Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth6 February 1955
CityLong Island, NY
CountryUnited States of America
italian might subtraction
It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
thinking meat-eating too-much
Not that I'm against meat eating. But I think we're eating too much.
onions chopping
When chopping onions, just chop onions.
beef research growing
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
cooking calories ifs
If you're cooking food, you don't have to count calories.
flavor rolling lawns
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.
baby tests milk
The entire history of baby formula has been the history of one overlooked nutrient after another...and still to this day babies fed on the most "nutritionally complete" formula fail to do as well as babies fed human milk. Even more than margarine, formula stands as the ultimate test product of nutritionism and a fair index of its hubris.
animal technology diversity
Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.
unique green-plants competition
Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.
giving-up thinking people
There are many people who don't do well on a vegetarian or vegan diet, that for them, meat is a very nutritious food. So, I'm not prepared to give up meat. I don't think we need to give up meat, but we certainly need to change the way we raise meat and diminish the amount of it in our diet.
hero believe acting
Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
quality poor wealthy
Essentially, we have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor crap and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food.
war modern protein
The history of modern nutritionism has been a history of macronutrients at war: protein against carbs; carbs against proteins, and then fats; fats against carbs.
eye shine-on average
There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn.