Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat. -Michael Pollan Environmental
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them. -Michael Pollan Food
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 Food
Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before. -Michael Pollan Food
We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding. -Michael Pollan Wisdom
The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms. -Michael Pollan Leadership
Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved. -Michael Pollan Diet
Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. -Michael Pollan Relationship
In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn. -Michael Pollan Food
Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It's cheaper than McDonald's in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is - you know, it's an industry kind of ruining North Carolina. -Michael Pollan Food
Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something. -Michael Pollan Funny
I think cooking is really key because it's the only way you're going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don't cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar - much more than you would ever use at home. -Michael Pollan Diet
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. -Michael Pollan Food
French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way. -Michael Pollan Food
A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet. -Michael Pollan Food
Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. -Michael Pollan Food
My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it. -Michael Pollan Money
If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have. -Michael Pollan Food
