100 Best Michael Pollan Quotes From The Author Of 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'

Rajnandini Roychoudhury
Dec 12, 2023 By Rajnandini Roychoudhury
Originally Published on Mar 11, 2021
Edited by Jacob Fitzbright
Michael Pollan spelled out with alphabet pasta.
?
Age: 0-99
Read time: 12.4 Min

Michael Pollan is an American activist and author.

He was born on 6 February 1965. At present, he works as a professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Michael Pollan is a well-known author of many food activist books.

His most famous work as an author is the book 'The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History Of Four Meals'. Other than that, he has written many other books like ‘Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual’, ‘Cooked: A Natural History Of Transformation’ and ‘The Botany Of Desire’.

In this article, we offer you some of the most famous motivational food quotes by Michael Pollan as well as quotes from his books like Michael Pollan 'Food Rules' quotes,  Michael Pollan 'Omnivore's Dilemma' quotes and other books too.

Check out [Gordon Ramsay quotes] and cooking quotes too.

Michael Pollan Quotes On Food Love

Find the motivation to eat healthy and stay fit by going through these Michael Pollan quotes on food love, Michael Pollan popular quotes, and more.

1. "When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you're eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it is, it's enormously satisfying."

- Michael Pollan.

2. "Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain."

- Michael Pollan.

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

- Michael Pollan.

4. "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.

5. "Every meal would connect us to the joy of living and the wonder of nature. Every meal would be like saying grace."

- Michael Pollan.

6. "In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats."

- Michael Pollan.

7. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

- Michael Pollan.

8. "What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!"

- Michael Pollan.

9. "Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity."

- Michael Pollan.

10. "You are what you eat eats."

- Michael Pollan.

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

- Michael Pollan.

12. "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.

Michale Pollan Quotes On Nature

In this category we are presenting a list of Michael Pollan quotes on the role of nature to provide us enriched food.

13. "The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway."

- Michael Pollan.

14. "We've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food."

- Michael Pollan.

15. "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."

- Michael Pollan.

16. "People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue."

- Michael Pollan.

17. "Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming."

- Michael Pollan.

18. "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."

- Michael Pollan.

19. "The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive."

- Michael Pollan.

20. "Through agriculture is how we change the world."

- Michael Pollan.

21. "Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise."

- Michael Pollan.

22. "I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification."

- Michael Pollan.

23. "Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong."

- Michael Pollan.

24. "Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most afflicts the gardener."

- Michael Pollan.

25. "The gardener cultivates some wildness, but they do so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery."

- Michael Pollan.

26. "You suddenly realize that consciousness is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world."

- Michael Pollan.

27. "We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health."

- Michael Pollan.

28. "A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."

- Michael Pollan.

29. "We have a system where wealthy farmers feed the poor rubbish and poor farmers feed the wealthy high-quality food."

- Michael Pollan.

Michael Pollan Quotes About Food And Culture

Healthy vegetable salad of fresh tomato, cucumber, onion, spinach, lettuce and sesame on plate.

Below is a list of quotations about fast food and the ill-effects of over consuming them and how to avoid it.

30. "We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize these four crops – five altogether, but one is cotton – and these are the building blocks of fast food."

- Michael Pollan.

31. "S policy: 'no snacks, no seconds, no sweets—except on days that begin with the letter S.'"

- Michael Pollan.

32. "Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of your milk."

- Michael Pollan.

33. "If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon."

- Michael Pollan.

34. "What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?"

- Michael Pollan.

35. "Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we’re eating animals."

- Michael Pollan.

36. "The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity."

- Michael Pollan.

37. "Don't eat anything incapable of rotting."

- Michael Pollan.

38. "It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car."

- Michael Pollan.

39. "There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion."

- Michael Pollan.

40. "People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets."

- Michael Pollan.

41. "Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup."

- Michael Pollan.

42. "I still think we have a long way to go on rebuilding a culture of cooking. Everyday simple cooking."

- Michael Pollan.

Inspirational Michael Pollan Quotes

The books written by Michael Pollan contains a number of inspirational nutrition quotes that help you maintain a nutritious diet. Here are some of his quotes from the author himself that will change your mind.

43. "If people eat healthy food, they will save enough to compensate for the food price being healthier and spending less on healthcare."

- Michael Pollan.

44. "There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal."

- Michael Pollan.

45. "But we can change the way we make and get our food so that it becomes food again—something that feeds our bodies and our souls."

- Michael Pollan.

46. "Nutrition science has usually put more of its energies into the idea that the problems it studies are the result of too much of a bad thing instead of too little of a good thing."

- Michael Pollan.

47. "Shake the hand that feeds you."

- Michael Pollan.

48. "If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims."

