If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have.
— Michael Pollan
How my son discovered vegetables was from growing them in the garden.
McDonald's is in a unique position. They can decide they don't want meat with hormones in it, and that will be the end of hormones in meat. I actually think exerting pressure on McDonald's is probably just as important as on the Department of Agriculture.
A cow out on grass is just an incredible thing to behold... Cows and other ruminants can do things we just can't do. They have the most highly evolved digestive organ on the planet, called the rumen. And the rumen can digest grass. It takes grass, cellulose in grass, and turns it into protein, very nutritious protein. We can't do that.
I think cooking is really key because it's the only way you're going to take back control of your diet from the corporations who want to cook for us. The fact is, so far, corporations don't cook that well. They tend to use too much salt, fat, and sugar - much more than you would ever use at home.
You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It's a shame. It's the media and the food industry: they've fed our panic around time.
If you're eating grassland meat, your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.
I don't think of myself as a spiritual person.
We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don't have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.
My work has gotten more political over time, but once you start exploring food, you find you're up against economics and politics and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to deal with.
A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.
Soon after the inauguration, the Obamas gave Big Food a case of heartburn when, in the spring of 2009, Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn, a symbolic but nevertheless powerful act that thrilled the food movement.
Europeans fought for shorter workdays, more vacation time, family leave, and all these kinds of things. Those haven't been priorities in America: it's been about money. You see, in the countries that fought for time, they cook more often; they have less obesity. There are real benefits to having time.
Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often, a relationship of interdependence develops: I'll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal.
Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness - which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness - is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world.
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.
The Congressional leaders set the agenda for journalism; it's not the other way around.
Restaurants serve supersize portions to make you feel you're getting your money's worth.
To the extent we push meat a little bit to the side and move vegetables to the center of our diet, we're also going to be a lot healthier.
I like the taste of grass-fed meat. It is chewier, I'll own that... The Argentines make excellent beef that's grass-fed. They've learned how to age it, and they've gotten good at it.
It's not that hard to eat well if you're willing to put a little more time into it, a little more thoughtfulness into it and, yes, a little bit more money.
A lot of what you see in the supermarket I would argue is not really food. It's what I call edible, food-like substances.
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.
As soon as you plow, you're releasing carbon.
My mode as a writer is to layer different perspectives: the scientific, the philosophical, the political, the journalistic. When you layer them, you get a really wholesome, interesting picture.
You can't be elected president without passing though Iowa and bowing down before corn-based ethanol, before agricultural subsidies. I mean, even McCain was a critic of ethanol, but when he got to Iowa, he was singing a different tune.
I was really gratified that, of all the episodes of 'Cooked,' the baking one really hit a chord. There were months where there were dozens of loaves posted from people on my Twitter feed every day... And it's a little bit of a guy thing. Most of those loaves put up on Twitter were put up there by guys.
It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage - indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
The euphemistically named CropLife America speaks for the pesticide industry.
It's no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television - or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.
Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.
The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.
The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism.
The Times has much less power than you think. I believe we attribute power to the media generally that it simply doesn't have. It's very convenient to blame the media, the same way we blame television for everything that's going wrong in society.
It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.
Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.
Animals raised on corn produce fattier meat, but it's not just that it's fattier, it's the kinds of fats. Corn-fed beef produces lots of saturated fats. So that the heart disease we associate with eating meat is really a problem with corn-fed meat. If you eat grass-fed beef, it has much more of the nutritional profile of the wild meat.
I'm very picky about the meat I eat. I eat grass-fed beef, which is now becoming more common. Yes, it's still more expensive, but it's a very sustainable product.
When you cook, you get to shop. You get to vote if you want the pastured raised pork or the organic grain. You can get to help produce your agricultural system, and you give that up when you outsource your cooking. You become dependent on what's offered - and that's a shame.
I hope that if you're cooking two nights a week, you can try for three.
Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.
Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically.
After writing 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' I wanted to write a book that got past the choir, that got to people who didn't care about how their food was grown but who did care about their health.
As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for 'better' jobs in the city. We emptied America's rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories.
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.
Bayer's planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and agrochemical markets.
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.
You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have - while we have consciousness, toolmaking, language, they have biochemistry.
Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.
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.
