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
america citizens income
Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.
cooking important might
Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It's the single most important thing you can do for your health.
thinking numbers care
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.
dream powerful real
I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.
natural feels likelihood
Any food product that feels compelled to tell you it’s natural in all likelihood is not.
doctors pay grocers
Better to pay the grocer than the doctor.
discovery answers facts
I made the unexpected but happy discovery that the answer to several of the questions that most occupied me was in fact one and the same: Cook.
struggle animal law
A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
perspective fuel growing
Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.
eggs agriculture needs
The whole problem of industrial agriculture is putting all of your eggs in one basket. We need to diversify our food chains as well as our fields so that when some of them fail, we can still eat.
strong want claims
If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat
inspirational motivational country
Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.
thinking erode moral
I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.
issues people environmental
People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.