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What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

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
Test
Abject
Unions
Marxism
Tests
Fats
Lows
Soviet
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Failure
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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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[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.
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There are certain products that it's worth buying organic just because the alternatives have so much pesticide. There's a list of the dirty dozen that you can get off the Web. Strawberries, potatoes. A handful of crops that have very high pesticide residues if you don't buy organic. If you eat that a lot, that's a good place to invest.
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Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.
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Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.
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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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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.
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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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The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world.
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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.
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The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
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Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.
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...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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.
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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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There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.
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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