75 Quotes by Michael Pollan about Food



  • Author Michael Pollan
  • Quote

    Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1

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  • Author Michael Pollan
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    Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]

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  • Author Michael Pollan
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    The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.

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  • Author Michael Pollan
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    By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved.

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  • Author Michael Pollan
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    [Smil] estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process.

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  • Author Michael Pollan
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    Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.

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  • Author Michael Pollan
  • Quote

    There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.

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