Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

104. “Leave something on your plate... ‘Better to go to waste than to waist.”

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

113. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

116. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

118. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

120. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

124. “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

125. “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

126. “To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.”

— Michael Pollan

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

133. “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

134. “Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. That’s why he was so popular. That’s why he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio. He was the American Dionysus.”

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

138. “At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.”

— Michael Pollan

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

142. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

145. “Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.”

— Michael Pollan

146. “A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.”

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

— Michael Pollan

149. “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

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