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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
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Non-Fiction Writer
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Michael Kevin Pollan
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More quotes by Michael Pollan

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I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.
Michael Pollan
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I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.
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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.
Michael Pollan
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Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.
Michael Pollan
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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
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I'm kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.
Michael Pollan
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Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.
Michael Pollan
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Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
Michael Pollan
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The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on this is the black hole of American politics.
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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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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A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael Pollan
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There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.
Michael Pollan
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If it came from a plant, eat it if it was made in a plant, don't.
Michael Pollan
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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
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Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.
Michael Pollan