Michael Pollan Quotes About Eating
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Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.
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Meat is a tremendous environmental challenge. It contributes enormous amounts of greenhouse gas, especially beef eating.
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Imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.
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One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.
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... 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.
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Eat with consciousness. When you eat with consciousness, and you know what you're eating, and you eat it in full appreciation of what it is, it's enormously satisfying.
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Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.
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Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
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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.
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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.
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Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.
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Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
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One of the powerful things about the food issue is that people feel empowered by it. There are so many areas of our life where we feel powerless to change things, but your eating issues are really primal. You decide every day what you're going to put in your body and what you refuse to put in your body. That's politics at its most basic.
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The first step towards solving the omnivore's dilemma is knowledge: eating with full consciousness. When that happens, I have a lot of confidence that people will make good choices.
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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.
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Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
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Not that I'm against meat eating. But I think we're eating too much.
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Do all your eating at a table.
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A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.
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The issue of snacking is complicated. In principle, "grazing" is probably a good idea. It would even out the insulin spikes and things like that from eating large meals. The problem is it makes it harder for people to control the amount they're eating.
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I agree insofar as we eat too much meat. We're eating about 200 pounds per person per year. That's about 9 ounces a day. That's probably more than is good for us and it's certainly more than is good for the environment.
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One surprise is how deeply the food system is implicated in climate change. I don't think that has really been on people's radar until very recently. 25 to 33 percent of climate change gases can be traced to the food system. I was also surprised that those diseases that we take for granted as what will kill us - heart disease, cancer, diabetes - were virtually unknown 150 years ago, before we began eating this way.
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Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
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The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.
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Now that I know how supermarket meat is made, I regard eating it as a somewhat risky proposition. I know how those animals live and what's on their hides when they go to slaughter, so I don't buy industrial meat.
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Stop eating before you're full.
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Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.
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For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.
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There's no sacrifice in eating well, there is no sacrifice in pleasure. To the contrary, the best-grown food is actually the tastiest.
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Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.
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