Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Pollan
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 6
Author
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Writer
Michael Kevin Pollan
Food
Pollution
Poisoning
Takes
Fuel
Fossil
Half
Zone
Fossils
Requires
Contributing
Produce
Corny
Bushel
Amount
Amounts
Gallon
Dead
Addition
Gallons
Huge
Corn
Erosion

More quotes by Michael Pollan

Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.
Michael Pollan
Image
What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.
Michael Pollan
Image
Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
Michael Pollan
Image
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
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.
Michael Pollan
Image
People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it's a really good idea if you can exert the kind of discipline needed.
Michael Pollan
Image
It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.
Michael Pollan
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.
Michael Pollan
Image
We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are - the environment, your health, animal welfare - the answers are going to be different for every person.
Michael Pollan
Image
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
Image
Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
Michael Pollan
Image
There's something magical that happens when people eat from the same pot. The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.
Michael Pollan
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.
Michael Pollan
Image
In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.
Michael Pollan
Image
A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
Michael Pollan
Image
Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
Michael Pollan