Quotes from Michael Pollan

Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience

How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history;

Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.

Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.

To plant trees," Russell Page wrote in his memoir, "is to give body and life to one's dreams of a better world.

Much of gardening is a return, an effort at recovering remembered landscapes.

Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the supermarket and the home-meal replacement have succeeded in obscuring. yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one's pronouncements.

Improving the soil improved the man.

Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.

Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity.

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.

In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known

we need, and now more than ever, to learn how to use nature without damaging it.

perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwavable organic TV dinners(four words I never expected to see conjoined)stacked in the frozen food case.

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? So

It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to do one thing at a time. One thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly, uni-tasking.

In order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.

What memoir of childhood doesn't at some point turn on the scent of a sweet pea or a freshly cut lawn or a boxwood hedge, to leap the fence of years?

consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think. Carhart-Harris

If you walk five blocks north from the wholefoods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight way, you'll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few homeless people.

But I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it—in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone—is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.

My confidence in telling this story gradually returned, and after a month I could write again; you can judge how well that's going, but at least it's going.

Today promised not to be about the ecstasy of life on a farm. Today was the day we were processing broilers or, to abandon euphemism, killing chickens.

Everything is interaction and reciprocal," wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the first time I can remember, did this: "I myself am identical with nature.