Raw foodists are kind of paddling upstream against evolution. The only reason they can do it, and they don't all keel over, is that they are using blenders. They're very Cuisinart-dependent.
— Michael Pollan
Even if you don't think you can cook well, you can cook better than the food industry.
Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon.
Is there any practice less selfish, any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?
I think the most important thing we can teach our kids for their long-term health and happiness is how to cook.
Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It's cheaper than McDonald's in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is - you know, it's an industry kind of ruining North Carolina.
Oddly enough, government policy helped get the fast food outlets into the city. Very well-intentioned small business administration loans to encourage minority business ownership. The easiest business to get into is opening a fast-food franchise in the inner city.
The first step in reforming appetite is going from processed food to real food. Then, if you can afford organic or grass-fed, fantastic. But the first step is moving from processed industrial food to the real thing.
Food choices are something fundamental you can control about yourself: what you take into your body. When so many other things are out of control and your influence over climate change - all these much larger issues - it's very hard to see any results or any progress. But everybody can see progress around food.
You can have intense food experience with less food. Europeans have intense food experiences but eat less food.
You don't need to know what an antioxidant is to eat well.
Eat all the junk food you want - as long as you cook it yourself. That way, it'll be less junky, and you won't eat it every day because it's a lot of work.
Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important.
Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.
Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
The French fry did not become America's most popular vegetable until industry took over the jobs of washing, peeling, cutting, and frying the potatoes - and cleaning up the mess.
One of my rules is pay more, eat less. You do get what you pay for, and if you're willing to pay more for pastured eggs or grass-fed beef, you're getting something that's more delicious, and you'll feel better about eating it.
Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.
It's the embrace of corn-based ethanol that has driven up all food prices. It's not making agriculture more sustainable.
I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.
We spend our lives in front of screens, and cooking is one of the best antidotes.
You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it's a lot of sugar. It's just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.
There is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you're General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald's, because the family meal is usually one thing shared.
If you fill your Agriculture Committee with representatives of commodity farmers, and you don't have urbanites, you don't represent eaters, okay? You don't have people from New York City on these committees, you are going to end up with the kind of farm bills we have: a piece of special interest legislation.
I've been amazed to learn all of the links between microbial health and our general health. This all started by trying to understand fermentation. The fermentation outside your body, and its relation to the fermentation inside your body. The key to health is fermentation, it turns out.
My whole interest in food grew from my interest in gardens and the question of how we engage with the natural world. To go back even further, I got interested in gardens because I was interested in nature and wilderness and Thoreau and Emerson.
When you realize the real pleasure in food comes in the first couple bites, and it diminishes thereafter, that's a kind of reminder to focus on the experience, enjoy those first bites, and as you get into the 20th bite, you're talking calories and not pleasure.
Basically, farm chemicals are labor-saving devices, and farmers who don't use them - weed killers especially - have to work harder or hire more help.
In the amount of time it takes to microwave a TV dinner, you can put something much tastier on the table, I promise.
We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain. Food comes to us ready-made in packages that obscure as much information as they reveal.
Eat a wide variety of species.
For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry - before you eat and then again along the way.
There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day.
To eat well, you either have to invest money or time. If you can put in some time, the raw ingredients are not that expensive. You can eat extremely well on a budget.
To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture - that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product.
To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen.
As I grew steadily more comfortable in the kitchen, I found that, much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.
The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.
We love salt, fat and sugar. We're hard-wired to go for those flavors. They trip our dopamine networks, which are our craving networks.
Simply by starting to cook again, you declare your independence from the culture of fast food. As soon as you cook, you start thinking about ingredients. You start thinking about plants and animals and not the microwave. And you will find that your diet, just by that one simple act, that is greatly improved.
The way you support farmers is by shopping and buying raw ingredients.
To me, onions are the metaphor for kitchen drudgery. Cutting them is hard to do well, and they fight you the whole way.
People have been dealing with health long before there was science, certainly before nutrition science. We're constantly reading about scientific studies that support old wives' tales.
We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding.
Our big problem is that high-calorie, special-occasion foods like cakes, fried foods, etc. have become so cheap and easy that we eat them every day. Make them special again by cooking them yourself. You won't do it every day, I promise.
Hillary Clinton is not strongly identified with reforming the industrial food system. The Clintons were involved with Walmart and Tyson in Arkansas. Though as a senator, Hillary was pretty good at reaching out to the small farmers in Upstate New York.
We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.
Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.
If you made all the French fries you ate, you would eat them much less often, if only because they're so much work. The same holds true for fried chicken, chips, cakes, pies, and ice cream. Enjoy these treats as often as you're willing to prepare them - chances are good it won't be every day.
I probably spend more on food than a lot of people, and I feel good about the whole food chain I'm supporting when I'm doing it. But even I have to remind myself. I'm always complaining about the prices at the farmer's market.
