Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.
Interpretation
French cooking elevates simple ingredients to create sophisticated flavors.
This quote by Michael Pollan highlights the idea that what we now regard as elite cuisine, particularly French cooking, originally emerged from humble beginnings. It suggests that the artistry of cooking lies in the ability to transform ordinary ingredients into remarkable dishes, showcasing the creativity and resourcefulness of those who first developed these culinary practices.
In practice
In a culinary class discussing how to make the most of limited resources.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
There's no way that music could ever go down the tubes. I can't imagine a civilization without music. When you realize today that music is such a part of people's lives. And will always be, really.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
For me, I really feel like if there's not a real, true connection to the material, I don't need to sing it. I don't need to sing songs just because I like them anymore. I've done that.
I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.
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