Michael Pollan /ˈpɒlən/ is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
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 designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.
. . . 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.
Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.
Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.
People eating the western diet of heavily processed food, of lots of meat and added sugar and added fat, and very little whole grains and fruits and vegetables. Populations who eat that way have seriously high incidences of chronic diseases.
High-quality food is better for your health.
At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other.
One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.
I don't like writing as an expert. I like writing as an amateur. I like writing as an idiot. It's much more fun to start in ignorance.
We used to eat economically. One of the things that happened is that we lost the cultural skills that used to allow people to eat well cheaply. For example making three or four meals from a chicken, rather than buying chicken breasts.
People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.
Students are very engaged by the issues, and it's not surprising because food choices are one of the few powers a child has.
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.
Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.
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.
The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.