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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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Michael Pollan
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 6
Author
Journalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Professor
Writer
Michael Kevin Pollan
Things
Basic
Rules
Tried
Build
Food
Certain

More quotes by Michael Pollan

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Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue. Science is still catching up with this. J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.
Michael Pollan
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In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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Be the kind of person who takes supplements - then skip the supplements.
Michael Pollan
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Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
Michael Pollan
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The problem is that we let special-occasion food become everyday food. That goes for soda and french fries.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.
Michael Pollan
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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
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If you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't be eating it.
Michael Pollan
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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
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Farms produce a lot more than food they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.
Michael Pollan
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There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.
Michael Pollan
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You want to say the thing that will drive everybody in the direction you want to go. But as a writer you have a pact with your readers that you'll be really straight with them at all times.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
Michael Pollan
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The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan