Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Pollan

“Corn is a greedy crop” lands because it sounds like folksy agronomy while smuggling in an indictment of an entire food system. Pollan borrows the farmer’s plainspoken authority - “as farmers will tell you” - to make the line feel earned, not preached. That tag is a rhetorical move: it deputizes lived experience against corporate mythmaking, the kind that sells monoculture as efficiency and abundance.

On the surface, “greedy” is practical. Corn is nitrogen-hungry; it exhausts soil, invites pests, and nudges growers toward fertilizer, herbicides, and tight rotations. But Pollan’s intent isn’t just to praise diversified farming. The personification is the point. By giving corn a vice, he hints that the crop has become an agent in American life - not merely planted, but culturally empowered. “Greedy” reads like a moral diagnosis for an economy that keeps feeding corn more land, more chemicals, more subsidies, and then wonders why waterways choke with runoff and rural communities get locked into a single crop’s boom-bust logic.

The subtext widens: corn’s greed mirrors ours. In Pollan’s work, corn is less a vegetable than an infrastructure - the hidden base of cheap calories, cheap meat, and cheap processed food. Calling it greedy reframes the conversation from personal choice (“eat better”) to systems design (“what did we build, and what does it demand?”). It’s a compact way of saying: follow the crop, and you’ll find the incentives.