Michael Pollan Quotes - Page 2

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

When chopping onions, just chop onions.

Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.

Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.

One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.

People say they don't have time to cook, yet in the last few years we have found an extra two hours a day for the internet.

We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.

Why don't we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.

Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It's the single most important thing you can do for your health.

If people eat healthy food, they will save enough to compensate for the food price being healthier and spending less on healthcare.

When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.

Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

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

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

One surprise is how deeply the food system is implicated in climate change. I don't think that has really been on people's radar until very recently. 25 to 33 percent of climate change gases can be traced to the food system. I was also surprised that those diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us - heart disease, cancer, diabetes - were virtually unknown 150 years ago, before we began eating this way.

America ships tons of sugar cookies to Denmark and Denmark ships tons of sugar cookies to America. Wouldn't it be more efficient just to swap recipes?

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not

There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig - an animal easily as intelligent as a dog - that becomes the Christmas ham.

Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.

Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.

We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.