Zitat des Tages von Michael Pollan:
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.
In the amount of time it takes to microwave a TV dinner, you can put something much tastier on the table, I promise.
Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.
Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.
People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.
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.
Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
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.
The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on; this is the black hole of American politics.
Restaurants serve supersize portions to make you feel you're getting your money's worth.
There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.
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.
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.
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.
Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.
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 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.
I hope that if you're cooking two nights a week, you can try for three.
The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies.
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.
Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.
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.
A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
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.
At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.
Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot.
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.
We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.
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.
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.
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.
Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.