Quotes from Michael Pollan

Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It's cheaper than McDonald's in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is - you know, it's an industry kind of ruining North Carolina.

Raw foodists are kind of paddling upstream against evolution. The only reason they can do it, and they don't all keel over, is that they are using blenders. They're very Cuisinart-dependent.

When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.

We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen.

The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.

Europeans fought for shorter workdays, more vacation time, family leave, and all these kinds of things. Those haven't been priorities in America: it's been about money. You see, in the countries that fought for time, they cook more often; they have less obesity. There are real benefits to having time.

My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.

Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon.

Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.

To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture - that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product.

The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.

How my son discovered vegetables was from growing them in the garden.

To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we're also going to be a lot healthier.

I'm kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.

Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness - which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness - is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world.

You can have intense food experience with less food. Europeans have intense food experiences but eat less food.

It's no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television - or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.

In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.

In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.

America ships tons of sugar cookies to Denmark and Denmark ships tons of sugar cookies to America. Wouldn't it be more efficient just to swap recipes?

Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.