I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.

Michael Pollan

Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.

Michael Pollan

family community food

Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.

Michael Pollan

subsidies cash real

People forget that eating represents their most profound engagement with the natural world. Through agriculture is how we change the world, more than anything else we do.

Michael Pollan

agriculture profound people

The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.

Michael Pollan

vitamins-and-minerals block body

Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

Michael Pollan

pleasure people

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

Michael Pollan

confusing healthy order

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

Michael Pollan

meat-industry wall animal

If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

Michael Pollan

plant ifs made

One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.

Michael Pollan

issues powerful people

One surprise is how deeply the food system is implicated in climate change. I don't think that has really been on people's radar until very recently. 25 to 33 percent of climate change gases can be traced to the food system. I was also surprised that those diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us - heart disease, cancer, diabetes - were virtually unknown 150 years ago, before we began eating this way.

Michael Pollan

cancer heart thinking

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

Michael Pollan

selfish practice people

Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it

Michael Pollan

enjoy meals

Most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation.

Michael Pollan

corporations cooks important

One of the problems is that the US government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health.

Michael Pollan

distance block mean

Cooking (from scratch) is the single most important thing we could do as a family to improve our health and general well-being.

Michael Pollan

scratches cooking important

... 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

mind profound culture

People say they don't have time to cook, yet in the last few years we have found an extra two hours a day for the internet.

Michael Pollan

two people years

Rule No.37 The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.

Michael Pollan

bread

Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

Michael Pollan

junk want long

Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care.

Michael Pollan

income numbers thinking