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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

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Michael Pollan
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 6
Author
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Writer
Michael Kevin Pollan
Everyone
Americans
America
Citizens
Wells
Spend
Well
Nation
Percent
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Food
Afford
Nations
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Shame

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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.
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Farms produce a lot more than food they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.
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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.
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The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.
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All the arguments about nutrition are really about what is the problem ingredient in the western diet. Is it the fat? Is it the lack of fiber? Is it the refined carbohydrates?But we don't have to worry about it. We just have to try to get off that diet to the extent we can.
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In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.
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Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others
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Every peasant cuisine has incredible ingenious tricks for getting a lot of nutrition out of a small amount of ingredients. There are people who don't have the money to invest in better food, but perhaps they have the time. There's a trade-off: The more time you're willing to put into food preparation, the less money you have to spend.
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Avoid foods you see advertised on television.
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People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost.
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The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.
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I'm not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that's something we can all do more and do better.
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My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.
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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.
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[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
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Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.
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So that's us: processed corn, walking.
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I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.
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Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.
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