Quotes from Michael Pollan

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

Nature abhors a garden.

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the 'pieds de Dieu'—the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still—foot odor.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

Even people who like the kind of food on offer, are coming to recognize that eating from this food chain is not conducive to good health.

The first step towards solving the omnivore's dilemma is knowledge: eating with full consciousness. When that happens, I have a lot of confidence that people will make good choices.

Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.

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

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

Is there any practice less selfish, any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

I'm very picky about the meat I eat. I eat grass-fed beef, which is now becoming more common. Yes, it's still more expensive, but it's a very sustainable product.

Without the potatoe, the balance of European power might never have tilted north

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

Basically, farm chemicals are labor-saving devices, and farmers who don't use them - weed killers especially - have to work harder or hire more help.

When you cook, you get to shop. You get to vote if you want the pastured raised pork or the organic grain. You can get to help produce your agricultural system, and you give that up when you outsource your cooking. You become dependent on what's offered - and that's a shame.

Restaurants serve supersize portions to make you feel you're getting your money's worth.

If you're eating grassland meat, your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.

In the amount of time it takes to microwave a TV dinner, you can put something much tastier on the table, I promise.

Even if you don't think you can cook well, you can cook better than the food industry.