Michael Kevin Pollan is an American author and journalist, who is currently the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Pollan is best known for his books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of food, such as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. These Michael Pollan quotes will motivate you.
Best Michael Pollan Quotes
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn’t paid at the cash register, it’s charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it’s charged to your health.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“If people eat healthy food, they will save enough to compensate for the food price being healthier and spending less on healthcare.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Why don’t we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you’re going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That’s politics at its most basic.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?” ~ Michael Pollan
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“Most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “The real food is not being advertised.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “One surprise is how deeply the food system is implicated in climate change. I don’t think that has really been on people’s radar until very recently. 25 to 33 percent of climate change gases can be traced to the food system. I was also surprised that those diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us – heart disease, cancer, diabetes – were virtually unknown 150 years ago, before we began eating this way.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Shake the hand that feeds you.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on health care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on health care.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of “antinutrients” – compounds that actually block the body’s absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “One of the problems is that the US government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. 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.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“Eat with consciousness. When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you’re eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it is, it’s enormously satisfying.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “I think that the American diet is a very large part of the reason we’re spending 2.3 trillion dollar per year on health care in this country. 75% of that money goes to treat chronic diseases, preventable chronic diseases, most of those are linked to diet.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we’re made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life-the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids-is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“Eat only until you’re 4/5 full. An ancient Japanese injunction.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature’s ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it” ~ Michael Pollan
- “In 2008, a year of supposed ‘food crisis’, we grew enough food to feed 11 billion people. Most of it was not eaten by humans as food, however.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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?” ~ Michael Pollan
- “The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry’s biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.” ~ Michael Pollan
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“I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Every major food company now has an organic division. There’s more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn’t necessarily expect to witness.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “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.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associated microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology – that is, as a function of the community, not the individual.” ~ Michael Pollan
- “This, for many people, is what’s most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing” ~ Michael Pollan
