Michael Pollan Quotes

I was brought up to think a lot about food and have respect for it, both as medicine and something to eat and enjoy.

There is a history to Italian food that goes back thousands of years, and there's a basic value of respecting food. America is young and doesn't have that.

I don't cook. I respect food too much.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

My life is a tsunami of inspirations. Number one is that I really do just love my BBQ. I mean it's the sustenance of mankind. You know, the animal rights of people, if they had their way, 99% of the human race would parish because we sustain ourselves with dead stuff on the grill.

With people in the world such as 'Jamie Oliver' and [TV chef] Clarissa Dickson-Wright there isn't much hope for animals.

In Rome people spend most of their time having lunch. And they do it very well - Rome is unquestionably the lunch capital of the world.

Often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings.

We are opposed to all cruelty, so as advocates of non-violence, opponents of oppression, people who abhor the cruelty inherent in slaughtering we say the only ethical way to consume flesh is to pick up the carcass of an animal who has died naturally or been killed accidentally, say by being hit by a car, and eat that.

I'm turned on by diversity. I'm turned on by things that are different. I like different animals, I like different ways of travel, and I like different people.

Isn't it ironic that today people say, 'If you know the love of God, you don't have to worry when you go on in sin.' But the apostle John said, 'If you know the love of God, you won't be able to go on in sin.'

Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.

The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study.

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.

If you have potato chips, that means, "Who's coming over?"Wealthy people - white people who're wealthy - have a bag of potato chips that's folded over with a clip. "What? There's some left over?" In my house, if there was a bag of potato chips, we'd pour it in a bowl and everybody would just dip in till it was gone.

To write an autobiography, you've got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible, without embarrassing anyone.

People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness. They always have the power to think, and to think about their thinking, and to think about thinking about their thinking, which the goddamn dolphin, as far as we know, can't do. Therefore they have much greater ability to change themselves than any other animal has.

The moral of the story is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.

The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills.

AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder.

When other people first became aware of the cow, they expressed concern and anxiety. They suggested strategies for getting the animal out of Molly's parlor: remedies and doctors and procedures, some mainstream and some New Age. They related anecdotes of friends who had removed their own cows in one way or another. But after a while they had exhausted their suggestions. Then they usually began to pretend that the cow wasn't there, and they preferred for Molly to go along with the pretense.

Because one has the animal instinct to seek out the people that suits one - you see people that go on life's journeys and get muddled along the way. If you look at their lives they've always gone with the wrong people... can you say it's the wrong people - I don't know.

My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

I always say, "Don't let a 'no' or even a dismissal defeat you, let it be the fire that makes you want to go. Every time someone says, "No," that makes me even more determined. That's one of the things I want to try to teach young people. Oddly, the other thing I want to teach the young people is to get a hobby. That's what I first say: "Do something that brings you happiness other than acting, because this business is so fickle." I make blankets and stuffed animals. I don't know. I'm a weirdo.