This root [the potato], no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticized with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisms of peasants and laborers?
Interpretation
The potato, while tasteless, is a vital sustenance for the hardworking, illustrating the value of utility over taste.
Denis Diderot's quote highlights the potato's role as a fundamental source of nourishment, especially for laborers. Despite its lack of flavor and the criticism it receives for being 'windy,' the potato offers substantial health benefits and sustenance to those who require energy for their demanding work. This reflects a broader philosophical perspective on the merits of practicality and utility in life, where something may not be pleasing to the senses but serves an important purpose.
In practice
In a speech about food security, one might reference Diderot's quote to emphasize the importance of staple foods.
The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.
Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
In order to get as much fame as one's father one has to much more able than he.
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.
The dead...are more real than the living because they are complete.
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.
To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.
In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.
When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.
Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force.
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