Michael Pollan
To eat well, you either have to invest money or time. If you can put in some time, the raw ingredients are not that expensive. You can eat extremely well on a budget.Collection: Money
People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.Collection: Food
Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.Collection: Food
The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.Collection: Gardening
I think cooking is really key because it's the only way you're going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don't cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar - much more than you would ever use at home.Collection: Diet
We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Diet
Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved.Collection: Diet
A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.Collection: Gardening
High-quality food is better for your health.Collection: Food
As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.Collection: Gardening
In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.Collection: Food
Eat all the junk food you want - as long as you cook it yourself. That way, it'll be less junky, and you won't eat it every day because it's a lot of work.Collection: Food
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.Collection: Food
The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.Collection: Leadership
Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.Collection: Environmental
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.Collection: Diet
Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important.Collection: Diet
I've been amazed to learn all of the links between microbial health and our general health. This all started by trying to understand fermentation. The fermentation outside your body, and its relation to the fermentation inside your body. The key to health is fermentation, it turns out.Collection: Health
To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we're also going to be a lot healthier.Collection: Diet
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.Collection: Environmental
Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.Collection: Family
Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.Collection: Real
If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.Collection: Plant
Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrupCollection: Corn Syrup
A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.Collection: Carbon Footprint
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.Collection: Practice
Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.Collection: Doctors
Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.Collection: Rotting
People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.Collection: Agriculture
Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.Collection: People
The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.Collection: Three
Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.Collection: Cooking
If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eatCollection: Strong
There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.Collection: Long
Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from theseCollection: Health
When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.Collection: Taste
You are what what you eat eats.Collection: Food
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?Collection: Selfish
Don't get your fuel from the same place your car doesCollection: Car
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.Collection: Wall
Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap.Collection: Made
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Years
Most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation.Collection: Important
There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.Collection: Giving Up
One of the skills of a journalist, though, is to find people who can teach him what he needs to know. So instead of taking courses, I've been very lucky in that I found teachers - scientists, especially - who were willing to teach me what I needed to know, whether it was about genetically modified crops or how photosynthesis works, and so on. I just find my teachers and don't have to pay for my education.Collection: Teacher
I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.Collection: Thinking
Once you introduce the issue to young people and suggest to them that they have the ability to vote with their forks, either by positively going for certain kinds of foods or rejecting other kinds of foods, they realize that this is a responsibility and an opportunity to shape the world a little bit by their own choices.Collection: Responsibility
I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.Collection: Fun