Michael Pollan

“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.”

“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.”

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“High-quality food is better for your health.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.”

“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

“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.”

“Even if you don't think you can cook well, you can cook better than the food industry.”

“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.”

“It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car.”