Michael Pollan Quotes

I want to give people a basic education, and to help them think for themselves when it comes to food.

Ultimately the person, even the child, must choose for himself.

I appreciate the power of a White House bully pulpit - but kids listen and learn primarily from other kids. If your son's friend tells him that the apple is better than the fries, he's more likely to listen.

It's an uphill battle to help our kids learn to make good food decisions - particularly when they are too often presented with an a la carte lunch room choice of french fries or yogurt.

Change the food in the schools and we can influence how children think. Change the curriculum and teach them how to garden and how to cook and we can show that growing food and cooking and eating together give lasting richness, meaning, and beauty to our lives.

Imagine a world where children were fed tasty and nutritious, real food at school from the age of 4 to 18. A world where every child was educated about how amazing food is, where it comes from, how it affects the body and how it can save their lives.

No matter where you are in life . . . [y]ou always have a choice and the choice can be power.

Something you need to do three times a day, seven days a week, and something you need to stop worrying about. If [kids] don't know how to cook, they go to junk, and then the junk becomes addictive, and then all of a sudden they're left with no choice.

Abundance = choice = freedom. Scarcity = dependence = control.

The point is less what we choose than that we have the power to make a choice.

Everyone has choices to make; no one has the right to take those choices away from us. Not even out of love.

Who gets to decide what you want?

Every kid in every school no matter their background, deserves to learn the basics about food - where it comes from, how to cook it and how it affects their bodies. These life skills are as important as reading and writing, but they've been lost over the past few generations. We need to bring them back and bring up our kids to be streetwise about food.

When we go to school, very often, we don't see that passion because the way school is run, the disciplinary nature of it and the rote learning are so, sort of, offensive actually, that children sort of lose that passion more often than not.

You cannot expect your children to be happy eating esoteric beige-colored foods when their friends get soda pop, Snickers, and Twinkies.

Their reasons don't mean anything unless I have a choice.

Kids who participate in school meal programs get roughly half of their calories each day at school. ... This is an extraordinary responsibility. But it's also an opportunity. And it's why one of the single most important things we can do to fight childhood obesity is to make those meals at school as healthy and nutritious as possible.

Did you hear? You are free." Yessss. Choice. It is a fine thing. And I choose to take you back, Most High.

Our power is in our ability to decide.

Everything I have is a private company. And even though a public company's a great thing, it's great for financing and all of the stuff you need to do. I'm not answering to anybody but my wife and my children and the people who work for me, and my partners.

One reason we planted the White House vegetable garden was to set an example about what food can mean, but to also begin a broader conversation about how we're feeding our kids, what they know about the food that they eat, how they're taking care of themselves.

No matter how frustrated you may feel, there is always a way out. In every situation that arises, we choose to be powerful or powerless. It may not always feel like it, but it is a choice. And there are consequences for these choices in terms of the results we get, and the subsequent increase or decrease in our power and influence. If we choose powerlessness, it is often because we doubt there is any other option.

What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?

If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever you put in front of them.

When I taught school, we just had the school cafeteria; we didn't have machines or things for children to buy food from. But parents can try to educate their children about choices. A lot of everything we're talking about that has to do with heart disease has to do with the choices that we make.