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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
Author
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Non-Fiction Writer
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Michael Kevin Pollan
Firsts
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Self
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More quotes by 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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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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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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Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food.
Michael Pollan
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I'm kind of a homebody, and the rhythm of my thinking and work is starting at home, going out and coming back, bringing back news, bringing back information, applying it.
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
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This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.
Michael Pollan
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For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.
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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A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
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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Any kind of food you eat is going to have an impact on the world. If you switch to tofu and get off meat, the soy bean is doing enormous damage in the Amazon and all throughout South America.
Michael Pollan
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Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
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.
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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One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.
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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I try to write in the first person - the first person not of a journalist but of a carnivore, an eater, a gardener, someone trying to figure out what to feed his family.
Michael Pollan
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If it came from a plant, eat it if it was made in a plant, don't.
Michael Pollan
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One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.
Michael Pollan