Michael Baum > Michael's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it’s only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.”
― Mark Bittman, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good

“Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightest word in any language is its word for God.”
― A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

“If you tend to treat religion as a private affair, something to do on your days off, something too private for the marketplace or political discussion, you may actually be dabbling with secularism.”
― Dale Fincher, Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk

“If we believe abortion damages mother, father, and child, we may let the Bible inform us, but secularists will insist we do the harder work of finding reasons and evidence that appeal even to a nonreligious person.”
― Dale Fincher, Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk

“Introducing Jesus as our light in this dark world gives our friends something to ponder, allowing a guarded heart to give Jesus another look and freeing people to see Jesus as a promise instead of a threat.”
― Dale Fincher, Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk

“Christians struggle with hypocrisy because of our core confusion about what Christianity means. We tend to believe that Christianity is more about being good than about following Jesus.5 If we believe this, when we try to share our beliefs with others, we talk more about attending church, praying a sinner’s prayer, and becoming a good person than about Jesus. The result is that we become known for morality, not for our love of Jesus.”
― Dale Fincher, Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk

“According to a recent Barna survey, a large majority of evangelical Christians and church leaders measure their own spiritual maturity by rule keeping, rather than by the fruit of the Spirit.28”
― Dale Fincher, Coffee Shop Conversations: Making the Most of Spiritual Small Talk

“I asked Eduardo if his efforts were meant to ensure the highest-quality livers or to guarantee the welfare of his geese. He shook his head slightly and smiled, a sign that he didn’t understand the question. I tried again: “What motivates you? If you had to choose, is it sweet livers you want, or a painless end to life?” Eduardo raised his eyebrows. “What’s the difference?”
― Dan Barber, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

“It is often said,” Vandana Shiva has written, “that the so-called miracle varieties of the Green Revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However, these higher yields disappear in the context of total yields of crops on farms.”
― Dan Barber, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

“I’m looking at flour like you would a carton of milk or a bag of peaches. Because it’s a fresh product. It’s alive.” “Versus everyone else?” I asked. “Everyone else pursues shelf life. Most flour preservation is done by toasting it slightly—it’s called kilning—and what you’re doing is drying out the grain further so there’s absolutely no moisture. That’s what we eat. Wheat picked long past ripeness, then broken apart, and then mummified. Mills are abattoirs for wheat.”
― Dan Barber, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

“I do not believe that ‘employment outside the house’ is as valuable or important or satisfying as employment at home, for either men or women,” wrote Wendell Berry in his famous 1987 essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.”
― Megan Kimble, Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food

“How Bad Are Bananas: The Carbon Footprint of Everything,”
― Megan Kimble, Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food

“Forty percent of grain grown across the world is fed to animals; if it takes twenty-five gallons of water to grow a pound of wheat, it takes five thousand gallons of freshwater to produce a pound of steak. Put another way, it takes ten thousand pounds of grain (really, corn) to grow a thousand-pound cow.”
― Megan Kimble, Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food

“If we refuse to update our knowledge, then we have refused to know and thereby refused to love.”
― Dale Fincher, Opening the Stable Door: An Advent Reader