Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Cheap food is misleading; its true costs are hidden and impact health and the environment.
Michael Pollan's quote emphasizes that what appears to be cheap food often comes with hidden costs that affect society, the environment, and personal health. When we opt for inexpensive food options, we must recognize that these choices contribute to broader issues such as environmental damage, public health crises, and economic disparities, thus revealing the true price we pay for our consumption.
Themes
FoodCostHealthEnvironmentSubsidies
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on sustainability, one might quote Pollan to highlight the hidden costs of cheap grocery options.
More from Michael Pollan
All quotes →You look how much sugar is in a typical supermarket loaf of bread: it's a lot of sugar. It's just become one of those sugar delivery systems in our food economy.
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There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, even drinking soda every now and then, but food manufacturers have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that we're eating them every day.
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Meat is a mighty contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. The amount of meat we're eating is one of the leading causes of climate change. It's as important as the kind of car you drive - whether you eat meat a lot or how much meat you eat.
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[Government] regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa.
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He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
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