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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.

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
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More quotes by Michael Pollan

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If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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...Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.
Michael Pollan
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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
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Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
Michael Pollan
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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
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For great many species today, fitness means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.
Michael Pollan
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When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
Michael Pollan
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Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
Michael Pollan
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Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.
Michael Pollan
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Are we, finally, speaking of nature or culture when we speak of a rose (nature), that has been bred (culture) so that its blossoms (nature) make men imagine (culture) the sex of women (nature)? It may be this sort of confusion that we need more of.
Michael Pollan
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Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
Michael Pollan
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A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
Michael Pollan
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The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
Michael Pollan
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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
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Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.
Michael Pollan
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The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food it contains a whole assortment of antinutrients - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.
Michael Pollan
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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
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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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Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.
Michael Pollan