Michael Pollan

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.

Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal__nless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of __anufacturing a controlled substance._ Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.

For great many species today, __itness_ means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we__e being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this is a fault of our own vocabulary. We don__ have a very good vocabulary to describe what others species do to us, because we think we__e the only species that really does anything.

This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting__o some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.

We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.

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.

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

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won__ be reversed: by now the Jonathan__ as much an American as I am.

. . . .how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the __rench paradox,_ for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn__ make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox__hat is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.

Yet the organic label itself__ike every other such label in the supermarket__s 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__ 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.

For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we__e 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__he carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids__s 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.

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.

Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature - from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms - plants, animals, and fungi - to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance.