Quotes from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“You are what what you eat eats.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“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, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“While it is true that many people simply can't afford to pay more for food, either in money or time or both, many more of us can. After all, just in the last decade or two we've somehow found the time in the day to spend several hours on the internet and the money in the budget not only to pay for broadband service, but to cover a second phone bill and a new monthly bill for television, formerly free. For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority. p.187”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Shake the hand that feeds you.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“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, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Organic Oreos are not a health food. When Coca-Cola begins selling organic Coke, as it surely will, the company will have struck a blow for the environment perhaps, but not for our health. Most consumers automatically assume that the word "organic" is synomymous with health, but it makes no difference to your insulin metabolism if the high-fructose corn syrup in your soda is organic.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. 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 still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather--all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but you do: 75 percent of the vegetable oils in your diet come from soy (representing 20 percent of your daily calories) and more than half of the sweeteners you consume come from corn (representing around 10 perecent of daily calories).”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of "antinutrients" - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“But don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“You are what you eat eats.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Depending on how we spend them, our food dollars can either go to support a food industry devoted to quantity and convenience and “value” or they can nourish a food chain organized around values—values like quality and health. Yes, shopping this way takes more money and effort, but as soon you begin to treat that expenditure not just as shopping but also as a kind of vote—a vote for health in the largest sense—food no longer seems like the smartest place to economize.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but “health” is simply not one of them, because it is given.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Okinawa, one of the longest-lived and healthiest populations in the world, practice a principle they call hara hachi bu: Eat until you are 80 percent full.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“But I contend that most of what we’re consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we’re consuming it—in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone—is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

About the author

Popular quotes

“That we should feed and nourish our souls with high notions of GOD; which would yield us great joy in being devoted to Him.”
― Brother Lawrence, quote from The Practice of the Presence of God

“This was something you had to work through on you own," Jason said. "Besides, I knew you'd do the right thing."

"Oh, right," I said. I wanted to throw something at him. I really did. "And if I hadn't?"

Now Jason brandished something he'd been holding behind his back. It was a golf club.

"I figured Big Bertha here would drive them away," he said.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from How to Be Popular

“Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?”
― David Baldacci, quote from The Camel Club

“What you may seek and what you may find are not always one.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The High King

“Destiny doesn't ask you if you want it Syn, it just forces it into your lap and deal with it. -RYDER”
― Amelia Hutchins, quote from Fighting Destiny

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.