Quotes by Michael Pollan

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding.

Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat were eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. Its as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.

I mean, were really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.

Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically.

“You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).”

“A garden should make you feel youve entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”

“The green thumb is equable in the face of natures uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.”

“Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for its high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.”

“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ”