Quotes from Michael Pollan

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

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

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

"Industrial organic" might sound like an oxymoron, but it is a reality.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

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

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

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.

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

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

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.

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.

You are what what you eat eats.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "celebration.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.

So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.