Quan Zhang

“You have just dined,” Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“If you walk five blocks north from the wholefoods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight way, you'll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few homeless people.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals