Michael Pollan /ˈpɒlən/ is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
I think that the American diet is a very large part of the reason we're spending 2. 3 trillion dollar per year on health care in this country. 75% of that money goes to treat chronic diseases, preventable chronic diseases, most of those are linked to diet.
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.
One of the problems is that the US government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health.
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 whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.
There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.
Suffering. . . is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.
Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food. . stay away from these
Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.
I've always been interested in plants because I'm a gardener, so I have a basic understanding of botany and things like that, but it's all self-taught.
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.
Johnny Appleseed was revered. . he was. . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.
There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.
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.
I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.
People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.
Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.
In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.