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" 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

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

" When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods. "

Michael Pollan

Calories

Find

" Eat a wide variety of species. "

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

" As soon as you plow, you're releasing carbon. "

" 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. "

" To me, onions are the metaphor for kitchen drudgery. Cutting them is hard to do well, and they fight you the whole way. "

Michael Pollan

Hard

Kitchen

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We spend our lives in front of screens, and cooking is one of the best antidotes. "

" We love salt, fat and sugar. We're hard-wired to go for those flavors. They trip our dopamine networks, which are our craving networks. "

Michael Pollan

Fat

Love

" 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. "

" French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way. "

" 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 Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society. "

" Bayer's planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and agrochemical markets. "

" A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals. "

" There is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you're General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald's, because the family meal is usually one thing shared. "

" 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

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

" For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. "

" To eat well, you either have to invest money or time. If you can put in some time, the raw ingredients are not that expensive. You can eat extremely well on a budget. "

" My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with the natural world. To go back even further, I got interested in gardens because I was interested in nature and wilderness and Thoreau and Emerson. "

" My work has gotten more political over time, but once you start exploring food, you find you're up against economics and politics and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to deal with. "

" You don't need to know what an antioxidant is to eat well. "

" The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics. "

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

" 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. "

" A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. "