Quote

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.

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
Think
Morality
Pipe
Thinking
Behavior
Assume
Aren
Tension
Moral
Systems
Powerful
Useful
Dream
Assuming
Character
Somehow
Real
Capitalism
Assure

More quotes by Michael Pollan

Image
Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
Michael Pollan
Image
Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
Michael Pollan
Image
Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
Michael Pollan
Image
People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it's a really good idea if you can exert the kind of discipline needed.
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
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
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
Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.
Michael Pollan
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
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
Image
Why don't we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.
Michael Pollan
Image
My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.
Michael Pollan
Image
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.
Michael Pollan
Image
One of the reasons we eat fast food is that we don't have to cook fast food. We are out-sourcing cooking to corporations, they tend to cook with far too much salt, fat, and sugar.
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
Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (Hard cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)
Michael Pollan
Image
The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.
Michael Pollan
Image
The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
Michael Pollan
Image
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
Image
It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
Michael Pollan