Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth6 February 1955
CityLong Island, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Michael Pollan quotes about
order healthy confusing
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.
healing cake chocolate
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.
environment lawns totalitarian-regimes
A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
order growth fundamentals
If you're a politician it's very useful to say that we can have economic growth and at the same time green the economy, but writers just have to face up to the fact that there are some fundamental tensions between the economic order and the biological order.
community identity fuel
Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.
cooking important scratches
Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.
wall animal meat-industry
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.
american-educator figure frontier historical johnny northwest played role turns
It turns out Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was a real historical figure who played a very important role in the frontier in the Northwest territory.
animal hunting views
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.
real mean thinking
I really do think that cooking is very important. It's really important for the farmers because it means you're going to be buying real food and not processed food, so that means the farmers will capture more of your food dollar.
thinking ideas people
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 unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.
animal answers citizens decisions depending good issue job lists people policy shopping supposed tools values welfare
I don't think it's a journalist's job to issue shopping lists or policy descriptions. We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are the environment, your health, animal welfare the answers are going to be different for every person.
character animal people
I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.
thinking vegetables oil
I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in the United States and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.