Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Family meals teach important social skills that are essential for a functioning democracy.
In this quote, Michael Pollan emphasizes the significance of sharing meals with family as a foundational aspect of social development and democratic values. He suggests that family meals foster essential skills such as sharing and healthy debate, which are crucial for harmonious living in a community, and he warns against neglecting this important tradition.
Themes
FamilyDemocracySharingDebateMealtime
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote during a discussion on the importance of family bonding in community development.
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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