Fire and Knowledge

Our words for unhealthy contamination—“soiled” or “dirty”—suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we’d all head straight into therapy.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 10.

Were the walls of the meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end—for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 333

Our teeth are omnicompetent—designed for tearing animal flesh as well as grinding plants. So are our jaws, which we can move in the manner of a carnivore, a rodent, or an herbivore, depending on the dish. Our stomachs produce an enzyme specifically designed to break down elastin, a type of protein found in meat and nowhere else. Our metabolism requires specific chemical compounds that, in nature, can be gotten only from plants (like vitamin C) and others that can be gotten only from animals (like vitamin B-12). More than just the spice of human life, variety for us appears to be a biological necessity.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 289

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 287

Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?

–Joel Salatin in Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 240

Considering that the human animal did not taste [high-fructose corn syrup] until 1980, for [it] to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diet stands as a notable achievement on the part of the corn-refining industry, not to mention this remarkable plant.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 103

The human desire for sweetness surpasses even our desire for intoxification.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 103

I think that there’s some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don’t have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television — we’ve turned cooking into a spectator sport. We’re terrified to play tackle football too when we watch how it’s played on TV — we’d get killed. But cooking’s a whole lot easier than it appears on Iron Chef.

We cook every night here. My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table. [But] when you create this image of people as being hurried, and harried, and of course you need TV dinners, that kind of sinks in. They kind of flatter us by telling us we’re too busy and that we have such rushed lives, but in the end we find time for what matters. In just the last 10 years we’ve found, what, two or three hours a day to deal with the internet? It’s a matter of priority, it’s not really about ability. Some people are very intimidated about cooking and I think that’s a shame, and I think we have to help people get over that by teaching them how to cook, teaching kids how to cook in school.

–Michael Pollan in “A Conversation with Michael Pollan,” Grist Magazine.