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
television lawns form
Lawns are a form of television
blow corn-syrup differences
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.
balance might
Without the potatoe, the balance of European power might never have tilted north
sex men confusion
Are we, finally, speaking of nature or culture when we speak of a rose (nature), that has been bred (culture) so that its blossoms (nature) make men imagine (culture) the sex of women (nature)? It may be this sort of confusion that we need more of.
way killing chickens
In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.
pain regret self
Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
oil soy fast-food
The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil. This is the main oil. This is the fast-food oil.
onions chopping
When chopping onions, just chop onions.
italian might subtraction
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.
flavor rolling lawns
To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe.
beef research growing
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
cooking calories ifs
If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.
appreciation mistake ignorance
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 to fix his broken machine.
unique green-plants competition
Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.