Michael Pollan Quotes

Eating is an agricultural act.

Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

The time has come to recognize that food, how we produce it, process it, package it, sell it, cook it and eat it, is as important as any other issue.

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

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.

Right now my favorite book is 'Omnivores Dilemma.'

How we grow food has enormous effects on the environment - climate change as well as pollution of air, water, and soil.

Eating is an environmental act.

To me, one of the easiest ways of addressing climate change and potentially remedying climate change is to stop subsidizing animal agriculture.

Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.

... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

We have to draw the line someplace with all the pesticides being used by the farmers.

In many places where coffee is grown, deforestation is a major issue.

I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture.

The Green Revolution is neither.

Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive land abandonment, is a widespread by-product of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11 percent of the earth's vegetated surface has been degraded—an area larger than India and China combined—and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.

It's a free society. But don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation becomes destructive.

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.

Large-scale deforestation can be prevented while increasing food production through better, smarter agriculture.

I've always had a strong interest in how food is produced and in knowing where it comes from.

A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.

Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex.

The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease.

We need to start thinking about the future of food if we are going to feed 9 billion people in a way that does not destroy our environment.