Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
Search Quotes tags
Query
Tags
Author
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
444b3a1 You are what what you eat eats. food Michael Pollan
2301eed Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. omnivore plants eating food Michael Pollan
9802b67 He showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "celebration." politics chocolate-cake connotations word-association chocolate semantics french food guilt Michael Pollan
7cedbdd 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. relationships inspiration motivation happiness planet sharing gardening eating food Michael Pollan
5ad6f8c Don't eat anything incapable of rotting. Michael Pollan
4e9f543 The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture. family meal food Michael Pollan
4db6071 While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending.. nutrition Michael Pollan
75903b7 So that's us: processed corn, walking. Michael Pollan
1f3bc36 When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too. Michael Pollan
0d269f7 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. meat industry ethics Michael Pollan
be75e1b But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you. change inspirational Michael Pollan
e5b0f54 Shake the hand that feeds you. Michael Pollan
40d02dc Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost. If that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal. We would not need to go hunting for our connec.. Michael Pollan
7292b3f 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. nature poetry landscape gardening Michael Pollan
b41edb8 Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. .. politics life industry ignorance food Michael Pollan
603a8b8 If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat Michael Pollan
3aa6ab5 For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love? love food Michael Pollan
0ff8e42 the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds. Michael Pollan
c901561 What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick! Michael Pollan
8f952e2 The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them. Michael Pollan
bd885ac According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children. A recent study in the predic.. diabetes fatties malnutrition health-care obesity health food Michael Pollan
2f776d8 Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring-to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn't very well function without this wall of ignorance and.. dilemma michael-pollan-omnivore-dilemma pollan food-chain omnivore michael food-regulation food-safety product industry purchase ignorance Michael Pollan
810f6bc Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right .. nature life nurture gardening wild wilderness Michael Pollan
430e6b8 But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.0.. Michael Pollan
c724c97 Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic." corn-syrup insulin organic Michael Pollan
446c70d For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. Michael Pollan
f25bf37 Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom. Michael Pollan
8c5e889 Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation. Michael Pollan
68b66e4 Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place. Michael Pollan
04776bd This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting--to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture. animal-welfare animal-rights veganism vegetarianism meat hunting animals food Michael Pollan
376f11c The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. marketing food Michael Pollan
fcf4175 Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts. nature nonconformity preservation garden gardening seeds Michael Pollan
7fc5ef3 Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. innocense hubris Michael Pollan
57231da The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the "cultural contradictions of capitalism"--its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on--are on vivid display today at the modern Americ.. meals Michael Pollan
92e490f The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness. nature happiness green-thumb Michael Pollan
9a795e5 Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness. nature trees Michael Pollan
77a9353 The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the.. hamburgers fast-food meat Michael Pollan
7e6a5e9 That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealth.. food-science nutrition social-sciences food Michael Pollan
28b8b29 we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin) politics legislation Michael Pollan
a9f3bcd Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, shining wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It's the smell of fresh soil in the spring, but fresh soil somehow distilled or improved upon, as if that wild, primordial scene has been refined and bottled: . You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there's the cozy kitchen to, for the smell o.. Michael Pollan
9e8dcb6 Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination. reality predictive-coding consciousness Michael Pollan
f11e505 Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization--against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into ye.. corporate-resistance Michael Pollan
9ff98e7 But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their.. western-diet industrial-food food Michael Pollan
5b11294 Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to "cast spells" -- in our vocabulary, "psychoactive" plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladona, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skin of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based "flying ointment" that the witches would then administer vaginal.. Michael Pollan
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 ▲ ▼