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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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Michael Kevin Pollan
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More quotes by Michael Pollan

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Every peasant cuisine has incredible ingenious tricks for getting a lot of nutrition out of a small amount of ingredients. There are people who don't have the money to invest in better food, but perhaps they have the time. There's a trade-off: The more time you're willing to put into food preparation, the less money you have to spend.
Michael Pollan
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There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.
Michael Pollan
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A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
Michael Pollan
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We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.
Michael Pollan
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...Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.
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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Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.
Michael Pollan
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The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.
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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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 your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these
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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When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.
Michael Pollan
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People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it's a really good idea if you can exert the kind of discipline needed.
Michael Pollan
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All the arguments about nutrition are really about what is the problem ingredient in the western diet. Is it the fat? Is it the lack of fiber? Is it the refined carbohydrates?But we don't have to worry about it. We just have to try to get off that diet to the extent we can.
Michael Pollan
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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.
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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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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The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.
Michael Pollan
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It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.
Michael Pollan