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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto QUOTES

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto QUOTES

1 " You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories). "

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

2 " Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites. "

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

3 " 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

4 " [Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa. "

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

5 " 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

6 " You are what what you eat eats. "

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

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

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

8 " 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

9 " The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. "

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

10 " That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. "

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

11 " 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 , In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

12 " Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care. "

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

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

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

14 " Shake the hand that feeds you. "

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

15 " 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

16 " The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them. "

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

17 " Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic. "

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

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

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

19 " When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight. "

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

20 " But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter. "

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