Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Corporations cook very differently from how people do.”

— Michael Pollan

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

209. “Memory is the enemy of wonder.”

— Michael Pollan

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— 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. “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

232. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

234. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

236. “I think there’s a real tension between capitalism and morality. That’s not to say these systems aren’t powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that’s just a pipe dream.”

— Michael Pollan

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

242. “My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices.”

— Michael Pollan

243. “Lawns are a form of television.”

— Michael Pollan

244. “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

245. “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

246. “The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.”

— Michael Pollan

247. “The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.”

— Michael Pollan

248. “Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.”

— Michael Pollan

249. “There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western diseases; in countries where people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate of cancer is half what is in the United States.”

— Michael Pollan

250. “My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.”

— Michael Pollan