. "

" Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before. "

Michael Pollan

Food

Company

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Eat a wide variety of species. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure. "

" The way you support farmers is by shopping and buying raw ingredients. "

" It's the embrace of corn-based ethanol that has driven up all food prices. It's not making agriculture more sustainable. "

Michael Pollan

Agriculture

Driven

" After writing 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn't care about how their food was grown but who did care about their health. "

" 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. "

" As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection. "

" Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. "

" The euphemistically named CropLife America speaks for the pesticide industry. "