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

1 " 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

2 " Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. "

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

3 " we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin) "

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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share. "

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

8 " But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed corn, walking. "

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

9 " Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread. "

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

10 " Imagine if we had a food system that actually produced wholesome food. Imagine if it produced that food in a way that restored the land. Imagine if we could eat every meal knowing these few simple things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what it really cost. If that was the reality, then every meal would have the potential to be a perfect meal. We would not need to go hunting for our connection to our food and the web of life that produces it. We would no longer need any reminding that we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and that what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world. I don’t want to have to forage every meal. Most people don’t want to learn to garden or hunt. 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. Imagine it: Every meal would connect us to the joy of living and the wonder of nature. Every meal would be like saying grace. "

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

11 " So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. "

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

12 " As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food. "

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

13 " So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another. "

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

14 " It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction. "

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

15 " The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants. "

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

16 " Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians -- we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted -- to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn't care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Big Horn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. "

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

17 " Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person. "

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

18 " [David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries. "

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

19 " Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine. "

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

20 " Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. "

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