Michael Pollan Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another...and still to this day babies fed on the most "nutritionally complete" formula fail to do as
  well as babies fed human milk. Even more than margarine, formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.

  Michael Pollan

  Baby, Tests, Milk

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• The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.

  Michael Pollan

  Mean, Years, Cds

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.52, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the
  toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your
  eye by the checkout: corn.

  Michael Pollan

  Eye, Shine On, Average

  Michael Pollan (2006). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, p.31, Penguin

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• Corporations cook very differently from how people do.

  Michael Pollan

  People, Corporations, Cooks

  Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.11, Penguin

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• The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.

  Michael Pollan

  War, Modern, Protein

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.30, Penguin

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• ...think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people to conquer the trees.

  Michael Pollan

  Thinking, Agriculture, People

  Michael Pollan (2001). “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”, p.18, Random House

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• A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Cooking, Example

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.161, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• There's something magical that happens when people eat from the same pot. 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

  Letting Go, Offending, People

  "Fire, Water, Air, Earth: Michael Pollan Gets Elemental In 'Cooked'". "Weekend Edition Sunday" with Rachel Martin, www.npr.org. April 21, 2013.

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• 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.

  Michael Pollan

  Thinking, Keys, Mcdonalds

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• Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

  Michael Pollan

  Rewards, Daydreaming, Form

  Michael Pollan (2013). “A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder”, p.9, Random House

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• Do all your eating at a table.

  Michael Pollan

  Tables, Eating

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.125, Penguin

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• 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.

  Michael Pollan

  Believe, Thinking, Media

  "Food Chains, Dead Zones, and Licensed Journalism". Interview with Russell Schoch, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2005.

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• People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.

  Michael Pollan

  People, Behave, Nutrients

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.51, Penguin

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

  Michael Pollan

  Writing, Finding The One, Phrases

  "Food Chains, Dead Zones, and Licensed Journalism". Interview with Russell Schoch, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2005.

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• Cooking meat over a fire is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men.

  Michael Pollan

  Men, Fire, Cooking

  Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.38, Penguin

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• 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.

  Michael Pollan

  Cells, Medicine, Peers

  "Food Chains, Dead Zones, and Licensed Journalism". Interview with Russell Schoch, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2005.

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• Be the kind of person who takes supplements - then skip the supplements.

  Michael Pollan

  Kind, Supplements, Persons

  Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.87, Penguin

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• To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

  Michael Pollan

  Past, Oil, America

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• A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

  Michael Pollan

  Feet, Quality, Odor

  Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.222, Penguin

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• Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.

  Michael Pollan

  Pride, Evil, Affliction

  Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.31, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration.

  Michael Pollan

  Land, Incentives, Needs

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• When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Practice, Different

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• ...Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.

  Michael Pollan

  Fda, World, Modern

  Michael Pollan (2009). “Food Rules: An Eater's Manual”, p.19, Penguin

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• Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: they can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain.

  Michael Pollan

  Body Weight, Brain, Half

  Michael Pollan (2013). “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”, p.41, Penguin

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• It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

  Michael Pollan

  Italian, Might, Subtraction

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.134, Bloomsbury Publishing

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