Michael Pollan
There are fundamental tensions between the biological reality of the planet and the economic reality. To some extent you can adapt the economy, create a new set of rules and incentives to send it down a better track, but finally people in the first world are going to have to consume a whole lot less.Collection: Reality
We're always projecting our moral categories on things. I think that's inevitable. But capitalism places no particular value on morality. Morality in the market is enforced by contract and regulation and law, because morality is understood to be in conflict with the motive force of greed and accumulation.Collection: Thinking
I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.Collection: Dream
There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.Collection: Mind
I'm kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.Collection: Home
The only one I have any trust in is storytelling - there's a couple I have a lot of trust in.Collection: Couple
I get letters from classes all the time. Say it's assigned in someone's 8th grade class, and the teacher asks everyone to write a letter to me about their impressions and what they learned. So, it's incredibly gratifying to hear.Collection: Teacher
Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.Collection: Vocabulary
Students are very engaged by the issues, and it's not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.Collection: Children
If you care about the animals, actually, organic might not be the best answer because now we have organic feedlots, organic factory farms. If you care about the environment - pesticides, especially - organic is the answer.Collection: Animal
We're spending, on average, 27 minutes a day cooking and about four minutes cleaning up, so basically about a half hour. Any one of TV shows takes twice as long to watch as that, which I think is very interesting because the main excuse people give for not cooking is they don't have time to cook, but somehow they're finding time to watch other people cook or eat on TV.Collection: Thinking
I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.Collection: Writing
The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.Collection: Animal
I realize that at a certain point if we're going to change our food system, it's going to be the next generation that's going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.Collection: Animal
The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.Collection: Everyday
In the end I'm still a writer. I'm still a journalist, and my first responsibility is to my readers. That's where I have to draw the line.Collection: Responsibility
We spend a remarkably small, shamefully small, percentage of our income on food. We manage to spend money on lots of other things. All up and down the social ladder you find people with plenty of money for cell phones, home entertainment systems, all other forms of entertainment.Collection: Home
My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices.Collection: People
Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. ("Hard" cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)Collection: Sweet
Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.Collection: Weed
When chopping onions, just chop onions.Collection: Onions
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.Collection: Land
It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.Collection: Vegetables
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.Collection: Animal
When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.Collection: Appreciation
We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.Collection: Priorities
Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.Collection: Healthy
It's been a mystery to me and a disappointment why conversation about health care reform hasn't turned more attention to the subject of food.Collection: Disappointment
The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.Collection: Agriculture
Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.Collection: Middle
The longer I've looked at these questions, of the American diet and the public health crisis that we face because of that diet, the more I've come to the conclusion that the collapse of cooking is a big part of the problem.Collection: Cooking
Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of othersCollection: Self
...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.Collection: Country
It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.Collection: Cooking
I think that there's some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don't have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television-we've turned cooking into a spectator sport. ...My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table.Collection: Sports
The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.Collection: Lines
We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are - the environment, your health, animal welfare - the answers are going to be different for every person.Collection: Animal
There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Garden
But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.Collection: Challenges
Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.Collection: Mom
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.Collection: Beautiful
[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.Collection: Government
A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ‘pieds de Dieu’—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.Collection: Feet
Wrangham cites several studies indicating that in fact humans don't do well on raw food: they can't maintain their body weight, and half of the women on a raw-food regimen stop menstruating. Devotees of raw food rely heavily on juicers and blenders, because otherwise they would have to spend as much time chewing as the chimps do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to extract sufficient energy from unprocessed plant matter to power a body with such a big, hungry brain.Collection: Body Weight
Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.Collection: Rewards
The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.Collection: War
For great many species today, fitness means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.Collection: Powerful
Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.Collection: Real