Michael Pollan

Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon.

Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

I hope that if you're cooking two nights a week, you can try for three.

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.

Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.

Dont eat anything your great grandmother wouldnt recognize as food

The French fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes - and cleaning up the mess.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

High-quality food is better for your health.

My mode as a writer is to layer different perspectives: the scientific, the philosophical, the political, the journalistic. When you layer them, you get a really wholesome, interesting picture.

For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry - before you eat and then again along the way.

Fairness forces you even when youre writing a piece highly critical of say genetically modified food as I have done to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day.

As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.

The euphemistically named CropLife America speaks for the pesticide industry.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.

If you made all the French fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them - chances are good it won't be every day.

The first step in reforming appetite is going from processed food to real food. Then, if you can afford organic or grass-fed, fantastic. But the first step is moving from processed industrial food to the real thing.

Unlike any other form of thought daydreaming is its own reward.

A cow out on grass is just an incredible thing to behold... Cows and other ruminants can do things we just can't do. They have the most highly evolved digestive organ on the planet, called the rumen. And the rumen can digest grass. It takes grass, cellulose in grass, and turns it into protein, very nutritious protein. We can't do that.

We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.

Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically.

McDonald's is in a unique position. They can decide they don't want meat with hormones in it, and that will be the end of hormones in meat. I actually think exerting pressure on McDonald's is probably just as important as on the Department of Agriculture.

Dont eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk.

A lot of what you see in the supermarket I would argue is not really food. It's what I call edible, food-like substances.

It's not that hard to eat well if you're willing to put a little more time into it, a little more thoughtfulness into it and, yes, a little bit more money.

To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we're also going to be a lot healthier.

Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.

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.

Even if you don't think you can cook well, you can cook better than the food industry.

My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.

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.

Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.

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.

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

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.

I'm very picky about the meat I eat. I eat grass-fed beef, which is now becoming more common. Yes, it's still more expensive, but it's a very sustainable product.

The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.

To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture - that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product.

I don't think of myself as a spiritual person.

Soon after the inauguration, the Obamas gave Big Food a case of heartburn when, in the spring of 2009, Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn, a symbolic but nevertheless powerful act that thrilled the food movement.

Restaurants serve supersize portions to make you feel you're getting your money's worth.

I probably spend more on food than a lot of people, and I feel good about the whole food chain I'm supporting when I'm doing it. But even I have to remind myself. I'm always complaining about the prices at the farmer's market.

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.

You don't need to know what an antioxidant is to eat well.

Corn is a greedy crop as farmers will tell you.

Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.

If you're eating grassland meat, your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.

Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.

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.

It's no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television - or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.

I like the taste of grass-fed meat. It is chewier, I'll own that... The Argentines make excellent beef that's grass-fed. They've learned how to age it, and they've gotten good at it.

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land so weve designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.

While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.

The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.

We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.

After writing 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn't care about how their food was grown but who did care about their health.

A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.

To eat well, you either have to invest money or time. If you can put in some time, the raw ingredients are not that expensive. You can eat extremely well on a budget.

One of my rules is pay more, eat less. You do get what you pay for, and if you're willing to pay more for pastured eggs or grass-fed beef, you're getting something that's more delicious, and you'll feel better about eating it.

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

Bayer's planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and agrochemical markets.

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.

When you cook, you get to shop. You get to vote if you want the pastured raised pork or the organic grain. You can get to help produce your agricultural system, and you give that up when you outsource your cooking. You become dependent on what's offered - and that's a shame.

Eat a wide variety of species.

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain. Food comes to us ready-made in packages that obscure as much information as they reveal.

Depending on how you farm your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.

Europeans fought for shorter workdays, more vacation time, family leave, and all these kinds of things. Those haven't been priorities in America: it's been about money. You see, in the countries that fought for time, they cook more often; they have less obesity. There are real benefits to having time.

Raw foodists are kind of paddling upstream against evolution. The only reason they can do it and they don't all keel over is that they are using blenders. They're very Cuisinart dependent.

Basically, farm chemicals are labor-saving devices, and farmers who don't use them - weed killers especially - have to work harder or hire more help.

I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.

Corn is the hero of its own story and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.

The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.

You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have - while we have consciousness, toolmaking, language, they have biochemistry.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.

Dont eat anything your great grandmother wouldnt recognize as food.

This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness.

You can't be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa, he was singing a different tune.

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.

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.

How my son discovered vegetables was from growing them in the garden.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Our big problem is that high-calorie, special-occasion foods like cakes, fried foods, etc. have become so cheap and easy that we eat them every day. Make them special again by cooking them yourself. You won't do it every day, I promise.

As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.

You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It's a shame. It's the media and the food industry: they've fed our panic around time.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.