Quotes from Michael Pollan

When eating sonewhere other than at a tablem stick to fruits and vegetables.

You have just dined," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." The

Nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it.

Inside, the bathroom was a riot of sparkling light. The arc of water I sent forth was truly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a waterfall of diamonds cascading into a pool, breaking its surface into a billion clattering fractals of light. This went on for a pleasant eternity.

For as you go on, you'll be getting more calories, but not necessarily more pleasure.

According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children.

A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. 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.

Food is a costly antidepressant.

But unless you can afford to hire a private chef to prepare meals exactly to your specifications, letting other people cook for you means losing control over your eating life, the portions as much as the ingredients. Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food and not edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.

Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

To think of some of the most delicious components of foods as toxins, as nutritionism has taught us to do in the case of fat, does little for our happiness as eaters.

The greatest biodiversity of an species is typically found in the place where it first evolved -- where nature first experimented white all the possibilities what an apple, or a potato or peach, could be.

What matters is not the special occasion but the everyday practice—the default habits that govern your eating on a typical day. "All things in moderation," it is often said, but we should never forget the wise addendum, sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Including moderation.

The clue arrived a year later, in the form of an article in a scientific journal describing the behavior of rats given a newly discovered compound called LSD. Hubbard tracked down the researcher, obtained some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience. He witnessed the beginning of life on earth as well as his own conception.

LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time. (Leaves!)

What existential difference is there between the human being's role in this (or any) garden and the bumblebee's

The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own.

So: Ask yourself not, Am I full ? but, Is my hunger gone? That moment will arrive several bites sooner.

We divide the world into subjects and objects, and here in the garden, as in nature generally, we humans are the subjects.

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.

Food processing began as a way to extend the shelf life of food by protecting it from these competitors. This is often accomplished by making the food less appealing to them, by removing nutrients from it

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century gastronomist, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which "feed," and humans, who eat, or dine, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology.

D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds. Put me down as two for three.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.