Michael Pollan quote: "you know what the best kind of organic certification would be? make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer's bookshelf. Because what you're feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. the way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what is sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms." Joel Salatin"

The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to count...
MICHAEL POLLAN

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
MICHAEL POLLAN

It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a doubl...
MICHAEL POLLAN

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of...
MICHAEL POLLAN

You can't be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based eth...
MICHAEL POLLAN

We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh prod...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries witho...
MICHAEL POLLAN

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

You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket scie...
MICHAEL POLLAN

I probably spend more on food than a lot of people, and I feel good about the whole food chain I'...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Eating is an agricultural act," Wendell Berry famously wrote, by which he meant that we are not just...
MICHAEL POLLAN

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even fi...
MICHAEL POLLAN

You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it's a lot of sugar. It's...
MICHAEL POLLAN

We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived t...
MICHAEL POLLAN

It’s astonishing, actually, how much anger an animal’s assault on your garden can incite.
MICHAEL POLLAN

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an im...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

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

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn'...
MICHAEL POLLAN

When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes therea...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-...
MICHAEL POLLAN

My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with th...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Oddly enough, government policy helped get the fast food outlets into the city. Very well-intentione...
MICHAEL POLLAN

French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian i...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Soon after the inauguration, the Obamas gave Big Food a case of heartburn when, in the spring of 200...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modi...
MICHAEL POLLAN

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than prepari...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Escherichia colia O157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no on...
MICHAEL POLLAN

We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain. Food comes to us ready-made in packages ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

When you cook, you get to shop. You get to vote if you want the pastured raised pork or the organic ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

I'm very picky about the meat I eat. I eat grass-fed beef, which is now becoming more common. Ye...
MICHAEL POLLAN

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply wo...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
MICHAEL POLLAN

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped b...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The first step in reforming appetite is going from processed food to real food. Then, if you can aff...
MICHAEL POLLAN

What is most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these rel...
MICHAEL POLLAN

...-compost is trucked in; some crops also receive fish emulsion along with their water and a side d...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own fo...
MICHAEL POLLAN

When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to...
MICHAEL POLLAN

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the far...
MICHAEL POLLAN

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the co...
MICHAEL POLLAN

To me, onions are the metaphor for kitchen drudgery. Cutting them is hard to do well, and they fight...
MICHAEL POLLAN

You are what what you eat eats.
MICHAEL POLLAN

For great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which human...
MICHAEL POLLAN

So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a rumina...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As so...
MICHAEL POLLAN

More than any other single trait, it is the apple’s genetic variability—its ineluctable wildness...
MICHAEL POLLAN

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wil...
MICHAEL POLLAN

It's the embrace of corn-based ethanol that has driven up all food prices. It's not making a...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
MICHAEL POLLAN

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of specie...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway
MICHAEL POLLAN

If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook ou...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a...
MICHAEL POLLAN

What memoir of childhood doesn't at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut law...
MICHAEL POLLAN

It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to l...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Much of gardening is a return, an effort at recovering remembered landscapes.
MICHAEL POLLAN

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent fort...
MICHAEL POLLAN

If you fill your Agriculture Committee with representatives of commodity farmers, and you don't ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

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

...the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbe...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.
MICHAEL POLLAN

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
MICHAEL POLLAN

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

Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It's cheaper than McDonald's in many places and f...
MICHAEL POLLAN

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word association...
MICHAEL POLLAN

You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile che...
MICHAEL POLLAN

If you made all the French fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they&#...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of ge...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and surv...
MICHAEL POLLAN

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reve...
MICHAEL POLLAN

In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

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

Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The French fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs...
MICHAEL POLLAN

A cow out on grass is just an incredible thing to behold... Cows and other ruminants can do things w...
MICHAEL POLLAN

My mode as a writer is to layer different perspectives: the scientific, the philosophical, the polit...
MICHAEL POLLAN

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and t...
MICHAEL POLLAN

To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, m...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even thou...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Industrial processes follow a clear, linear, hierarchical logic that is fairly easy to put into word...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey,...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not...
MICHAEL POLLAN

The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and t...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Improving the soil improved the man.
MICHAEL POLLAN

Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.
MICHAEL POLLAN

Lawns are a form of television
MICHAEL POLLAN

Bayer's planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly inc...
MICHAEL POLLAN

When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
MICHAEL POLLAN

So that's us: processed corn, walking.
MICHAEL POLLAN

Shake the hand that feeds you.
MICHAEL POLLAN

To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture -...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lightin...
MICHAEL POLLAN

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

Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not on...
MICHAEL POLLAN

A lot of what you see in the supermarket I would argue is not really food. It's what I call edib...
MICHAEL POLLAN

As soon as you plow, you're releasing carbon.
MICHAEL POLLAN

Isn’t it curious how in so many of our pastimes and hobbies we play at supplying one or another of...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a m...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be hap...
MICHAEL POLLAN

We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.
MICHAEL POLLAN

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our m...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Eat a wide variety of species.
MICHAEL POLLAN

The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel's rhetorical style.
MICHAEL POLLAN

I was really gratified that, of all the episodes of 'Cooked,' the baking one really hit a ch...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
MICHAEL POLLAN

In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal,...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Animals raised on corn produce fattier meat, but it's not just that it's fattier, it's t...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.
MICHAEL POLLAN

McDonald's is in a unique position. They can decide they don't want meat with hormones in it...
MICHAEL POLLAN

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unex...
MICHAEL POLLAN

If you're eating grassland meat, your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.
MICHAEL POLLAN

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

High-quality food is better for your health.
MICHAEL POLLAN

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journali...
MICHAEL POLLAN

It's no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television - or educational television, as ...
MICHAEL POLLAN

In the amount of time it takes to microwave a TV dinner, you can put something much tastier on the t...
MICHAEL POLLAN

