Quotes from Michael Pollan

Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved.

People say they don't have time to cook, yet in the last few years we have found an extra two hours a day for the internet.

To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

To eat well, you either have to invest money or time. If you can put in some time, the raw ingredients are not that expensive. You can eat extremely well on a budget.

The way you support farmers is by shopping and buying raw ingredients.

We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain. Food comes to us ready-made in packages that obscure as much information as they reveal.

After writing 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn't care about how their food was grown but who did care about their health.

Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it

A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.

For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

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

Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

You want to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you'll be really straight with them at all times.

McDonald's is in a unique position. They can decide they don't want meat with hormones in it, and that will be the end of hormones in meat. I actually think exerting pressure on McDonald's is probably just as important as on the Department of Agriculture.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

As soon as you plow, you're releasing carbon.

Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes thereafter, that's a kind of reminder to focus on the experience, enjoy those first bites, and as you get into the 20th bite, you're talking calories and not pleasure.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have.

My mode as a writer is to layer different perspectives: the scientific, the philosophical, the political, the journalistic. When you layer them, you get a really wholesome, interesting picture.