Michael Pollan Quotes

Agribusiness and food processing are important parts of modernizing our economy, of modernizing our agriculture and moving into a phase where a more modernized agriculture helps not only farmers but also helps consumers.

Blessed be agriculture! if one does not have too much of it.

It's clear that agriculture, done right, is the best means the world has today to simultaneously tackle food security, poverty and environmental degradation.

If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.

Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.

In the nineteen-eighties, rates of obesity started to rise sharply in the U.S. and around the world. By the nineteen-nineties, obesity reached epidemic proportions.

If I'm going to eat fast food, I'm going to McDonald's. I don't need to pretend.

Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.

For, behind the scenes, halfway around the world in Mexico, were two decades of aggressive research on wheat that not only enabled Mexico to become self-sufficient with respect to wheat production but also paved the way to rapid increase in its production in other countries.

Most Americans live on a diet that includes processed fare that is neither fresh nor natural.

Americans are like Pac Man. We just eat our way through the day. There's always something going into the mouth.

The rich agricultural nations are the ones that can adapt to the new biotechnologies.

We're going to move from a commodity economy where you basically grow the same kind of crops - where a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn - to an ingredient economy where there will be a kernel of corn that will be designed for fuel, there will be a kernel of corn designed for livestock.

In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.

My father was a progressive farmer, and was always ready to lay aside an old plough if he could replace it with one better constructed for its work. All through life, I have ever been ready to buy a better plough.

I have been busy working in order to make agriculture a priority sector not on a small scale, but into an agro-based industry.

Establishment at public expense of rural depots for the most improved agricultural machinery, to be lent out to the agricultural population at a rent covering cost and management alone.

Agricultural chemistry was not something that could be readily mastered by farmers, nor could the new machines be easily operated and maintained. Agricultural schools were needed to provide the necessary training. Then, if local gentry and rich households with large landholdings tried new methods—and if the new techniques were effective—the people will naturally follow them.

… whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

It is not known where he that invented the plough was born, nor where he died: yet he has effected more for the happiness of the world than the whole race of heroes and of conquerors, who have drenched it with tears, and manured it with blood, and whose birth, parentage, and education have been handed down to us with a precision proportionate to the mischief they have done.

America's ranchers and farmers produce the highest-quality products in the world.

I eat a lot of takeaways.

Where I am in Nottingham, there is a Sainsbury's, and you see children going in there buying take away food - a sandwich, but more likely a packet of crisps, a fizzy drink - and that's their breakfast.

Think about the systems at McDonald's. It's a very mechanized world, where you take out a highly processed patty.

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.