Michael Pollan Quotes

Right now my favorite book is 'Omnivores Dilemma.'

Behind every morsel of bread, fruits, or meat is a large amount of transformed fossil fuels.

Eating is an agricultural act.

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.

Our food is safer and our diets are more diverse than ever before; production methods are becoming increasingly sustainable, clean and efficient; and we are constantly becoming better at protecting biodiversity.

I think the only real knowledge I had before I went to Iowa was what I learned from 'Food Inc'. But once I got there and developed these extensive relationships with the farmers, I realized that we're basically made of corn.

The reasons for food insecurity are many and varied. But part of the problem is the global farming systems.

I was introduced to the world of modern food production in the mid-1990s, while researching an article about California's strawberry industry for the 'Atlantic Monthly.'

Industrial agriculture freed many people to pursue lives their parents and grandparents could never have. It made America modern.

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.

I see this [biodiesel] as a way for the farmer to grow fuel and food and put him back in business again

People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.

It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'

I think it’s the right moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary perspective - how can we not only discover more compassionate relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and that would mean challenging the whole capitalist industrial form of food production.

Horses raise what the farmer eats and eats what the farmer raises. You can't plow the ground and get gasoline.

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.

Sara Scherr and Jeff McNeely have given us a thoughtful, sensible book about a topic of great importance to the world. There is no food security, no poverty reduction, no environmental sustainability without transforming our agricultural practices. The book ?presents well documented cases of best practices from all over the world. It should be required reading for all concerned with agriculture, the environment, food security or just the future of our children.

It is now 14 years since I first suggested that organic farming might have some benefits and ought to be taken seriously. I shall never forget the vehemence of the reaction.. much of it coming from the sort of people who regard agriculture as an industrial process, with production as the sole yardstick of success.

We are turning everything on this planet into food for humans. We'll eat it and, if we can't eat it, we'll kill it and take its place and just move it out of the way.

The very substance which last week was grazing in the field, waving in the milk pail, or growing in the garden, is now become part of the man.

Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

Nature has put itself the problem how to catch in flight light streaming to the earth and to store the most elusive of all powers in rigid form. To achieve this aim, it has covered the crust of earth with organisms which in their life processes absorb the light of the sun and use this power to produce a continuously accumulating chemical difference. ... The plants take in one form of power, light; and produce another power, chemical difference.

There's no point in being unhappy about growing older. Just think of the millions who have been denied the privilege.