Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
There is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you're General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald's, because the family meal is usually one thing shared.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques how processed food companies undermine traditional family meals to increase sales of their products.
In this quote, Michael Pollan highlights the conflict between the values of family meals and the interests of large food corporations. He suggests that these companies, such as McDonald's and General Mills, prefer to promote processed foods over shared meals at home because the latter represents a threat to their business model. By fostering a culture that diminishes the significance of home-cooked meals, they can encourage consumers to turn to convenience foods instead.
Themes
Food CultureProcessed FoodFamily MealGeneral MillsKelloggMcdonald'S
In practice
Example use cases
During a talk on nutrition, one might quote Pollan to emphasize the importance of family meals in promoting healthier eating habits.
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.
Michael PollanRead
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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