Michael Pollan Quotes

“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?”

Source: The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World

Michael Pollan book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

Source: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

“The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.”

“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.”

“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Michael Pollan Quotes about food

“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 eat”

“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

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

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Michael Pollan book Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

Source: Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.”

“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”

[Unhappy Meals, 2007-01-28, The New York Times Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?ei=5090&en=a18a7f35515014c7&ex=1327640400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print, 2007-01-28]

Michael Pollan Quotes about people

Michael Pollan book Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

Source: Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“This, for many people, is what's most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing”

“…the microwave is an individualistic serial machine – it can only do one at a time so if you've got four people eating four different entrees, each has to be individually heated. So our microwave dinner, which was supposed to save us so much time, took about an hour to get to the table.”

“There are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, then there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.”

“You are what what you eat eats.”

Source: The Botany of Desire (2001), Chapter 2 (p. 79)

Michael Pollan Quotes

“The family meal is the nursery of democracy.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“We forget how much time it can take simply to avoid cooking”

Context: It's [a kitchen/dining table] where we teach our children the manners they need to get along in society. We teach them how to share. To take turns. To argue without fighting and insulting other people. They learn the art of adult conversation. The family meal is the nursery of democracy.

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”

Context: We forget how much time it can take simply to avoid cooking: all that time spent driving to restaurants or waiting for our orders, none of which gets counted as 'food preparation'. And much of the half-hour saved by not cooking is spent watching screens.

“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“So that's us: processed corn, walking.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“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.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 333.
Context: The industrialization — and brutalization — of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. 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.

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

“But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Shake the hand that feeds you.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“… the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”

Source: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“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.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”

Source: Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

“The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so.”

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 318.

“Home cooking is good for you, and I eat out less. But that's the least of it. What has surprised me is how stimulating it is. How satisfying. You learn a lot about plants and animals. You begin to recognise your place in the world.”

[In Defense of Food: Author, Journalist Michael Pollan on Nutrition, Food Science and the American Diet, 2008-02-13, Democracy Now!, http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/13/in_defense_of_food_author_journalist, 2009-04-15]

“Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.”

[Michael Pollan: Why the family meal is crucial to civilisation, Sat 25 May 2013, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/may/25/michael-pollan-family-meal-civilisation, 2018-05-23]

“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.”

Source: The Botany of Desire (2001), Chapter 1, “Desire: Sweetness / Plant: The Apple” (p. 41)

“Evolution doesn’t depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.”

Introduction “The Human Bumblebee” (p. xxi)
The Botany of Desire (2001)