A Quote by Michael Pollan

Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.

Michael Pollan

Quote Topics

Acting Always Been Believe Best Best Interests Calling Calling The Shots Corn Crucial Domination Every Hero Humans Indeed Interests Our Own Played Reason Rise Role Shots Story Succeeded Suggest Supporting Supporting Role Though Us World World Domination Would Would Be Wrong

Quote Author

Michael Pollan
American - Educator

You know they call corn-on-the-cob, "corn-on-the-cob", but that's how it comes out of the ground. They should just call it corn, and every other type of corn, corn-off-the-cob. It's not like if someone cut off my arm they would call it "Mitch", but then re-attached it, and call it "Mitch-all-together".

Mitch Hedberg

The worst thing about Halloween is, of course, candy corn. It's unbelievable to me. Candy corn is the only candy in the history of America that's never been advertised. And there's a reason. All of the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911. And so, since nobody eats that stuff, every year there's a ton of it left over.

Lewis Black

Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.

Hope Jahren

The corn that is B something 5 corn thats been genetically altered in the United States, it cant reproduce but it has huge kernels, its very sweet and its wonderful but the winds have blown this across into Mexico. And so the Mexican corn is being infected with the inability to reproduce.

Nick Nolte

But let the good old corn adorn The hills our fathers trod; Still let us, for his golden corn, Send up our thanks to God!

John Greenleaf Whittier

I believe that our lives, just like fairy tales - the stories that have been written by us humans, through our own experiences of living - will always have a Hero and a Heroine, a Fairy Godmother and a Wicked Witch.

Lucinda Riley

We're going to move from a commodity economy where you basically grow the same kind of crops - where a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn is a kernel of corn - to an ingredient economy where there will be a kernel of corn that will be designed for fuel, there will be a kernel of corn designed for livestock.

Tom Vilsack

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant andfluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any.

Henry David Thoreau

Each of us is our own story, but none of us is only our own story. The arc of my own personal story is inexplicably and intrinsically linked to the story of my parents and the story of my neighbor and the story of the kid that I met one time. All of us are linked in ways that we don't always see. We are never simply ourselves.

Kelly Barnhill

Tita knew through her own flesh how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla, how a soul that hasn't been warmed by the fire of love is lifeless, like a useless ball of corn flour.

Laura Esquivel

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

Michael Pollan

But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking.

Michael Pollan

The government will pay certain farmers to not grow corn. Wow. Where's my check? That'd be great. "Hey, what do you do for a living?" "Well, I don't grow corn. Get up at the crack of noon, make sure there's no corn growing. I'm gonna get up early tomorrow. And not plow. You know, we used to not grow tomatoes-but there's more money in not growing corn."

Brian Regan

All humans are storytellers with their own unique point of view. When we understand this, we no longer feel the need to impose our story on others or to defend what we believe. Instead we see all of us as artists with the right to create our own art.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

You really get the most out of sweet corn if you pick the corn off the stalk and rush it to a pot of boiling water. The longer you wait, the more sugar you lose. But if you get it in the first half hour, that is the sweetest corn ever.