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic...
MICHAEL POLLAN

I don't think it's a journalist's job to issue shopping lists or policy descriptions. We're supposed...
MICHAEL POLLAN

They want to sow fear.
LAURA POLLAN

We will continue to fight as long as he remains in prison.
LAURA POLLAN

We would never have thought this would go on for so long.
LAURA POLLAN

We ask on this Christmas Day for freedom for our political prisoners and for the Cuban people to hav...
LAURA POLLAN

Michael and I had great role models. Though his father has passed away, his parents had an amazingly...
TRACY POLLAN

Human rights basically have been dead in our country for three years. Physically, I am tired. But I ...
LAURA POLLAN

We are calling for freedom for all political prisoners.
LAURA POLLAN

I wasn't a very good waitress, always spilling things on people and forgetting things. I once sp...
TRACY POLLAN

It's an extremely sad day for us, because Christmas is a family holiday. Since our husbands are not ...
LAURA POLLAN

Worrying won't prevent the worst outcome. I've learned to live in the moment, which is not m...
TRACY POLLAN

I'm not a social retard, but I prefer to go unnoticed.
TRACY POLLAN

Well their performance was really brilliant. They should get an Oscar for best performance in a come...
LAURA POLLAN

The uncertainty wore on him. The conditions in jail--the handcuffs, the noise, the filth, the crowdi...
MICHAEL FINKEL

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportu...
MICHAEL SALTER

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged ...
MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Scared people did scary things sometimes,
MICHAEL GRANT

The greatest problem you have is your greatest opportunity.
MICHAEL WICKETT

There is no school of philosophy that approaches ordinary common sense.
MICHAEL LIPSEY

Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.
MICHAEL KORDA

We worry about losing our memory, yet there are things we wish we could forget.
MICHAEL LIPSEY

Rulers were made to be broken.
MICHAEL ISENBERG

It is easy to forgive an insult, but harder to forget one.
MICHAEL LIPSEY

The 8 Equities: Physical, Spiritual, Psychological, Intellectual, Emotional, Financial, Social and F...
MICHAEL VANCE

Must, bid the Morn awake!
Sad Winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This day's...
MICHAEL DRAYTON

Never forget that you are married to a very beautiful woman.
MICHAEL LIPSEY

How can our relationship grow when you don't respect my need to discuss everything that is wrong wit...
MICHAEL LIPSEY

An ounce of hypocracy is worth a pound of ambition.
MICHAEL KORDA

The more you can dream, the more you can do.
MICHAEL KORDA

I never thought a role model should be negative.
MICHAEL JORDAN

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life - birth, death, ...
MICHAEL SHERMER

Twenty children can never play together for twenty years
MICHAEL ADELOWO

Every company's greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.
MICHAEL LEBOEUF

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.
MICHAEL LEBOEUF

Sometimes you have to do the work and hope the career materializes.
MICHAEL LIPSEY

First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and i...
MICHAEL CAINE

I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get cat...
MICHAEL STIPE

There isn't always sex, but there is always chocolate.
MICHAEL LIPSEY

There was a lot of tabloid journalism about my supposed sex addiction. Bullshit. It's all bullshit. ...
MICHAEL DOUGLAS

In every pang that rends the heart The Man of Sorrows had a part.
MICHAEL BRUCE

Oft morning dreams presage approaching fate, For morning dreams, as poets tell, are true.
MICHAEL BRUCE

There are plenty of teams in every sport that have great players andnever win titles. Most of the ti...
MICHAEL JORDAN

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.
MICHAEL JORDAN

...and he smiled a lot. The smile did not mean that he was happy. It meant he was stronger than most...
MICHAEL CADNUM

Must, bid the Morn awake!
Sad Winter now declines,
Each bird doth choose a mate;
This da...
MICHAEL DRAYTON

Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.
MICHAEL PRITCHARD

You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.
MICHAEL PRITCHARD

If we keep treating our most important values as meaningless relics, that's exactly what they'll bec...
MICHAEL JOSEPHSON

No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will st...
MICHAEL PRITCHARD

Here when the labouring fish does at the foot arrive, And finds that by his strength but vainly he...
MICHAEL DRAYTON

The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a sing...
MICHAEL CRICHTON

The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.
MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside...
MICHAEL BRIDGE

Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final ac...
MICHAEL KORDA

This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a...
MICHAEL KORDA

When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside...
MICHAEL BRIDGE

Revolutions never occur in mathematics.
MICHAEL CROWE

Prince Edward all in gold, as he great Jove had been, The Mountfords all in plumes, like estridges...
MICHAEL DRAYTON

I was an altar boy, which I loved and am very proud of. It was strict, but also really nice.
MICHAEL KEATON

When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an Ameri...
MICHAEL HANEKE

Chairman Chaffetz was an enthusiastic supporter of the 'USA Freedom Act,' designed to rein i...
MICHAEL HAYDEN

To be sure, debates will linger about whether Medicare is too large or too small. Debates remain abo...
MICHAEL JOHNS

People want to make sure there is flexibility to reallocate assets. They are trusting us to make the...
MICHAEL HINTZE

We all must recognize that homeland security funds should be allocated by threat and no other reason...
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

Your Guardians of Freedom is a new program that enables unit commanders and Airmen to quickly commun...
MICHAEL BURGESS

I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.
MICHAEL JORDAN

Dell's a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. Th...
MICHAEL DELL

When someone can't afford to wear shoes, it's not just about them not having shoes on that d...
MICHAEL FRANTI

When I was at the CIA I asked my civilian advisory board to tackle some tough questions. Among the t...
MICHAEL HAYDEN

Obama's drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted ...
MICHAEL HASTINGS

Michael Pollan

Share:

Related

More Michael Pollan