Quote

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.

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
Way
Directly
Good
Helped
Benefited
Fortune
Optimist
Build
Markets
Products
Articles
Development
Farmers
Land
Hopeless
Makes
Preserves

More quotes by Michael Pollan

Image
One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.
Michael Pollan
Image
Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
Michael Pollan
Image
Farms produce a lot more than food they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.
Michael Pollan
Image
The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.
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
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
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
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
Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.
Michael Pollan
Image
Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
Michael Pollan
Image
Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these
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
Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.
Michael Pollan
Image
The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
Michael Pollan
Image
When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.
Michael Pollan
Image
Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.
Michael Pollan
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in this country and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.
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
Image
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.
Michael Pollan