Quotes from Michael Pollan

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

Food choices are something fundamental you can control about yourself: what you take into your body. When so many other things are out of control and your influence over climate change - all these much larger issues - it's very hard to see any results or any progress. But everybody can see progress around food.

I've been amazed to learn all of the links between microbial health and our general health. This all started by trying to understand fermentation. The fermentation outside your body, and its relation to the fermentation inside your body. The key to health is fermentation, it turns out.

Eat all the junk food you want - as long as you cook it yourself. That way, it'll be less junky, and you won't eat it every day because it's a lot of work.

We love salt, fat and sugar. We're hard-wired to go for those flavors. They trip our dopamine networks, which are our craving networks.

Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so.

Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important.

Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.

You can't be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa, he was singing a different tune.

I think the most important thing we can teach our kids for their long-term health and happiness is how to cook.

I was really gratified that, of all the episodes of 'Cooked,' the baking one really hit a chord. There were months where there were dozens of loaves posted from people on my Twitter feed every day... And it's a little bit of a guy thing. Most of those loaves put up on Twitter were put up there by guys.

You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it's a lot of sugar. It's just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.

The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.

If you fill your Agriculture Committee with representatives of commodity farmers, and you don't have urbanites, you don't represent eaters, okay? You don't have people from New York City on these committees, you are going to end up with the kind of farm bills we have: a piece of special interest legislation.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.

We spend our lives in front of screens, and cooking is one of the best antidotes.

I don't think of myself as a spiritual person.

There is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you're General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald's, because the family meal is usually one thing shared.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.

I hope that if you're cooking two nights a week, you can try for three.

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.

The first step in reforming appetite is going from processed food to real food. Then, if you can afford organic or grass-fed, fantastic. But the first step is moving from processed industrial food to the real thing.

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.