Quotes from Michael Pollan

Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.

You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It's a shame. It's the media and the food industry: they've fed our panic around time.

The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.

You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have - while we have consciousness, toolmaking, language, they have biochemistry.

French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

I think cooking is really key because it's the only way you're going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don't cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar - much more than you would ever use at home.

Hillary Clinton is not strongly identified with reforming the industrial food system. The Clintons were involved with Walmart and Tyson in Arkansas. Though as a senator, Hillary was pretty good at reaching out to the small farmers in Upstate New York.

The French fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes - and cleaning up the mess.

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.

Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.

A lot of what you see in the supermarket I would argue is not really food. It's what I call edible, food-like substances.

I probably spend more on food than a lot of people, and I feel good about the whole food chain I'm supporting when I'm doing it. But even I have to remind myself. I'm always complaining about the prices at the farmer's market.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry - before you eat and then again along the way.

Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.

Cooking meat over a fire is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men.

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

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

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

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

... 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.