"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration."
— Michael Pollan

"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
— Michael Pollan

"You are what what you eat eats."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"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. "
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187"
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"... 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."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them. "
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"So that's us: processed corn, walking."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours."
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire)

"Shake the hand that feeds you."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"The fast-food hamburger has been brilliantly engineered to offer a succulent and tasty first bite, a bite that in fact would be impossible to enjoy if the eater could accurately picture the feedlot and slaughterhouse and the workers behind it or knew anything about the 'artificial grill flavor' that made the first bite so convincing. This is a hamburger to hurry through, no question. By comparison, eating a grass-fed burger when you can picture the green pastures in which the animal grazed is a pleasure of another order, not a simple one, to be sure, but one based on knowledge rather than ignorance and gratitude rather than indifference.
To eat slowly, then, also means to eat deliberately, in the original sense of the word: 'from freedom' instead of compulsion. "
— Michael Pollan

"The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness."
— Michael Pollan

"Don't eat anything incapable of rotting."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest. "
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed corn, walking."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"...our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows." -Martin Renner"
— Michael Pollan

"The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive."
— Michael Pollan

"Sooner or later your fingers close on that one moist-cold spud that the spade has accidentally sliced clean through, shining wetly white and giving off the most unearthly of earthly aromas. It's the smell of fresh soil in the spring, but fresh soil somehow distilled or improved upon, as if that wild, primordial scene has been refined and bottled: eau de pomme de terre. You can smell the cold inhuman earth in it, but there's the cozy kitchen to, for the smell of potatoes is, at least by now, to us, the smell of comfort itself, a smell as blankly welcoming as spud flesh, a whiteness that takes up memories and sentiments as easily as flavors. To smell a raw potato is to stand on the very threshold of the domestic and the wild. (241)"
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat"
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway."
— Michael Pollan

"How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called "this grace wholly gratuitous"? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64)"
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to "cast spells" -- in our vocabulary, "psychoactive" plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladona, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skin of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based "flying ointment" that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the "broomstick" by which these women were said to travel. (119)"
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"Immersed this spring in research for this chapter, I was sorely tempted to plant one of the hybrid cannabis seeds I'd seen for sale in Amsterdam. I immediately thought better of it, however. So I planted lots of opium poppies instead. I hasten to add that I've no plans to do anything with my poppies except admire them - first their fleeting tissue-paper blooms, then their swelling blue-green seedpods, fat with milky alkaloid. (Unless, of course, simply walking among the poppies is enough to have an effect, as it was for Dorothy in Oz.)"
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"'Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an American supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, after I realized that the straightforward question 'What should I eat?' could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: 'What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?' Not very long ago an eater didn't need a journalist to answer these questions. The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"A charge often levied against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There's some truth to this indictment, if that it what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature. ... The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he's put in play--that the ducks and fishes are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious polyculture are his to harvest even so."
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins."
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don't know--even a sense of mystery--keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets."
— Michael Pollan

""When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.""
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's 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."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"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)."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

""Sometimes the large scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back.""
— Michael Pollan

"...People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land."
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. All the guests were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips. At the appointed moment a cannon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan's mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches. The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne."
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"Johnny Appleseed was revered . . he was . . . an evangelist (of a doctrine veering perilously close to pantheism)."
— Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World)

"Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.
Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, it the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much."
— Michael Pollan (Second Nature: A Gardener's Education)

"[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa."
— Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto)

"...every new genetically engineered plant is a unique event in nature, bringing its own set of genetic contingencies. This means that the reliability or safety of one genetically modified plant doesn't necessarily guarantee the reliability or safety of the next."
— Michael Pollan