Michael Pollan Quotes

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.

My niche will be to support the environment through the growth of organic agriculture.

We face a simple choice. Either we go back to the days when everything was disposable and landfill dumps consumed our countryside at an increasing pace, or we recognise that we have limited resources and need to use them wisely and sustainably.

Let's get government support for farmers to make the transition to organic.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

We can move water easily with plastic pipes. We can move shade around with nursery cloth like a tinker toy for animals and plants. Yet we have developed this necessity to grow food with chemical fertiliser because we have forgotten the magic of manure.

The job of uncovering the global food waste scandal started for me when I was 15 years old. I bought some pigs. I was living in Sussex. And I started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way. I went to my school kitchen, and I said, 'Give me the scraps that my school friends have turned their noses up at.'

People need to realize how powerful the transformation of soil can be.

Learning about issues such as sustainability and locavorism are things that you need to have as part of you as a chef because it will make you cook more delicious food.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

When I was a kid, we always had big gardens, acres of stuff we grew out in the yard.

Be mindful of what supermarkets are doing and demand to see their business practices. Stop throwing away food. Compost as much as you can, eat as locally and as seasonally as you can. Share knowledge and information.

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.

Know you food, know your farmers, and know your kitchen.

You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.

So organic farming practices are something that, to me, are interlinked with the idea of using biodiesel.

You can pregrow a village with no consequence on the land. In fact, with a positive carbon contribution.

There is also a marked global trend towards sustainable agriculture, building on traditional methods which use fewer chemical inputs, carefully manage soil and water resources, and work hand-in-hand with nature.

Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I'd like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.

If we moved from industrialized agriculture to re-localized organic agriculture, we could sequester about one quarter of the carbon moving into the air and destroying our glaciers, oceans, forests and lands.

In an organic system you don't waste anything. We need to educate the consumer to accept a tiny blemish on an orange.

In Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, the government in a matter of years has put a lot of energy behind recycling food waste as livestock feed. It's environmentally friendly, it provides cheap livestock feed for the farmers in those parts of the world, and it avoids sending the food waste to landfill.

My real emphasis is on the farmers who are taking care of the land, the farmers who are really thinking about our nourishment.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.