Michael Rocha > Michael's Quotes

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”
― Michael Pollan

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“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, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“You are what what you eat eats.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“So that's us: processed corn, walking.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“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.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens, too.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't. ”
― Michael Pollan

“According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born in 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. (An African American child's chances are two in five.) Because of diabetes and all the other health problems that accompany obesity, today's children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The problem is not limited to America: The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition--a billion--had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition--800 million.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“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.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals