Quotes from Michael Pollan

Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.

Can a recognition of one's shallowness qualify as a profound insight?

Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive

anyone who picks a mushroom trails an invisible cloud of its spore behind him; this, he believes, is the origin of the idea of fairy dust.

quotation from William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: "The true method of knowledge is experiment.

The dinner we have eaten tonight," he told his audience in a 1928 lecture, "was a part of the sun but a few months ago." Industrial food both obscured these links and attenuated them. In lengthening the food chain so that we could feed great cities from distant soils, we were breaking the "rules of nature" at least twice: by robbing nutrients from the soils the foods had been grown in and then squandering those nutrients by processing the foods.

Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.

Evolution doesn't depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.

The usual antonym for the word "spiritual" is "material." That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical.

Quantum mechanics holds that matter may not be as innocent of mind as the materialist would have us believe. For example, a subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple locations, is pure possibility, until it is measured—that is, perceived by a mind. Only then and not a moment sooner does it drop into reality as we know it: acquire fixed coordinates in time and space. The implication here is that matter might not exist as such in the absence of a perceiving subject. Needless

negative capability," the ability to exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for absolutes, whether those of science or spirituality.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

Nutritionism prefers to tinker with the Western diet, adjusting the various nutrients (lowering the fat, boosting the protein) and fortifying processed foods rather than questioning their value in the first place.

Apparently it is easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.

There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms, is the good.)

its power to imbue everything in our field of experience with a heightened sense of purpose and consequence.

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

At every level, from the soil to the plate, the industrialization of the food chain has involved a process of chemical and biological simplification

brooding on his cramped horizon and reaching for a drink.

In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau once wrote; a century later

one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. (These

the critical influence of "set" and "setting." Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.

Our brains constitute only 2.5 percent of our weight yet consumer 20 percent of our energy when we're resting.

pensar no alimento como puro e simples combustível é interpretá-lo mal.