Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" It's the embrace of corn-based ethanol that has driven up all food prices. It's not making agriculture more sustainable. "
Michael Pollan
More
Agriculture
Driven
Related Quotes:
" Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north. "
Michael Pollan
Never
Balance
Without
" In the amount of time it takes to microwave a TV dinner, you can put something much tastier on the table, I promise. "
Michael Pollan
Promise
Dinner
Table
" My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me. "
Michael Pollan
Writing
About
Learn
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Learn
Inside
Body
" 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
Me
" 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 French fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes - and cleaning up the mess. "
Michael Pollan
Cleaning
Over
Mess
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Food
Cheap
Health
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
You
Cooking
Day
" 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
Product
Meat
Now
" 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
Go
" If you made all the French fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them - chances are good it won't be every day. "
Michael Pollan
Good
You
Day
" 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
" This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness. "
Michael Pollan
Change
Nature
Human Nature
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Political
Picture
Interesting
" The first step in reforming appetite is going from processed food to real food. Then, if you can afford organic or grass-fed, fantastic. But the first step is moving from processed industrial food to the real thing. "
Michael Pollan
Moving
Food
First Step
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Cooking
Ignorance
Week
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Effort
Culture
Challenge
" The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing. "
Michael Pollan
Doing
Meal
Learn
" Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something. "
Michael Pollan
Way
Me
Writing
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
You
Eat
Well
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Landscape
Rest
Changes
" Europeans fought for shorter workdays, more vacation time, family leave, and all these kinds of things. Those haven't been priorities in America: it's been about money. You see, in the countries that fought for time, they cook more often; they have less obesity. There are real benefits to having time. "
Michael Pollan
Family
Time
Money
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Animals
Law
Great
" Bayer's planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and agrochemical markets. "
Michael Pollan
Concentration
Planned
Promises
" 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
" 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. "
Michael Pollan
Achievement
View
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. "
Michael Pollan
People
New York
City
" Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about. "
Michael Pollan
Personal
Much
Like
" A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet. "
Michael Pollan
Food
Quality
Free