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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.

Michael Pollan

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Michael Pollan
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 6
Author
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
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Writer
Michael Kevin Pollan
Thinking
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Inevitable
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Capitalism
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Market
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More quotes by Michael Pollan

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We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are - the environment, your health, animal welfare - the answers are going to be different for every person.
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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.
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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.
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Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.
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One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.
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Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.
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High-quality food is better for your health.
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The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.
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It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.
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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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Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.
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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.
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We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.
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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.
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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.
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I think that the American diet is a very large part of the reason we're spending 2.3 trillion dollar per year on health care in this country. 75% of that money goes to treat chronic diseases, preventable chronic diseases, most of those are linked to diet.
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Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.
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In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.
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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
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Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.
Michael Pollan