Quote

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.

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
Interested
Solar
Taking
Vegetables
Whether
Turning
Energy
Meat
Back
Begins
Everything
Plant
Always
Eating
Things
Beginning
Carbohydrates

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I try very hard to tell stories and not lecture. I try to approach things as an amateur and not an expert, so that when I'm doing something, I'm starting out in a place a lot like where my readers start out - which is to say, naïve.
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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.
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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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Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.
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The only one I have any trust in is storytelling - there's a couple I have a lot of trust in.
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Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these
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I realize that at a certain point if we're going to change our food system, it's going to be the next generation that's going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.
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Even people who like the kind of food on offer, are coming to recognize that eating from this food chain is not conducive to good health.
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Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.
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The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn’t have. It’s very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that’s going wrong in society.
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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.
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Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.
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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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Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.
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Oil companies have gas stations. There's this whole huge structure that is about finding a new liquid for the tank. And the idea that maybe there shouldn't be a liquid, that maybe the best is an electrical grid, a sustainably powered electrical grid that we all plug into, that doesn't sit well with oil companies.
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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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...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 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 are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.
Michael Pollan
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It's really important for your health, because you will never use as much salt and fat and sugar as a corporation will use cooking for you.
Michael Pollan