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Michael Pollan

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Famous Michael Pollan Quotes

“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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“When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.”

NeedsLittlesHas BeensDifferentProblemAnimalResultsPracticeWillingDiseaseTreatedBehaveComplexityFarmsChemicalsFarmersEfficiencyFeedingMachineryCrowdedFertilizerSanitationLivestockSymbiosisDifferent AnimalsMonoculture
Author:Michael Pollan
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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
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World
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“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.”

MeanProblemSupportBuildingHealthyDistanceBlockFast FoodHealthy FoodOrganic Food
Author:Michael Pollan
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“That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”

PeopleThinkingShouldWellsIdeasEnoughProblemWould BeEarthSufferingChoicesNationsPleasureWorryBecomingHealthyEatingConsequenceObsessionDietsRelatedDestructiveNutritionUnhealthyHealthy EatingFood ChoicesUnhealthy Obsession
Author:Michael Pollan
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“Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”

KnowsMindImportantFactsProblemFacesIndividualEnergySoundCan DoPowerfulGardenMost PowerfulCarbonDependenceFootprintBenignCarbon FootprintPlanting A Garden
Author:Michael Pollan
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