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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.

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
Expect
Wagers
Tree
Planting
Future
Utopian
Doesn
Gardening
Seems
Enterprise
Always
Witness
Planter
Necessarily
Wager
Garden
Planters

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If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.
Michael Pollan
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I've always been interested in plants because I'm a gardener, so I have a basic understanding of botany and things like that, but it's all self-taught.
Michael Pollan
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I really do think that cooking is very important. It's really important for the farmers because it means you're going to be buying real food and not processed food, so that means the farmers will capture more of your food dollar.
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A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
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All money for agricultural extension, land grant universities has been toward developing industrial food. Lots of money has been invested toward maximizing yield. If you took even a small amount of that money and put it toward organic research, I don't have any doubts you could match those yields.
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People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.
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The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.
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Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.
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Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.
Michael Pollan
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I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in this country and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.
Michael Pollan
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Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others
Michael Pollan
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Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.
Michael Pollan
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The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.
Michael Pollan
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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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Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (Hard cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)
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Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
Michael Pollan