Top 350 Michael Pollan Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

312. “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

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 “For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...”

— Michael Pollan

314. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

325. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

327. “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

328. “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

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. “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

331. “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

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. “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

338. “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

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

— Michael Pollan

340. “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

341. “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

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

— 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. “Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing – without a human brain, it is inert – so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen.”

— Michael Pollan

347. “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

348. “The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas.”

— Michael Pollan

349. “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

350. “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