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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
Tilted
European
North
Balance
Power
Might
Without
Never

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There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.
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The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.
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I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.
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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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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.
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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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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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Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
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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.
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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.
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It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
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He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
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There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.
Michael Pollan
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So that's us: processed corn, walking.
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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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael Pollan
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The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
Michael Pollan
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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.
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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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Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.
Michael Pollan