A collection of thoughts and quotations by Michael Pollan on eating, food, diet, plants, nature, chocolate, meal, nutrition, animal, meat, ethics and guilt.
76 Motivational Quotes By Michael Pollan That Will Change Your Life Forever
Michael Pollan is a journalism professor at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, author, and activist. Pollan studied English at Bennington College and then went on to acquire a post graduate degree from Columbia University, before embarking on a career as a writer, essayist and journalism teacher. His most renowned book is ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’, published in 2006, in which he deals with the subject of how human beings go about the process of acquiring their food. Some of his other well-known books include ‘Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation’, ‘A Place of My Own’, ‘In Defense of Food’, ‘Food Rules: An Eater’s Manuel’ and ‘The Botany of Desire’ among others. On the other hand, Pollan has also been a regular contributor of essays to some of the leading publications in the world like ‘TIME’, ‘The New Yorker’ and ‘New York Times’. Pollan has also been awarded the ‘Washburn Award’ by the Boston Museum of Science for his efforts towards making science more popular among the masses. Pollan has also delivered many speeches and given several interviews on different subjects. We have excerpted his quotes from his speeches, writings, books, essays, interviews and lectures. Presenting a collection of Michael Pollan’s quotations on omnivore, lifestyle, fruits, plants, happiness, inspiration, community, sharing, challenge, ignorance, life, love, obesity, malnutrition and diabetes.
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
Michael Pollan
Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
Michael Pollan
The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.
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.
Michael Pollan
The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
Michael Pollan
When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
Michael Pollan
... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.
What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!
Michael Pollan
The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.
This, for many people, is what's 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
Michael Pollan
For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?
Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.
Michael Pollan
Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
Michael Pollan
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
For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.
Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.
Michael Pollan
[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
Michael Pollan
Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.
This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.
Michael Pollan
We ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)
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
Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
Michael Pollan
The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.
Michael Pollan
Use the apple test
"If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.
Michael Pollan
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
Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food,
For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.
Michael Pollan
Lawns are a form of television
Michael Pollan
Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup
Michael Pollan
When chopping onions, just chop onions.
Michael Pollan
Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.
Michael Pollan
Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.
Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
Michael Pollan
...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.
Michael Pollan
(Sir Albert)Howard put it this way:"Artificial manures (synthetic fertilizers)lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.
Michael Pollan
Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
Michael Pollan
...our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows." -Martin Renner
Michael Pollan
Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring - to the carelessness of both producers and consumers.
Michael Pollan
There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
Michael Pollan
We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.
Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
Michael Pollan
Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
Michael Pollan
Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.
Michael Pollan
It's brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.
It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
Michael Pollan
Be the kind of person who takes supplements -- then skip the supplements.
Michael Pollan
Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.
Michael Pollan
...People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.
Michael Pollan
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
Michael Pollan
A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country,...
Michael Pollan
Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.
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
The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
Michael Pollan
Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.
I wondered if this wasn't a case of making the ideal an enemy of the good, but Salatin was convinced that industrial organic was finally a contradiction in terms. I decided I had to find out if he was right.
Perhaps as the sway of tradition in our eating decisions weakens, habits we once took for granted are thrown up in the air, where they're more easily buffeted by a strong idea or a breeze of fashion.
You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
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 unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup )
Howard put it this way:)
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: to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction. )
