Time is the missing ingredient in our recipes-and in our lives. Michael Pollan More Quotes by Michael Pollan More Quotes From Michael Pollan People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue. Michael Pollan environmentalissuespeople Human health should now be thought of as a collective property of the human-associate d microbiota, as one group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology - that is, as a function of the community, not the individual. Michael Pollan individualgroupscommunity The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery. Michael Pollan recognitionmysterydoe Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness. Michael Pollan wagersgardentree The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world. Michael Pollan votethreeworld Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food. Michael Pollan wealthyqualitypoor We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are - the environment, your health, animal welfare - the answers are going to be different for every person. Michael Pollan animalgivingpeople The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line. Michael Pollan lineseatingtoday Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Michael Pollan greek When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. Michael Pollan ignorancemistakeappreciation That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. Michael Pollan peopleideasthinking At either end of any food chain you find a biological system-a patch of soil, a human body-and the health of one is connected-literally-to the health of the other. Michael Pollan soilbodyland To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest - on behalf of the senses and the microbes - against the homogenization of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. Michael Pollan lawnsrollingflavor You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned. Michael Pollan seedsapples Man is by definition the first and primary weed. Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us. Michael Pollan weedmenfirsts 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 fitnessmotivationalinspirational A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius. Michael Pollan carbon-footprintveganbeef 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 zerogardenthinking The banquet is in the first bite. Michael Pollan banquetsbitesfirsts When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too. Michael Pollan chickenstaste
