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"If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have."
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Exlpore more Sustainability quotes
"High productivity and a healthy environment are two unconditionally entwined buddies. Our process allows us to abort any attempts toward crucifying either of the two-because as soon as one of them dies, the other follows suit."
"With ceremony, with forms of politeness and reassurance, they borrowed the waters of the River and its little confluents to drink and be clean and irrigate with, using water mindfully, carefully. They lived in a land that answers greed with drought and death. A difficult land: aloof yet sensitive."
"We must plant trees, grow gardens instead of lawns, ride bicycles when we can and support responsible local businesses over big brands."
"Once our family was very small and we used to say, ''our planet has enough resources to feed all of us'' but today, we are not that family and it is a burden on our planet to feed us. We have to reconsider our views and confess ''our planet has not enough resources to feed all of us anymore''."
"In case you're short on definitions, here's one. Insanity: 'Destroying the very things that sustain us.' And if we're so short-sighted so as to make such preposterous choices, then it's not all that preposterous to believe that shortly our end will be in sight."
"We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it."
"I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is."
"Limitless material growth is not sustainable or moral."
"It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both."
"Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat."
Explore more quotes by Michael Pollan
"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."
"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."
"Those of us who care about food and where it comes from will miss both Obama and Michelle. Even though Obama failed to do many things he indicated he would do around food, Michelle Obama has done a lot to shine a light on the link between diet and health, which is really important."
"Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life-the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids-is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air."
"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."
"Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share."
"Yet the organic label itself-like every other such label in the supermarket-is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away."
"I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification."
"Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham."
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