- Michael Pollan.

49. "Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it"

- Michael Pollan.

50. "Use the apple test 'If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, you're not hungry.'"

- Michael Pollan.

51. "Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health."

- Michael Pollan.

52. "Instead of seeing organic food as an expense, view it as an investment in your health and a donation towards a safer, better, world for future generations."

- Michael Pollan.

Funny Michael Pollan Quotes

Here is a list of some light humor Michael Pollan quotes that talk about the serious issues of an unhealthy diet.

53. "Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak."

- Michael Pollan.

54. "The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead."

- Michael Pollan.

55. "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

- Michael Pollan.

56. "A good pot holds memories."

- Michael Pollan.

57. "Forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation."

- Michael Pollan.

58. "There is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us."

- Michael Pollan.

59. "Don't buy any food you've ever seen advertised."

- Michael Pollan.

60. "Eating what stands on one leg, is better than eating what stands on two legs, which is better than eating what stands on four legs."

- Michael Pollan.

61. "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.

62. "As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor."

- Michael Pollan.

63. "Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom."

- Michael Pollan.

64. "We spend our lives in front of screens, and cooking is one of the best antidotes."

- Michael Pollan.

65. "In ancient Greece, the word for 'cook', 'butcher', and 'priest' was the same - mageiros - and the word shares an etymological root with 'magic'."

- Michael Pollan.

Quotes From 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'

Check out some iconic quotes from the author of the book 'The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History Of Four Meals'.

66. "When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too."

- Michael Pollan.

67. "But that's the challenge - to change the system more than it changes you."

- Michael Pollan.

68. "Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily."

- Michael Pollan.

69. "I like to be able to open a can of stock and I like to talk about politics, or the movies, at the dinner table sometimes instead of food."

- Michael Pollan.

70. "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.

71. "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.

72. "A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef."

- Michael Pollan.

73. "Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation."

- Michael Pollan.

74. "Perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwavable organic TV dinners, stacked in the frozen food case."

- Michael Pollan.

75. "So that's us: processed corn, walking."

- Michael Pollan.

76. "Without such a thing as fast food, there would be no need for slow food."

- Michael Pollan.

Best Michael Pollan Quotes

Below is a compilation of the best inspirational and motivational quotes by Michael Pollan.

77. "In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known."

- Michael Pollan.

78. "One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance."

- Michael Pollan.

79. "But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you."

- Michael Pollan.

80. "Real food is alive and there for it should eventually die."

- Michael Pollan.

81. "This, for many people, is what's most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing"

- Michael Pollan.

82. "We all have different priorities. There's no one single set of ethical rules."

- Michael Pollan.

83. "For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours."

- Michael Pollan.

84. "We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry."

- Michael Pollan.

85. "The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture."

- Michael Pollan.

86. "Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice."

- Michael Pollan.

87. "It's where we teach our children the manners they need to get along in society. We teach them how to share."

- Michael Pollan.

88. "Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris."

- Michael Pollan.

89. "This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness."

- Michael Pollan.

90. "We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem."

- Michael Pollan.

91. "In 2008, a year of supposed 'food crisis', we grew enough food to feed 11 billion people. Most of it was not eaten by humans as food, however."

- Michael Pollan.

92. "Polyface is proof that people can sometimes do more for the health of a place by cultivating it rather than by leaving it alone."

- Michael Pollan.

93. "Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward."

- Michael Pollan.

94. "Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does."

- Michael Pollan.

95. "A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius."

- Michael Pollan.

96. "The other thing that soy contributes to, of course, is hydrogenated oil... This is the fast-food oil."

- Michael Pollan.

97. "I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not"

- Michael Pollan.

98. "At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind."

- Michael Pollan.

99. "The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you."

- Michael Pollan.

100. "When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more."

- Michael Pollan.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Michael Pollan quotes then why not take a look at Julia Child quotes, or 'Chef' quotes

Main image credit: Deutschlandreform / Shutterstock.com

We Want Your Photos!
We Want Your Photos!

We Want Your Photos!

Do you have a photo you are happy to share that would improve this article?
Email your photos

More for You

See All

Written by Rajnandini Roychoudhury

Bachelor of Arts specializing in English, Master of Arts specializing in English

Rajnandini Roychoudhury picture

Rajnandini RoychoudhuryBachelor of Arts specializing in English, Master of Arts specializing in English

With a Master of Arts in English, Rajnandini has pursued her passion for the arts and has become an experienced content writer. She has worked with companies such as Writer's Zone and has had her writing skills recognized by publications such as The Telegraph. Rajnandini is also trilingual and enjoys various hobbies such as music, movies, travel, philanthropy, writing her blog, and reading classic British literature. 

Read full bio >