Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.”

— Michael Pollan

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

— Michael Pollan

253. “The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of “antinutrients” – compounds that actually block the body’s absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.”

— Michael Pollan

254. “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

255. “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

256. “Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”

— Michael Pollan

257. “And I remember Bill asking, ‘What’s going on?’ “‘I’m experiencing a lot of guilt.’ Bill replied, ‘That’s a very common human experience,’ and with that, the whole image of being hanged pixilated and then just disappeared, to be replaced by this tremendous sensation of freedom and interconnectedness. This was huge for me. I saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would let go. A little older and wiser, now I can do this for myself.”

— Michael Pollan

258. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

260. “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

261. “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

262. “Most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation.”

— Michael Pollan

263. “Even people who like the kind of food on offer, are coming to recognize that eating from this food chain is not conducive to good health.”

— Michael Pollan

264. “On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.”

— Michael Pollan

265. “People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it’s a really good idea if you can exert the kind of discipline needed.”

— Michael Pollan

266. “But however it worked, it worked, or certainly seemed to: by the end of the decade, LSD was widely regarded in North America as a miracle cure for alcohol addiction.”

— Michael Pollan

267. “What memoir of childhood doesn’t at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut lawn or a boxwood hedge, to leap the fence of years?”

— Michael Pollan

268. “Journalism is one set of tools – one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.”

— Michael Pollan

269. “What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence – a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.”

— Michael Pollan

270. “It’s very important to get out, to do reporting. It’s also really interesting. I come at it as a journalist, and I think that’s helped me, and I come at it as someone who sees nature wherever he looks, and that helps.”

— Michael Pollan

271. “Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much – the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime! – without suffering complete annihilation.”

— Michael Pollan

272. “Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.”

— Michael Pollan

273. “I think that the American diet is a very large part of the reason we’re spending 2.3 trillion dollar per year on health care in this country. 75% of that money goes to treat chronic diseases, preventable chronic diseases, most of those are linked to diet.”

— Michael Pollan

274. “If you’re cooking food, you don’t have to count calories.”

— Michael Pollan

275. “Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.”

— Michael Pollan

276. “The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn’t have. It’s very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that’s going wrong in society.”

— Michael Pollan

277. “I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.”

— Michael Pollan

278. “I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food.”

— Michael Pollan

279. “The only one I have any trust in is storytelling – there’s a couple I have a lot of trust in.”

— Michael Pollan

280. “All money for agricultural extension, land grant universities has been toward developing industrial food. Lots of money has been invested toward maximizing yield. If you took even a small amount of that money and put it toward organic research, I don’t have any doubts you could match those yields.”

— Michael Pollan

281. “It’s more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional – I’m talking about for your health – then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.”

— Michael Pollan

282. “We’re supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are – the environment, your health, animal welfare – the answers are going to be different for every person.”

— Michael Pollan

283. “There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.”

— Michael Pollan

284. “After a week in front of the screen, the opportunity to work with my hands – with all my senses, in fact – is always a welcome change of pace, whether in the kitchen or in the garden. There’s something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense. I don’t want you to get the idea it’s made a Buddhist of me, but in the kitchen, maybe a little bit. When stirring the pot, just stir the pot.”

— Michael Pollan

285. “What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”

— Michael Pollan

286. “Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.”

— Michael Pollan

287. “It’s been a mystery to me and a disappointment why conversation about health care reform hasn’t turned more attention to the subject of food.”

— Michael Pollan

288. “We could have a greener economy, even a greener consumer economy by changing the rules – whether it’s by taxing carbon or trading carbon, I’m not sure what – but in the end there’s just a fundamental problem with the sheer amount we’re consuming.”

— Michael Pollan

289. “We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration.”

— Michael Pollan

290. “Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I’m writing about.”

— Michael Pollan

291. “Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.”

— Michael Pollan

292. “I’m not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that’s something we can all do more and do better.”

— Michael Pollan

293. “The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.”

— Michael Pollan

294. “Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.”

— Michael Pollan

295. “Timothy Leary, always happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced him to put his supply of Sandoz psilocybin pills under the control of Health Services: “Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.”

— Michael Pollan

296. “That anyone should need to write a book advising people to “eat food” could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.”

— Michael Pollan

297. “All he would tell me is that the experience, which took place in his meditation practice, acquainted him with “something way, way beyond a material worldview that I can’t really talk to my colleagues about, because it involves metaphors or assumptions that I’m really uncomfortable with as a scientist.”

— Michael Pollan

298. “Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal – unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.”

— Michael Pollan

299. “Much of gardening is a return, an effort at recovering remembered landscapes.”

— Michael Pollan

300. “If you’re a politician it’s very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.”

— Michael Pollan