Quotes by Michael Pollan

“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.”

“But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we ...”

“Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.”

“Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple ...”

“That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ours...”

“So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing w...”

“As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming inc...”

“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.”

“So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But...”

“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 subtra...”

“That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of ou...”

“The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.”

“Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians -- we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted -- to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines an...”

“Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "W...”

“Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.”

“The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging...”

“The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, is a parable about the folly of human ingenuity -- about how our species can sometimes be too smar...”

“Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.”

“[David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the si...”

“Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which...”