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The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World

Book by Michael Pollan · 34 quotes · Way, Corn, Eating

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The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World Quotes

“Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.”

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“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 mono-cultures. 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.”

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“To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.”

Has BeensDrinkFruitChickensCornSupermarketsSodaSyrupNuggetsSoft DrinksChicken NuggetsCorn Syrup
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“The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.”

TryingYearsMeanFactsProblemMightGrowthNaturalProductsIndustryLimitsPercentHundredRateShoesPopulationPoundsTolerateFifteenCdsBumpsAnnualsTroublesomeExplodingFood IndustryAmerican Food
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“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.”

InspirationalCountryMotivationalPresidentFoodHealthHealthyRiversBillsFarmsCornAlarmsSurgeonsObesityEpidemicsSigningCaloriesSupermarketsCarrotsHealthy EatingHealthy DietSyrupCorn Syrup
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“This for many people is what is 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. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.”

PeopleFeelsYearsReasonCertainPleasureAnimalViewsEmotionMillionsComfortableKillingVegetarianVeganHuntingDisgustingAgricultureOffensiveCountenanceKilling It
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“The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock. The important thing is that there be multiple food chains, so that when any one of them fails-when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food-borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work, when drought strikes and plagues come and soils blow away-we'll still have a way to feed ourselves.”

WayStillsImportantRunningAbilityEconomyVirtueEnvironmentFailingDiseaseImportant ThingsMadBlowOilStrikesChainsSoilShockFarmsCowsDiverseMultiplePlagueEpidemicsDroughtPasturesFood ChainPesticides
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“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.”

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“A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.”

CareCultureAnimalMoralEconomicExampleCostCapitalismMercyCookingTendenciesImpulseTensionContradictionCapitalistEfficiencyBlindnessImperativesCasualtiesErode
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“In Joel's view, that reformation begins with people going o the trouble and expense of buying directly from farmers they know - "relationship marketing," as he calls it. He believes the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do. "Don't you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?"”

PeopleKnowsBelieveLooksPersonsEyeHouseGrowsViewsTroubleIntegrityCookingMarketingMeaningfulOddBuyingGuaranteesExpensesFarmersMechanicReformationSellersBuyersContractor
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“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.”

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