The first step in reforming appetite is going from processed food to real food. Then, if you can afford organic or grass-fed, fantastic. But the first step is moving from processed industrial food to the real thing. – Michael Pollan
I mean, we’re really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification. – Michael Pollan
The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies. – Michael Pollan
When you cook, you get to shop. You get to vote if you want the pastured raised pork or the organic grain. You can get to help produce your agricultural system, and you give that up when you outsource your cooking. You become dependent on what’s offered – and that’s a shame. – Michael Pollan
Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we’ve designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food. – Michael Pollan
My work has gotten more political over time, but once you start exploring food, you find you’re up against economics and politics and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to deal with. – Michael Pollan
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
Even if you don’t think you can cook well, you can cook better than the food industry. – Michael Pollan
Restaurants serve supersize portions to make you feel you’re getting your money’s worth. – Michael Pollan
It’s not that hard to eat well if you’re willing to put a little more time into it, a little more thoughtfulness into it and, yes, a little bit more money. – Michael Pollan
Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable. – Michael Pollan
A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet. – Michael Pollan
Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don’t realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature. – Michael Pollan
A cow out on grass is just an incredible thing to behold… Cows and other ruminants can do things we just can’t do. They have the most highly evolved digestive organ on the planet, called the rumen. And the rumen can digest grass. It takes grass, cellulose in grass, and turns it into protein, very nutritious protein. We can’t do that. – Michael Pollan
We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human. – Michael Pollan
To a very great extent, it’s the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture – that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product. – Michael Pollan
Every major food company now has an organic division. There’s more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before. – Michael Pollan
There’s been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with. – Michael Pollan
After writing ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma,’ I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn’t care about how their food was grown but who did care about their health. – Michael Pollan
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
Our big problem is that high-calorie, special-occasion foods like cakes, fried foods, etc. have become so cheap and easy that we eat them every day. Make them special again by cooking them yourself. You won’t do it every day, I promise. – Michael Pollan
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
It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television – or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. – Michael Pollan
There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we’re eating them every day. – Michael Pollan
