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A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born in 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. (An African American child's chances are two in five.)
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Michael Pollan |
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COOK AND, IF YOU CAN, PLANT A GARDEN.
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Michael Pollan |
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One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)
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Michael Pollan |
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nine of every ten cells in our bodies belong not to us, but to these microbial species (most of them residents of our gut), and that 99 percent of the DNA we're carrying around belongs to those microbes. Some scientists, trained in evolutionary biology, began looking at the human individual in a humbling new light: as a kind of superorganism, a community of several hundred coevolved and interdependent species.
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Michael Pollan |
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All of our uncertainties about nutrition should not obscure the plain fact that the chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity..
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Michael Pollan |
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always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.
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Michael Pollan |
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AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS CONTAINING INGREDIENTS THAT ARE A) UNFAMILIAR, B) UNPRONOUNCEABLE, C) MORE THAN FIVE IN NUMBER, OR THAT INCLUDE D) HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP.
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Michael Pollan |
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AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS THAT MAKE HEALTH CLAIMS.
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Michael Pollan |
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GET OUT OF THE SUPERMARKET WHENEVER POSSIBLE.
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Michael Pollan |
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EAT MOSTLY PLANTS, ESPECIALLY LEAVES.
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Michael Pollan |
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EAT WILD FOODS WHEN YOU CAN.
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Michael Pollan |
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EAT MORE LIKE THE FRENCH. OR THE ITALIANS. OR THE JAPANESE. OR THE INDIANS. OR THE GREEKS.
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Michael Pollan |
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Cream--the richest, sweetest part of milk--is of course our first flavor, the taste, in a spoon, of life's first freshness and innocence, long before we ever encounter the taste of cooked food. And what is smoke--or ashes, with which one of the butters has been dusted--if not the very opposite of that freshness? There it is, innocence and experience mingled in a spoonful of ice cream. Bittor, whom no one would describe as a sunny man, has f..
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Michael Pollan |
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It may be that a taste for Bittor's cooking, for his obsessive, slightly mad investigation into the nature of wood and fire and food, has been prepared by our culture's ongoing attempt to transcend all those things, not just with molecular gastronomy, but with artificial flavors and colors, synthetic food experiences of every kind, even the microwave oven. High and low, this is an age of the jaded palate, ever hungry for the next new taste,..
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Michael Pollan |
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One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the back-breaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived ..
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food
social-commentary
society
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Michael Pollan |
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For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a plain old onion.
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Michael Pollan |
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When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides ..
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Michael Pollan |
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You are what you eat" is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil."
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Michael Pollan |
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The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn's relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one's neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower's brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I beca..
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gardening
lawn-mowing
lawns
nature
social-norms
sustainability
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Michael Pollan |
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there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.
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Michael Pollan |
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In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same--mageiros--and the word shares an etymological root with "magic."
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Michael Pollan |
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You have just dined," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." The"
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Michael Pollan |
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This lingering hint of savagery isn't necessarily a strike against fire cooking, however. To the contrary, some believe a bloody slab of beefsteak augments the power of the eater. "Whoever partakes of it," Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies, "assimilates a bull-like strength." By comparison, the braise or stew--and particularly the braise or stew of meat that's been cut into geometric cubes and rendered tender by long hours in the pot--rep..
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Michael Pollan |
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All these activities are forms of adult play that also serve as ceremonial acts of remembering--who we are, where we came from, how nature works.
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Michael Pollan |
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By now, cooking has become so thickly crusted with pretension and gadgetry and marketing hype that the effort to reduce it to its most basic elements, to drive it into a corner and see it plainly, seemed like a good way to take hold of it again.
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Michael Pollan |
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Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility. Our
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Michael Pollan |
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It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us. One
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Michael Pollan |
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To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic? I
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Michael Pollan |
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The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead." This"
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Michael Pollan |
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One would expect to find a comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn - Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more wheat than corn - 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in t..
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Michael Pollan |
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A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. (These figures would be about 4 percent higher if the salad were grown conventionally.) I
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Michael Pollan |
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one of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. Because
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Michael Pollan |
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Some researchers attribute the increase in gluten intolerance and celiac disease to the fact that modern breads no longer receive a lengthy fermentation. The organic acids produced by the sourdough culture also seem to slow our bodies' absorption of the sugars in white flour, reducing the dangerous spikes of insulin that refined carbohydrates can cause. (Put another way, a sourdough bread will have a lower "glycemic index" than a bread leav..
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Michael Pollan |
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Cooking, according to the hypothesis, is not merely a metaphor for the creation of culture, as Levi-Strauss proposed; it is its evolutionary prerequisite and biological foundation. Had our protohuman ancestors not seized control of fire and used it to cook their food, they would never have evolved into Homo sapiens. We think of cooking as a cultural innovation that lifts us up out of nature, a manifestation of human transcendence. But the r..
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Michael Pollan |
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The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, a giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn... Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical name it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified ..
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zea-mays
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Michael Pollan |
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643e4de
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Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimat..
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Michael Pollan |
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Yet there are problems with speeding up whole-grain bread, and they begin with the flour. Many if not most of the new whole-grain white breads on the market are made with a new variety of hard white wheat developed by ConAgra. This is why the bread doesn't look like whole wheat: the specks of bran are white, or whitish. They are also microscopic: The wheat is milled by ConAgra using a patented process called Ultrafine that attains a degree ..
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Michael Pollan |
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The greatest biodiversity of an species is typically found in the place where it first evolved -- where nature first experimented white all the possibilities what an apple, or a potato or peach, could be.
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Michael Pollan |
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as the EPA sees it, Bt has always been a safe pesticide, the potato has always been a safe food, so put the two together and you've got something that should be safe both to eat and to kill bugs with.
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Michael Pollan |
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There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.
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Michael Pollan |
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But surely the most important of all the relationships sponsored by this work is the one between those of us who elect to do it and the people it gives us the opportunity to feed and nourish and, when all goes well, delight. Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that hum..
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Michael Pollan |
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190c221
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By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle
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Michael Pollan |
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3e4771f
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A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country
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meatpacking
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Michael Pollan |
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8d4b058
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What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs.
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meatpacking
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Michael Pollan |