Michael Pollan Vegetables Quotations

Everything we eat begins with a plant turning solar energy into carbohydrates. Everything. Whether we're eating meat or eating vegetables, it all begins there. So I'm always interested in taking things back to the beginning.

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

One USDA scientist went so far as to claim that there has never been a documented case of food-borne illness from eating fermented vegetables.

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).

It's more important that you eat vegetables, even if they are conventional -- I'm talking about for your health -- then it is until you wait until you can afford organic, or you can find organic.

People eating the western diet of heavily processed food, of lots of meat and added sugar and added fat, and very little whole grains and fruits and vegetables.Populations who eat that way have seriously high incidences of chronic diseases.

Animals die even if you eat vegetables. That is the nature of farming. There is a certain sacrifice involved.

I think using waste oils as fuel makes sense. We do waste a huge amount of vegetable oil in the United States and using that as a fuel source strikes me as fine.

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.