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Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

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
Greeks
Japanese
Greek
French
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Italians

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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The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.
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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Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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The first step towards solving the omnivore's dilemma is knowledge: eating with full consciousness. When that happens, I have a lot of confidence that people will make good choices.
Michael Pollan
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I'm not talking about having to consult Julia Child before you can take a pot off the rack. I think that's something we can all do more and do better.
Michael Pollan
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There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.
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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The energy I was sensing in audiences was political energy, as much as anything else.
Michael Pollan
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We spend a remarkably small, shamefully small, percentage of our income on food. We manage to spend money on lots of other things. All up and down the social ladder you find people with plenty of money for cell phones, home entertainment systems, all other forms of entertainment.
Michael Pollan
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The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
Michael Pollan
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Without the potatoe, the balance of European power might never have tilted north
Michael Pollan
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I agree insofar as we eat too much meat. We're eating about 200 pounds per person per year. That's about 9 ounces a day. That's probably more than is good for us and it's certainly more than is good for the environment.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan
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Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.
Michael Pollan
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The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food it contains a whole assortment of antinutrients - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.
Michael Pollan
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There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.
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.
Michael Pollan
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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.
Michael Pollan