Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Pollan

Pollan is doing something sly here: he’s laundering a personal indulgence into a moral practice. “My work” is the alibi and the engine. It suggests that the research, the reporting, the thinking about food systems doesn’t just change policy opinions; it changes the grocery cart. The sentence is modest on the surface - no manifesto, no scolding - but the subtext is a quiet recalibration of what counts as a legitimate expense. Spending “more money” on food is framed not as lifestyle vanity but as an earned, even responsible, consequence of paying attention.

The phrasing matters. “Put a lot of time into seeking out” makes good food sound less like a treat and more like a craft, almost a form of civic labor. That’s a Pollan move: he takes the mundane act of shopping and loads it with ethics without turning it into puritanism. There’s also a soft challenge embedded for readers who’ve been trained to treat cheapness and convenience as virtues. If an educator and public thinker is admitting that better eating costs time and money, he’s acknowledging the uncomfortable truth his critics often point to: “vote with your fork” is easier when you have the currency to vote.

Contextually, Pollan’s broader project has been to expose the hidden subsidies and externalized harms behind industrial food. This line is the personal corollary: once you see the machinery, the “cheap” option stops feeling cheap. The intent isn’t to brag about artisanal tastes; it’s to normalize the idea that food deserves priority - and to make the reader ask what, exactly, we’ve been economizing away.