Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.”

— Michael Pollan

302. “In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel – it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.”

— Michael Pollan

303. “I have no scientific training at all. I was an English major in school. Everything I learned about science I’ve learned as a journalist would, finding out what I needed to know.”

— Michael Pollan

304. “Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.”

— Michael Pollan

305. “I try to write in the first person – the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.”

— Michael Pollan

306. “The interesting thing I learned was that if you’re really concerned about your health, the best decisions for your health turn out to be the best decisions for the farmers and the best decisions for the environment-and that there is no contradiction there.”

— Michael Pollan

307. “For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.”

— Michael Pollan

308. “I mean, we’re really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.”

— Michael Pollan

309. “For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...”

— Michael Pollan

310. “Yet in general all writers can really do is lift a sensitive finger to the cultural breeze and sense a coming change in the weather; very seldom do they actually change it themselves.”

— Michael Pollan

311. “The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.”

— Michael Pollan

312. “We used to eat economically. One of the things that happened is that we lost the cultural skills that used to allow people to eat well cheaply. For example making three or four meals from a chicken, rather than buying chicken breasts.”

— Michael Pollan

313. “I agree insofar as we eat too much meat. We’re eating about 200 pounds per person per year. That’s about 9 ounces a day. That’s probably more than is good for us and it’s certainly more than is good for the environment.”

— Michael Pollan

314. “Fairness forces you – even when you’re writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done – to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.”

— Michael Pollan

315. “One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.”

— Michael Pollan

316. “I really try to write as an ordinary person would, not as someone who’s too sophisticated about food, or too knowledgeable about things.”

— Michael Pollan

317. “Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.”

— Michael Pollan

318. “Is there any more futile, soul-irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner?”

— Michael Pollan

319. “Today these four crops account for two thirds of the calories we eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet. Why should this concern us? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between fifty and a hundred different chemical compounds and elements in order to be healthy.”

— Michael Pollan

320. “Without the potatoe, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.”

— Michael Pollan

321. “The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.”

— Michael Pollan

322. “You want to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you’ll be really straight with them at all times.”

— Michael Pollan

323. “The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.”

— Michael Pollan

324. “The issue of snacking is complicated. In principle, “grazing” is probably a good idea. It would even out the insulin spikes and things like that from eating large meals. The problem is it makes it harder for people to control the amount they’re eating.”

— Michael Pollan

325. “You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.”

— Michael Pollan

326. “The philosophical implications of “predictive coding” are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories.”

— Michael Pollan

327. “When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic – that is, more spiritual – idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.”

— Michael Pollan

328. “If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access “cosmic consciousness,” or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience.”

— Michael Pollan

329. “The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power – thirty-two billion dollars a year – used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.”

— Michael Pollan

330. “I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.”

— Michael Pollan

331. “Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map – and not the only map.”

— Michael Pollan

332. “The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it’s not the other way around.”

— Michael Pollan

333. “I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in the United States and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.”

— Michael Pollan

334. “Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what’s on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don’t buy industrial meat.”

— Michael Pollan

335. “We don’t die well in America.”

— Michael Pollan

336. “One of the last nights we were together, he said, ‘Honey, don’t push me. I’m finding my way.’” At the same time, he sought to comfort her. “This is simply the wheel of life,” she recalls him saying. “’You feel like you’re being ground down by it now, but the wheel is going to turn and you’ll be on top again.”

— Michael Pollan

337. “Schwartz said that several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. “You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.”

— Michael Pollan

338. “It is possible to be indifferent to flowers – possible but not very likely. Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. 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

339. “How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can’t concentrate? That’s pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.”

— Michael Pollan

340. “Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too.”

— Michael Pollan

341. “The entropy paper asks us to conceive of the mind as an uncertainty-reducing machine with a few serious bugs in it.”

— Michael Pollan

342. “Sometimes the best way to show your respect for something is to just leave it alone.”

— Michael Pollan

343. “If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.”

— Michael Pollan

344. “Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.”

— Michael Pollan

345. “Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end there. Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain kind of perfection.”

— Michael Pollan

346. “These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us.”

— Michael Pollan

347. “The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.”

— Michael Pollan

348. “Among the many, many things the green thumb knows is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging, redeems this season’s deaths and disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.”

— Michael Pollan

349. “Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don’t grow in forests or prairies – in “the wild.” Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.”

— Michael Pollan

350. “The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent.”

— Michael Pollan