Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.”

— Michael Pollan

52. “Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is.” – D. H. Lawrence, Pansies.”

— Michael Pollan

53. “Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.”

— Michael Pollan

54. “The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat.”

— Michael Pollan

55. “It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly. Unitasking.”

— Michael Pollan

56. “An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

— Michael Pollan

57. “If people eat healthy food, they will save enough to compensate for the food price being healthier and spending less on healthcare.”

— Michael Pollan

58. “Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associate d microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology – that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.”

— Michael Pollan

59. “There’s always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.”

— Michael Pollan

60. “I don’t like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It’s much more fun to start in ignorance.”

— Michael Pollan

61. “The environment is not just around you, it’s passing through you.”

— Michael Pollan

62. “Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved.”

— Michael Pollan

63. “Great cooking is all about the three ’p’s: patience, presence, and practice.”

— Michael Pollan

64. “Carhart-Harris argues in the entropy paper that even a temporary rewiring of the brain is potentially valuable, especially for people suffering from disorders characterized by mental rigidity. A high-dose psychedelic experience has the power to “shake the snow globe,” he says, disrupting unhealthy patterns of thought and creating a space of flexibility – entropy – in which more salubrious patterns and narratives have an opportunity to coalesce as the snow slowly resettles.”

— Michael Pollan

65. “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

66. “The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.”

— Michael Pollan

67. “The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.”

— Michael Pollan

68. “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

69. “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the first time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with nature.”

— Michael Pollan

70. “We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.”

— Michael Pollan

71. “Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.”

— Michael Pollan

72. “Nature abhors a garden.”

— Michael Pollan

73. “Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture.”

— Michael Pollan

74. “Be the kind of person who takes supplements – then skip the supplements.”

— Michael Pollan

75. “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”

— Michael Pollan

76. “If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.”

— Michael Pollan

77. “If you’re going to change the food system, there is a lot that you, the consumer, can do on your own; but in the end, it will be very important to make changes at the national level.”

— Michael Pollan

78. “You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.”

— Michael Pollan

79. “Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.”

— Michael Pollan

80. “One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens.”

— Michael Pollan

81. “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”

— Michael Pollan

82. “Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.”

— Michael Pollan

83. “So that’s us: processed corn, walking.”

— Michael Pollan

84. “Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.”

— Michael Pollan

85. “Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth.”

— Michael Pollan

86. “If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it’s not hard to imagine you’re looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.”

— Michael Pollan

87. “Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”

— Michael Pollan

88. “I’ve begun to wonder if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set. Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.”

— Michael Pollan

89. “Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.”

— Michael Pollan

90. “Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so.”

— Michael Pollan

91. “Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

— Michael Pollan

92. “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.”

— Michael Pollan

93. “Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.”

— Michael Pollan

94. “Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.”

— Michael Pollan

95. “We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that’s only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.”

— Michael Pollan

96. “In recent years, “psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless,” as one psychoanalyst has put it. If psychedelic therapy proves successful, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the brain and the mind in the practice of psychotherapy. At least that’s the promise.”

— Michael Pollan

97. “Not only does he choose his own words with great care, but he insists that you do too, so, for example, when I carelessly deployed the term “recreational use,” he stopped me in mid-sentence. “Maybe we need to reexamine that term. Typically, it is used to trivialize an experience. But why? In its literal meaning, the word ‘recreation’ implies something decidedly nontrivial. There is much more to be said, but let’s bookmark this topic for another time. Please go on.”

— Michael Pollan

98. “Every major food company now has an organic division. There’s more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.”

— Michael Pollan

99. “We don’t die well in America. Ask people where do you want to die, and they will tell you, at home with their loved ones. But most of us die in an ICU. The biggest taboo in America is the conversation about death. Sure, it’s gotten better; now we have hospices, which didn’t exist not so long ago. But to a doctor, it’s still an insult to let a patient go.”

— Michael Pollan

100. “Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.”

— Michael Pollan