Quote

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

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
Like
Desire
Allowed
Death
Sex
Purged
Doesn
Flower
Lawn
Another
Americans
Lawns
Nature
Exist
Occurred
Much
Wonder
Seed
Never
Since
Seeds
Time
Dies
Grass

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
I agree insofar as we eat too much meat. We're eating about 200 pounds per person per year. That's about 9 ounces a day. That's probably more than is good for us and it's certainly more than is good for the environment.
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
In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.
Michael Pollan
Image
The longer I've looked at these questions, of the American diet and the public health crisis that we face because of that diet, the more I've come to the conclusion that the collapse of cooking is a big part of the problem.
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
Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
Michael Pollan
Image
Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
Michael Pollan
Image
If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.
Michael Pollan
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.
Michael Pollan
Image
In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.
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
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
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
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
Image
The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.
Michael Pollan
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn’t have. It’s very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that’s going wrong in society.
Michael Pollan
Image
Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
Michael Pollan