Michael Pollan Quotes (71 Quotes)

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.

In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.

Are we, finally, speaking of nature or culture when we speak of a rose (nature), that has been bred (culture) so that its blossoms (nature) make men imagine (culture) the sex of women (nature) It may be this sort of confusion that we need more of.

It turns out Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was a real historical figure who played a very important role in the frontier in the Northwest territory.