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Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan Quotes

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Famous Michael Pollan Quotes

“Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we've more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.”

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Book:Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
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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.”

WayDoeEndsReasonProblemCultureAnimalTechnologyGrowingConflictDiversityEatingPlantEnvironmentalVariousChainsComplexityGreat MenEfficiencyFeedingCropsIngenuityFood ChainProdigiousEnvironmental ProblemsMono
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World
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“The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather--all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.”

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Book:In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
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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
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World
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“Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”

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Book:In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
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