Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.”

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

153. “Not that I’m against meat eating. But I think we’re eating too much.”

— Michael Pollan

154. “The longer I’ve looked at these questions, of the American diet and the public health crisis that we face because of that diet, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that the collapse of cooking is a big part of the problem.”

— Michael Pollan

155. “We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.”

— Michael Pollan

156. “If you care about the animals, actually, organic might not be the best answer because now we have organic feedlots, organic factory farms. If you care about the environment – pesticides, especially – organic is the answer.”

— Michael Pollan

157. “Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.”

— Michael Pollan

158. “Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. Cook it yourself. Eat anything you want – just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

— Michael Pollan

159. “Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others.”

— Michael Pollan

160. “I realize that at a certain point if we’re going to change our food system, it’s going to be the next generation that’s going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.”

— Michael Pollan

161. “Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we’re eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I’m always interested in taking things back to the beginning.”

— Michael Pollan

162. “As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.”

— Michael Pollan

163. “Do all your eating at a table.”

— Michael Pollan

164. “The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.”

— Michael Pollan

165. “Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.”

— Michael Pollan

166. “This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.”

— Michael Pollan

167. “There’s been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.”

— Michael Pollan

168. “There are many people who don’t do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I’m not prepared to give up meat. I don’t think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.”

— Michael Pollan

169. “Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.”

— Michael Pollan

170. “The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm’s... the demand for food isn’t elastic; people don’t eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.”

— Michael Pollan

171. “There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.”

— Michael Pollan

172. “I get letters from classes all the time. Say it’s assigned in someone’s 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it’s incredibly gratifying to hear.”

— Michael Pollan

173. “What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism – its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.”

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

175. “A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.”

— Michael Pollan

176. “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

177. “There’s a parable here somewhere, about the difference between journalism and history. What might appear to be “the story” in the present moment may actually be a distraction from it, a shiny object preventing us from seeing the truth of what is really going on beneath the surface of our attention, what will most deeply affect people’s lives in time.”

— Michael Pollan

178. “Anyway, in my writing I’ve always been interested in finding places to stand, and I’ve found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I’m writing about.”

— Michael Pollan

179. “Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices – visual, olfactory, and tactile – to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.”

— Michael Pollan

180. “The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry’s biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.”

— Michael Pollan

181. “The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe.”

— Michael Pollan

182. “Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we’ve designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.”

— Michael Pollan

183. “Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.”

— Michael Pollan

184. “I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley.”

— Michael Pollan

185. “Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing.”

— Michael Pollan

186. “America ships tons of sugar cookies to Denmark and Denmark ships tons of sugar cookies to America. Wouldn’t it be more efficient just to swap recipes?”

— Michael Pollan

187. “For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”

— Michael Pollan

188. “For though we may be the Earth’s gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won’t get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role – that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.”

— Michael Pollan

189. “I really do think that cooking is very important. It’s really important for the farmers because it means you’re going to be buying real food and not processed food, so that means the farmers will capture more of your food dollar.”

— Michael Pollan

190. “Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health.”

— Michael Pollan

191. “Cooking – of whatever kind, everyday or extreme – situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.”

— Michael Pollan

192. “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.”

— Michael Pollan

193. “The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.”

— Michael Pollan

194. “Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.”

— Michael Pollan

195. “Memory is the enemy of wonder.”

— Michael Pollan

196. “Yet the organic label itself – like every other such label in the supermarket – is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.”

— Michael Pollan

197. “There are things we know and things we don’t know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that’s what I’ve tried to build these rules on.”

— Michael Pollan

198. “Cooking is no longer obligatory, and that marks a shift in human history, one whose full implications we’re just beginning to reckon.”

— Michael Pollan

199. “Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.”

— Michael Pollan

200. “Corporations cook very differently from how people do.”

— Michael Pollan