Michael Pollan Quotes About Animals

Quotes about: Animals

• Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

  Michael Pollan

  Wall, Animal, Meat Industry

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.169, Bloomsbury Publishing

• The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.

  Michael Pollan

  Food, Animal, Community

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.156, Penguin

• The human animal is adapted to, and apparently can thrive on, an extraordinary range of different diets, but the Western diet, however you define it, does not seem to be one of them.

  Michael Pollan

  Inspirational, Motivational, Fitness

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.73, Penguin

• 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

  Struggle, Animal, Rights

• There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig - an animal easily as intelligent as a dog - that becomes the Christmas ham.

  Michael Pollan

  Dog, Intelligent, Compassion

  "An Animal's Place" by Michael Pollan, www.nytimes.com. November 10, 2002.

• This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting—to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Hunting, Views

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.182, Bloomsbury Publishing

• A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Cooking, Example

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.161, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.

  Michael Pollan

  Technology, Animal, Diversity

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.11, Bloomsbury Publishing

• But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

  Michael Pollan

  Lying, Animal, Hair

• The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Ninety Nine, Oil

• Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, People, Grace

• 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

  Animal, Meat, Eating

• I realize that at a certain point if we're going to change our food system, it's going to be the next generation that's going to be critical. This generation is very interested in food issues, very concerned about things like animal welfare and the impact of the food system on the environment.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Impact, Issues

  Source: indianapublicmedia.org

• If you care about the animals, actually, organic might not be the best answer because now we have organic feedlots, organic factory farms. If you care about the environment - pesticides, especially - organic is the answer.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Answers, Care

  "Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma". Interview with Anne E. McBride, leitesculinaria.com. March 20, 2007.

• I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.

  Michael Pollan

  Character, Animal, People

  "Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma". Interview with Anne E. McBride, leitesculinaria.com. March 20, 2007.

• Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved.

  Michael Pollan

  Sacrifice, Animal, Vegetables

  Source: indianapublicmedia.org

• 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

  Animal, Circles, People

• The best farming systems are ones where animals and plants are put into a synergistic relationship.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Farming, Plant

  Source: indianapublicmedia.org

• We're supposed to show people how the world is, to give them the tools they need to make good decisions as citizens or consumers. Depending on what your values are - the environment, your health, animal welfare - the answers are going to be different for every person.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, People, Giving

• When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Practice, Different

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