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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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Michael Pollan
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: February 6
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Non-Fiction Writer
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Michael Kevin Pollan
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More quotes by Michael Pollan

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Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.
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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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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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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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The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.
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Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature.
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Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.
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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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Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
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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.
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Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.
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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.
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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.
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But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.
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If it came from a plant, eat it if it was made in a plant, don't.
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We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules.
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A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
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A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
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Farms produce a lot more than food they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community.
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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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