User Profile

If my neighborhood were wine, connoisseurs would describe it as “shitty, with overtones of failure and poor life decisions.”

— Artemis by Andy Weir

“It’s all part of the life-cycle of an economy. First it’s lawless capitalism until that starts to impede growth. Next comes regulation, law enforcement, and taxes. After that: public benefits and entitlements. Then, finally, overexpenditure and collapse.”

— Artemis by Andy Weir

father loves me 366 percent more than he loves anything else.

— Artemis by Andy Weir

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

the typical item of food on an American’s plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do). Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don’t set thresholds for food-borne pathogens.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

I also visited Rosie the organic chicken at her farm in Petaluma, which turns out to be more animal factory than farm. She lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies, who, aside from their certified organic feed, live lives little different from that of any other industrial chicken. Ah, but what about the “free-range” lifestyle promised on the label? True, there’s a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old—for fear they’ll catch something outside—and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later.

— The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan