Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “To plant trees,” Russell Page wrote in his memoir, “is to give body and life to one’s dreams of a better world.”

— Michael Pollan

202. “For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.”

— Michael Pollan

203. “The real food is not being advertised.”

— Michael Pollan

204. “It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.”

— Michael Pollan

205. “My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won’t be reversed: by now the Jonathan’s as much an American as I am.”

— Michael Pollan

206. “I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.”

— Michael Pollan

207. “In the end I’m still a writer. I’m still a journalist, and my first responsibility is to my readers. That’s where I have to draw the line.”

— Michael Pollan

208. “You’re not seriously telling us that LSD is less harmful than alcohol, are you?’ Of course I am!”

— Michael Pollan

209. “It’s astonishing, actually, how much anger an animal’s assault on your garden can incite.”

— Michael Pollan

210. “The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet.”

— Michael Pollan

211. “I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.”

— Michael Pollan

212. “Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion.”

— Michael Pollan

213. “Polyface is proof that people can sometimes do more for the health of a place by cultivating it rather than by leaving it alone.”

— Michael Pollan

214. “I still think we have a long way to go on rebuilding a culture of cooking. Everyday simple cooking.”

— Michael Pollan

215. “In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known.”

— Michael Pollan

216. “Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”

— Michael Pollan

217. “But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.”

— Michael Pollan

218. “The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it.”

— Michael Pollan

219. “Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn’t disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you’d be willing to share.”

— Michael Pollan

220. “On the back was a quotation from William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: “The true method of knowledge is experiment.”

— Michael Pollan

221. “It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.”

— Michael Pollan

222. “Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.”

— Michael Pollan

223. “For great many species today, fitness means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.”

— Michael Pollan

224. “The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but “health” is simply not one of them, because it is given.”

— Michael Pollan

225. “Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it’s rate of obesity.”

— Michael Pollan

226. “We spend a remarkably small, shamefully small, percentage of our income on food. We manage to spend money on lots of other things. All up and down the social ladder you find people with plenty of money for cell phones, home entertainment systems, all other forms of entertainment.”

— Michael Pollan

227. “The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”

— Michael Pollan

228. “Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.”

— Michael Pollan

229. “When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest – the added sugars and fats in processed foods.”

— Michael Pollan

230. “Improving the soil improved the man.”

— Michael Pollan

231. “Sigmund Freud wrote that “there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego.” Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything.”

— Michael Pollan

232. “Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1.”

— Michael Pollan

233. “I’m very hopeful that we’ll see some change in our food system. I don’t know how far we’ll go, or how quickly we’ll get there, but there is no question that a significant percentage of the American public is dissatisfied with the food system.”

— Michael Pollan

234. “As grandmothers used to say, ‘Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.”

— Michael Pollan

235. “Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.”

— Michael Pollan

236. “In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.”

— Michael Pollan

237. “In a way, the more techniques you apply, the less important the ingredients are. It shouldn’t be that way, but you can get away with it. But if you’re highlighting this astounding artichoke, it’s got to be an astounding artichoke.”

— Michael Pollan

238. “But I contend that most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we’re consuming it – in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone – is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.”

— Michael Pollan

239. “I’ve always been interested in plants because I’m a gardener, so I have a basic understanding of botany and things like that, but it’s all self-taught.”

— Michael Pollan

240. “People don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.”

— Michael Pollan

241. “For me, “spiritual” is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct – at once so familiar and on reflection so strange – stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within.”

— Michael Pollan

242. “So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer.”

— Michael Pollan

243. “Students are very engaged by the issues, and it’s not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.”

— Michael Pollan

244. “I’m kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.”

— Michael Pollan

245. “Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it’s high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.”

— Michael Pollan

246. “You have to draw lines between being a journalist and an activist.”

— Michael Pollan

247. “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.”

— Michael Pollan

248. “Lawns are a form of television.”

— Michael Pollan

249. “One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.”

— Michael Pollan

250. “The virus altered the the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.”

— Michael Pollan