Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.”

— Michael Pollan

103. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

105. “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

106. “A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

— Michael Pollan

107. “How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity... To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history;.”

— Michael Pollan

108. “Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.”

— Michael Pollan

109. “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

110. “Barbecue brings people together, it always did and always will. Even in the sixties, during the race movements, barbecue was one of the things that held down the tensions. At a barbecue, it didn’t matter who you were.”

— Michael Pollan

111. “People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.”

— Michael Pollan

112. “Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring- to the carelessness of both consumers and producers.”

— Michael Pollan

113. “Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.”

— Michael Pollan

114. “Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.”

— Michael Pollan

115. “A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.”

— Michael Pollan

116. “While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation.”

— Michael Pollan

117. “Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you’re eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.”

— Michael Pollan

118. “Eat with consciousness. When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you’re eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it is, it’s enormously satisfying.”

— Michael Pollan

119. “Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?”

— Michael Pollan

120. “In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.”

— Michael Pollan

121. “Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.”

— Michael Pollan

122. “At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.”

— Michael Pollan

123. “Avoid foods you see advertised on television.”

— Michael Pollan

124. “Why don’t we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.”

— Michael Pollan

125. “S policy: “no snacks, no seconds, no sweets – except on days that begin with the letter S.”

— Michael Pollan

126. “Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”

— Michael Pollan

127. “The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending.”

— Michael Pollan

128. “This, for many people, is what’s most offensive about hunting – to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing.”

— Michael Pollan

129. “Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head.”

— Michael Pollan

130. “What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?”

— Michael Pollan

131. “The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.”

— Michael Pollan

132. “Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.”

— Michael Pollan

133. “Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die.”

— Michael Pollan

134. “There’s no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.”

— Michael Pollan

135. “Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we’re eating animals.”

— Michael Pollan

136. “There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.”

— Michael Pollan

137. “In ancient Greece, the word for “cook,” “butcher,” and “priest” was the same – mageiros – and the word shares an etymological root with “magic.”

— Michael Pollan

138. “It’s literally a reboot of the system – a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics.”

— Michael Pollan

139. “Eating’s not a bad way to get to know a place.”

— Michael Pollan

140. “Farms produce a lot more than food; they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.”

— Michael Pollan

141. “If you can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t be eating it.”

— Michael Pollan

142. “People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.”

— Michael Pollan

143. “Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.”

— Michael Pollan

144. “It’s brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don’t get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.”

— Michael Pollan

145. “The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.”

— Michael Pollan

146. “Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.”

— Michael Pollan

147. “People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human – in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost.”

— Michael Pollan

148. “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

149. “Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.”

— Michael Pollan

150. “We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize these four crops – five altogether, but one is cotton – and these are the building blocks of fast food. One of the ways you democratize healthy food is you support healthy food.”

— Michael Pollan