You are what what you eat eats.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
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.
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.
So that's us: processed corn, walking.
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.
The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.
Shake the hand that feeds you.
If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.
... 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!
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
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.
Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
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.
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.
Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.
Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
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.
![[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.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/michael-pollan-37611.jpg)
[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.
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.
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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)
We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.
Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.
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.
Use the apple test "If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.
Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.
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.
Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food,
We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.
It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
Lawns are a form of television
 unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup ){kind=small}
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
When chopping onions, just chop onions.
Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.
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.
A good pot holds memories.
Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.
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(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.
Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.
...our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows." -Martin Renner
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.
There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
...People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.
We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.
Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
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Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener.
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.
: 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. ){kind=small}
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.
Be the kind of person who takes supplements -- then skip the supplements.
There's nothing really quite like that first soft spring breeze of intoxication. Keep drinking all you want, but you will never get it back.
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.
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country,...
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.
The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
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.
Rule No. 41. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
Umami…is the quasi-secret heart and soul of almost every braise, stew, and soup.
You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.
The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we’re eating animals.
