Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The energy expended in producing and delivering food often far exceeds the energy it provides.
This quote highlights the environmental impact of food production and transportation, emphasizing that the energy consumed in growing, processing, and delivering a box of organic lettuce significantly outweighs the caloric energy it provides. It brings attention to the inefficiencies in our food systems and the reliance on fossil fuels, prompting a reevaluation of how we source and consume food.
Themes
FoodEnergySustainabilityEnvironmentCalories
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion on food sustainability, this quote can illustrate the hidden energy costs of conventional food production.
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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