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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.

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
Work
Use
Pieces
Carbon
Good
Energy
Food
Explain
Things
Helping
System
Findings
People
Tell
Takes
Finding
Around
Path
Plant
Stories
Animal
Animals
Flows
Character
Story
Flow
Organize
Hard
Help
Characters
Plants

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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.
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The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.
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People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost.
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There's something magical that happens when people eat from the same pot. The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.
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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.
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Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
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A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
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People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain.
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If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.
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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.
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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.)
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Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.
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Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
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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.
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It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
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The longer I've looked at these questions, of the American diet and the public health crisis that we face because of that diet, the more I've come to the conclusion that the collapse of cooking is a big part of the problem.
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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.
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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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This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.
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When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.
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