Top Michael Pollan Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Michael Pollan Biography

Michael Pollan /ˈpɒlən/ is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

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Michael Pollan Quotes

There's a lot of research that suggests that organic yields are close or superior to conventional yields depending on factors like climate. In a drought year an organic field of corn will yield more - considerably more - than a conventional field; organic fields hold moisture better so they don't need as much water. It simply isn't true that organic yields are lower than conventional yields.

Corn, Drought, Simply, Water, Years, Yield

The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another. . . and still to this day babies fed on the most "nutritionally complete" formula fail to do as well as babies fed human milk. Even more than margarine, formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.

Baby, Day, Human, Milk, Test, Tests

I try very hard to tell stories and not lecture. I try to approach things as an amateur and not an expert, so that when I'm doing something, I'm starting out in a place a lot like where my readers start out - which is to say, naïve.

Amateur, Experts, Start, Stories, Things, Trying

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.

Animal, Diversity, Feeding, Reasons, Technologies, Technology

Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.

Beginning, Energy, Interested, Meat, Vegetables

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

Eat, French, Greek, Italians, Japanese, Like

Be the kind of person who takes supplements - then skip the supplements.

Kind, Person, Persons, Supplements

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.

Land, Development, Way, Helped, Markets

It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

Car, Fitness, Food, Motivational, Window

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

Humanity, Sun, Eating, Sip, Instead

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Dieting, Eat, Eating Well, Food, Plants

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 our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.

Consequences, Earth, Health, Ideas, Thinking, Worry

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

Chicken, Corn Syrup, Nuggets, Soft, Soft Drinks, Syrup

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.

Powerful, Mean, World, Evolutionary, Species

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 things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost. If that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal.

Food, Knowing, Land, Reality, Simple, Way

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

Breath, Garden, Pods, Sight, Sounding, Vegetables

The issue of snacking is complicated. In principle, "grazing" is probably a good idea. It would even out the insulin spikes and things like that from eating large meals. The problem is it makes it harder for people to control the amount they're eating.

Good, Ideas, Insulin, Issues, Like, People

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.

Courses, Found, People, Skills, Taking, Teacher

Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Cook, Food, Junk, Long, Want

One of the reasons we eat fast food is that we don't have to cook fast food. We are out-sourcing cooking to corporations, they tend to cook with far too much salt, fat, and sugar.

Cooking, Corporations, Eat, Reasons, Sugar

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