Michael Pollan Quotes

If you knew how meat was made, you'd probably lose your lunch.

What does animal welfare have to do with food safety? The animals are the food! They are living in their own excrement, developing horrific sores, stressed out, and, therefore, more vulnerable to illness and disease.

Animals that we eat are raised for food in the most economical way possible, and the serious food producers do it in the most humane way possible. I think anyone who is a carnivore needs to understand that meat does not originally come in these neat little packages.

I know lots and lots and lots of vegetarians who think it's perfectly all right to kill animals for food to eat, but don't do it because they think all the ways in which it's done are wrong.

Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries.

This [the movie Babe] is the way Americans want to think of pigs. Real-life 'Babes' see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can't even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.

Right afterward I read Fast Food Nation. That book changed my life: It made me a vegetarian.

The factory farm is . . . an obvious moral evil so sickening and horrendous. . . All this so we can have our accustomed veal or lamb or fried chicken or pork chop or hot dog.

If we each had to butcher our own meat, there would be a great increase in the number of vegetarians.

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Maybe one day the world will change, that we'll be in a luxurious position of being able to debate whether or not it's inherently wrong to eat animals, but the question doesn't matter right now.

I eat meat, but no meat that isn't pastured is acceptable, and we probably need to eat a whole lot less.

I don't want food that comes from animals that are caged up and fed antibiotics. I am really suspicious of that kind of production of meat and poultry.

The emergence and spread of virulent strains of avian influenza has been attributed by experts to the intensely overcrowded, unsanitary, and stressful conditions that often characterize large-scale factory farming in industrialized agriculture.

I don't want any more concentration camps for animals that are cruelly treated, force-fed to fatten themselves up for our consumption.

Mary had a little lamb. And when she saw it stricken she shipped it off to Packingtown and now its labeled chicken.

Obviously, if I'm in Argentina, I'm going to have a steak, but I don't love meat, really. I always think about where the food came from and who had to get it.

To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen.

I've been involved in animal issues for quite a while, going back 24 years. I started reading up on factory farming and slaughterhouses and animal cruelty, and it didn't make sense for me to be part of it.

I've learned so much about what you can do to help animals, the environmental issues around meat production.

We all buy our meat wrapped in plastic because we don't like to think about the animal that died.

I feel like things are weirder in our food production chain than I can even make up. I wouldn't invent pink slime, but pink slime exists: It's a non-fictional entity. Like, that stuff grosses me out so much, I couldn't make it up.

Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.

So much of today's food is based on the exploitation of animals and the environment. Yes, it's cheap, but at what cost?