Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do - to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Planting a garden can significantly impact both the environment and personal mindset, fostering independence and awareness.
This quote highlights the powerful implications of gardening beyond just environmental benefits. