Quotes by Michael Pollan

“How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the de...”

“It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has g...”

“My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.”

“Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).”

“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.”

“Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have...”

“People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our...”

“Memory is the enemy of wonder”

“In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same -- mageiros -- and the word shares an etymological root with "magic.”

“You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of ...”

“Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the sam...”

“Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuousl...”

“Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan d...”

“Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not...”

“You are what what you eat eats.”

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

“While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the t...”

“Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills de...”

“When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.”

“The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those produc...”