Quotes from Michael Pollan

pile, I started to see the golden kernels everywhere, ground into the mud by tires and boots, floating in the puddles of rainwater, pancaked on the steel rails. Most of this grain is destined for factory farms and processing plants, so no one worries much about keeping it particularly clean. Even so, it was hard not to register something deeply amiss in the sight of so much food lying around on the wet ground.

He quotes an expert on anxiety who suggests we should think of the two disorders as "fraternal twins": "Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss." Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense.

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.

The Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.... We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

I could, like some of the meat we were cooking, relax into it, clear my mind of competing desires & give myself over to the work... This time became a kind of luxury. And that is precisely when I began to truly enjoy the work of cooking.

DO ALL YOUR EATING AT A TABLE. No, a desk is not a table.

How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say

By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle

TotuÈ™i, tot ceea ce pot s? realizeze scriitorii în general este s? ridice în aer un deget sensibil È™i s? presimt? o schimbare a vremii; foarte rar ei înÈ™iÈ™i provoac? schimbarea.

The only discordant note in the conversation came when I casually dropped the slang expression for psilocybin when asking him about going hunting for 'shrooms. "I really, really hate that word," he said, almost gravely, adopting the tone of a parent upbraiding a potty-mouthed child. The word never crossed my lips again.

How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say the plant world's success story because it is no longer clear that corn's triumph is such a boon to the rest of the world, and because we should give credit where credit is due.

I myself am identical with nature.

Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates. How brilliant!

Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss." Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense.

the marvel of consciousness," as Vladimir Nabokov once called it, "that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being"—maybe

The problem starts with the nutrient. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, a seemingly unavoidable approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.

A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country

There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. "Broken" does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system.

Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice. At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically managed the omnivores dilemma have lost their sharpness here or simply failed. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food American's have never had a single, strong, stable, culinary tradition to guide us.

The premise behind the approach was that our fear of death is a function of our egos, which burden us with a sense of separateness that can become unbearable as we approach death. "We are born into an egoless world," Cohen wrote, "but we live and die imprisoned within ourselves.

What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.

Appleseed's orchard, is a blooming, fruiting meritocracy, in which every apple seed roots in the same soil and any seedling has an equal chance at greatness, regardless of origin or patrimony. Befitting the American success story, the botany of the apple—the fact that the one thing it won't do is come true from seed—meant

Could it be that sweetness is the prototype of all desire?

People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.