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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.

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
American
Rather
Subtraction
Might
Decidedly
Right
Pleasurable
Thing
Addition
Insist
Consumption
Italian

More quotes by Michael Pollan

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Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives.
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Much more has to be done to democratize the food movement. One of the reasons that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food, whether you mean organic or grass-fed or whatever.
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Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
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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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He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
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I still think we have a long way to go on rebuilding a culture of cooking. Everyday simple cooking.
Michael Pollan
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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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Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism).
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Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.
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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.
Michael Pollan
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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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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.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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If people eat healthy food, they will save enough to compensate for the food price being healthier and spending less on healthcare.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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So that's us: processed corn, walking.
Michael Pollan
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It's estimated that about 30 percent of the increase in grain prices could be attributed to the decision to embrace biofuels, particularly corn-based ethanol. It has done nothing for climate change and the business is in real trouble now with the collapse of oil prices. It's completely dependent on a dollar subsidy and tariff from the government.
Michael Pollan
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For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?
Michael Pollan
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We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.
Michael Pollan
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Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others
Michael Pollan