For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

— Michael Pollan

French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.

— Michael Pollan

[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

Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.

— Michael Pollan

Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety-Marathon- notable for its 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

Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.

— Michael Pollan

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

High-quality food is better for your health.

— Michael Pollan

. . . .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 afford quite as much satisfaction.

— Michael Pollan

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called "this grace wholly gratuitous"? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64)

— Michael Pollan