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a8fe307
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It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease].
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meatpacking
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Michael Pollan |
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f7f1b9d
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Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.
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meatpacking
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Michael Pollan |
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4932f46
|
The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.
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meatpacking
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Michael Pollan |
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09cc873
|
Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.
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food
hfcs
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Michael Pollan |
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613eeb0
|
Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)
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food
hfcs
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Michael Pollan |
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8f74e47
|
Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).
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food
hfcs
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Michael Pollan |
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6918311
|
Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
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naturalism
pleasure
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Michael Pollan |
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c7c43ea
|
A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well.
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Michael Pollan |
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90f6f6b
|
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James placed alcohol at the very center of the religious experience. "The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature," he writes, which are "usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is i..
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Michael Pollan |
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b962628
|
Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
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Michael Pollan |
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66a3e19
|
one of the packages warned that we would not get optimal results in the microwave. The various stages that made up the frozen brown rocket of onion soup would meld together pointlessly in the microwave. If we wanted the gratinee effect promised on the package, then we had to bake it in the oven (at 350degF) for forty minutes. I could make onion soup from scratch in forty minutes!" (p.198-199)"
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Michael Pollan |
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e68871c
|
Also, organic cows, like Rosie the organic chicken, are never fed corn that contains residues of atrazine, the herbicide commonly sprayed on American cornfields. The tiniest amount of this chemical (0.1 part per billion) has been shown to change the sex of frogs. There's been no study to show what it does to children.
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Michael Pollan |
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7423d1e
|
It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.
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Michael Pollan |
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44c0ce8
|
Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process.
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Michael Pollan |
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695aa3a
|
Everything that lives, it seems, must play host to the germ of its own dissolution.
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Michael Pollan |
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758d0e8
|
Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.
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Michael Pollan |
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500ae7f
|
Uncle Jeff insisted that I also take a tray of unseasoned barbecue, so I could see for myself that what's going on here at the Skylight Inn does not in any way, shape, or form depend for it's flavor or quality on "sauce." That is a word he pronounces with an upturned lip and a slight sneer, suggesting that the use of barbecue sauce was at best a culinary crutch deserving of pity and at worst a moral failing."
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cooking
meat
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Michael Pollan |
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8269396
|
Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.
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food-industry
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Michael Pollan |
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4776e8e
|
The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.
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Michael Pollan |
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b340856
|
How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say
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Michael Pollan |
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e82a297
|
When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture--the critical role they've played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and music (think of jazz or rock improvisation), of poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen, not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, a..
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Michael Pollan |
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ccf93c9
|
How this peculiar grass, native to Central America and unknown to the Old World before 1492, came to colonize so much of our land and bodies is one of the plant world's greatest success stories. I say the plant world's success story because it is no longer clear that corn's triumph is such a boon to the rest of the world, and because we should give credit where credit is due.
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Michael Pollan |
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692db24
|
What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence--a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.
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Michael Pollan |
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182f3af
|
To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glu..
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Michael Pollan |
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b9ea31b
|
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.
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Michael Pollan |
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526d048
|
We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the "French paradox," for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple creme cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox--that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily."
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food
french-paradox
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Michael Pollan |
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edc633c
|
It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.
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food-industry
|
Michael Pollan |
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85f35d1
|
For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.
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food-industry
|
Michael Pollan |
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3ee9bf8
|
In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are..
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antibiotics
|
Michael Pollan |
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5646d59
|
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.
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Michael Pollan |
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4c1b653
|
This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, p..
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Michael Pollan |
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be99ac9
|
The healthiest food in the supermarket--the fresh produce--doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
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Michael Pollan |
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2fc291e
|
To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker's bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in kar..
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price
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Michael Pollan |
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fcae0b8
|
USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don't set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers who failed to meet the standards, something the USDA, incredibly, lacks the authority to do.)
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usda
|
Michael Pollan |
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1b53f8a
|
Supermarkets in Denmark have experimented with adding a second bar code to packages of meat that when scanned at a kiosk in the store brings up on a monitor images of the farm where the meat was raised, as well as detailed information on the particular animal's genetics, feed, medications, slaughter date, etc. Most of the meat in our supermarkets simply couldn't withstand that degree of transparency; if the bar code on the typical package o..
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food-industry
transparency
|
Michael Pollan |
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99b5fef
|
Possibly none at all: it's a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn't necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge.
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Michael Pollan |
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376a5df
|
What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don't eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, sh..
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Michael Pollan |
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788de80
|
Most recently, as the medical value of marijuana has been rediscovered, medicine has been searching for ways to "pharmaceuticalize" the plant--find a way to harness its easily accessible benefits in a patch or inhaler that doctors can prescribe, corporations patent, and governments regulate. Whenever possible, Paracelsus's lab-coated descendants have synthesized the active ingredients in plant drugs, allowing medicine to dispense with the p..
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Michael Pollan |
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dbc74c8
|
the potential of psychedelics to improve brain function.
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Michael Pollan |
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e5fbb10
|
Paracelsus's grand project, which arguably is still going on today,* represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan faith it set out to uproot. In much the same way that the new monotheism folded into its rituals the people's traditional pagan holidays and spectacles, it desperately needed to do something about their ancient devotion to magic plants. Indeed,..
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Michael Pollan |
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ccd764a
|
Policies are useful tools. Instead of prescribing highly specific behaviors, they supply us with broad guidelines that should make everyday decision making easier and swifter.
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Michael Pollan |
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b48b743
|
The healthiest food in the supermarket - the fresh produce - doesn't boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don't have the budget or the packaging. Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
|
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|
Michael Pollan |
|
a3c2dea
|
The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. 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 ..
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Michael Pollan |
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d9fd6d0
|
But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.
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Michael Pollan |