Mike Jorgensen > Mike's Quotes

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”
― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“They may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.”
― Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

“Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.”
― Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

“Switching to all organic food production is the single most critical (and most doable) action we can take right now to stop our climate crisis.”
― Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

“If you do just one thing—make one conscious choice—that can change the world, go organic. Buy organic food. Stop using chemicals and start supporting organic farmers. No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future.”
― Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe

“The demands of the marketplace eventually outstripped the chicken’s physical capacity to support them. The bird’s breasts became too big for its legs and skeleton to support. The animals grew so fast they couldn’t supply oxygen to all their tissue and muscle, causing fluid to build up in their body cavity. The chicken’s immune system suffered, and some birds simply keeled over after a few weeks.”
― Christopher Leonard, The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business

“However close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet." quoted by Gidon Eshel (Bard College geographer)”
― James E. McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

“We instinctively feel an overwhelming desire to take sides: organic or conventional, fair or free trade, "pure" or genetically engineered food, wild or farm-raised fish. Like most things in life, though, the sensible answer lies somewhere between the extremes, somewhere in that dull but respectable placed called the pragmatic center. To be a centrist when it comes to food is, unfortunately, to be a radical.”
― James McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly

“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

“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

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

“But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.”
― 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

“... the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“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. ”
― Michael Pollan, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

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

“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

“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

“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”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Shake the hand that feeds you.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Mostly Sally

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves!

“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”
― P.G. Wodehouse