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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Many processed foods, like supermarket bread, contain high levels of sugar, which contributes to unhealthy eating habits.
In this quote, Michael Pollan highlights the hidden presence of sugar in commonly consumed foods such as bread, suggesting that these products serve as vehicles for sugar rather than providing genuine nutritional value. This observation raises awareness about the need to scrutinize food labels and understand how everyday items can contribute to an unhealthy diet, emphasizing the importance of making informed food choices in a sugar-laden food economy.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a health seminar discussing the importance of reading food labels, you might use this quote to illustrate how sugar hides in everyday foods.
More from Michael Pollan
All quotes →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.
The gardener cultivates wildness, but he does so carefully and respectfully, in full recognition of its mystery.
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Wow, wow, wow! I never imagined meatless meals could be so satisfying.
Real food doesn't have ingredients, real food is _x000D_ ingredients.
Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self."
Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe.
The centuries last passed have also given the taste important extension; the discovery of sugar, and its different preparations, of alcoholic liquors, of wine, ices, vanilla, tea and coffee, have given us flavors hitherto unknown.
Sometimes when I'm alone, I take the pearl from where it lives in my pocket and try to remember the boy with the bread, the strong arms that warded off nightmares on the train, the kisses in the arena.