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

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
Balance
Power
Might
Without
Never
Tilted
European
North

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I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.
Michael Pollan
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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael Pollan
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I'm kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.
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...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.
Michael Pollan
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There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.
Michael Pollan
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Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
Michael Pollan
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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
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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.
Michael Pollan
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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.
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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There are certain products that it's worth buying organic just because the alternatives have so much pesticide. There's a list of the dirty dozen that you can get off the Web. Strawberries, potatoes. A handful of crops that have very high pesticide residues if you don't buy organic. If you eat that a lot, that's a good place to invest.
Michael Pollan
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...Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.
Michael Pollan
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Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.
Michael Pollan
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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
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My hope is that if people have the knowledge, and if they actually see where their food comes from and have access to the information, they will make better ethical choices.
Michael Pollan
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One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.
Michael Pollan
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The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.
Michael Pollan
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Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.
Michael Pollan
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It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan