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Quotes About Food

Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only "good to eat"—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, "good to think," for among all the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas.
~ Michael Pollan
food system organized around quantity rather than quality has a destructive feedback loop built into it, such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eats, in a futile—but highly profitable—quest for the absent nutrient.
~ Michael Pollan
You're better off eating the real thing in moderation than bingeing on "lite" food products packed with sugars and salt.
~ Michael Pollan
The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.
~ Michael Pollan
The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. So we ignore the elephant in the room and focus instead on good and evil nutrients, the identities of which seem to change with every new study.
~ Michael Pollan
A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.
~ Michael Pollan
One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)
~ Michael Pollan
The dinner we have eaten tonight," he told his audience in a 1928 lecture, "was a part of the sun but a few months ago." Industrial food both obscured these links and attenuated them. In lengthening the food chain so that we could feed great cities from distant soils, we were breaking the "rules of nature" at least twice: by robbing nutrients from the soils the foods had been grown in and then squandering those nutrients by processing the foods.
~ Michael Pollan
Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.
~ Michael Pollan
But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.
~ Michael Pollan
At every level, from the soil to the plate, the industrialization of the food chain has involved a process of chemical and biological simplification
~ Michael Pollan
one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. (These
~ Michael Pollan
An alternative food system is rising up on the margins," Joel continued. "One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren't as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?
~ Michael Pollan
Agriculture—which consists mainly of growing edible grasses like wheat, corn, and rice—is our term for this revolutionary new approach to getting food from the soil and the sun.
~ Michael Pollan
Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.
~ Michael Pollan
La falta de una cultura de comida estable nos hace muy vulnerables a las lisonjas de los ingenieros alimentarios y los estrategas del marketing, para quienes el dilema del omnívoro no es tanto un dilema como una oportunidad. La industria alimentaria está muy interesada en exacerbar nuestra ansiedad ante lo que debemos o no comer, para así poder aliviarla después con nuevos productos.
~ Michael Pollan
To eat corn directly is to consume all the energy in the corn, but when you feed that corn to an animal, 90% of its energy is lost... what this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories in our meal, tens of thousand corn calories could have been used to feed many more people.
~ Michael Pollan
Cheese is all about the dark side of life - Sister Noella; aka The Cheese Nun
~ Michael Pollan
Comer nos pone en contacto con todo aquello que compartimos con el resto de los animales y con lo que nos separa de ellos. Nos define.
~ Michael Pollan
The point is that, as eaters (if not as scientists), we know all we need to know to act: This diet, for whatever reason, is the problem.
~ Michael Pollan
Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.
~ Michael Pollan
The next Skylight sound bite goes like this: "We got barbecue, slaw, and cornbread, that's all," Samuel recites. "When you come here, it's not what you want, it's how much of it you need.
~ Michael Pollan
People who get off the Western diet see dramatic improvements in their health.
~ Michael Pollan
AÈ™adar, este lipsa voinÈ›ei de a cheltui mai mult pe mâncare în mod real o chestiune de accesibilitate sau una care È›ine de priorit??i?
~ Michael Pollan