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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

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Michael Pollan
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 6
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Michael Kevin Pollan
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A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
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Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
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Oil companies have gas stations. There's this whole huge structure that is about finding a new liquid for the tank. And the idea that maybe there shouldn't be a liquid, that maybe the best is an electrical grid, a sustainably powered electrical grid that we all plug into, that doesn't sit well with oil companies.
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We're always projecting our moral categories on things. I think that's inevitable. But capitalism places no particular value on morality. Morality in the market is enforced by contract and regulation and law, because morality is understood to be in conflict with the motive force of greed and accumulation.
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I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.
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It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
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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.
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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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Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.
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We spend a remarkably small, shamefully small, percentage of our income on food. We manage to spend money on lots of other things. All up and down the social ladder you find people with plenty of money for cell phones, home entertainment systems, all other forms of entertainment.
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You are what what you eat eats.
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There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.
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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.
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A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.
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I'm not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that's something we can all do more and do better.
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There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.
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Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.
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But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.
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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.
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