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
animal ninety-nine oil
The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves.
people tears tissues
Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.
pain regret self
Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.
certain knows basic-things
There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.
problem solutions
We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.
forget operations underrated
...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.
real book taken
That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.
challenges environmental beef
Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.
philosophy empowering needs
we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)
dream reality denial
Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.
garden space landscape
A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
lines activist journalist
You have to draw lines between being a journalist and an activist.
moving garden ideas
The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.
food grandmother cooking
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.