Quote

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

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
Make
Side
Fairness
Food
Represent
Sides
Highly
Sure
Possibly
Extensively
Force
Forces
Gmos
Done
Critical
Genetically
Writing
Piece
Modified
Even
Pieces
Accurately

More quotes by Michael Pollan

Image
There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.
Michael Pollan
Image
The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs carbs against proteins, and then fats fats against carbs.
Michael Pollan
Image
If you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't be eating it.
Michael Pollan
Image
So that's us: processed corn, walking.
Michael Pollan
Image
I try very hard to tell stories and not lecture. I try to approach things as an amateur and not an expert, so that when I'm doing something, I'm starting out in a place a lot like where my readers start out - which is to say, naïve.
Michael Pollan
Image
Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.
Michael Pollan
Image
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
Image
The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.
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
[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.
Michael Pollan
Image
People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.
Michael Pollan
Image
...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
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
A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
Michael Pollan
Image
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
Image
Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.
Michael Pollan
Image
A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.
Michael Pollan
Image
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
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
Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.
Michael Pollan