Michael Pollan Quotes

The critical influence of set and setting. Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.

Wherever the apple tree goes, its offspring propose so many different variations on what it means to be an apple -- at least five per apple, several thousand per tree -- that a couple of these novelti...

Is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 cor...

Sir Albert)Howard put it this way:Artificial manures (synthetic fertilizers)lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.

The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)

Compost is trucked in; some crops also receive fish emulsion along with their water and a side dressing of pelleted chicken manure. Over the winter a cover crop of legumes is planted to build up nitro...

Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only good to eat—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, good to think, for among all the many other t...

Also, by demonizing one nutrient -fat- we inevitably give a free pass to anther , supposedly good, nutrient -carbohydrates in this case - and then proceed to eat much of that instead.

And I remember Bill asking, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘I’m experiencing a lot of guilt.’ Bill replied, ‘That’s a very common human experience,’ and with that, the whole image of being hanged pixilated and th...

As I’ve heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it’s not YOUR time.

For me, cooking is about seeking the deepest, farthest, richest flavors in everything I make. About extracting the absolute most out of every ingredient, whether it is a beautiful piece of salmon or a...

Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to th...