A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
Michael Pollan

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
Michael Pollan

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.
Michael Pollan

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.
Michael Pollan

Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.
Michael Pollan

Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.
Michael Pollan

Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before.
Michael Pollan

Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.
Michael Pollan

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.
Michael Pollan

High-quality food is better for your health.
Michael Pollan


I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist.
Michael Pollan

I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification.
Michael Pollan

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.
Michael Pollan

In addition to contributing to erosion, pollution, food poisoning, and the dead zone, corn requires huge amounts of fossil fuel - it takes a half gallon of fossil fuel to produce a bushel of corn.
Michael Pollan

In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn.
Michael Pollan

In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.
Michael Pollan

My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it.
Michael Pollan

My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.
Michael Pollan

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.
Michael Pollan

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.
Michael Pollan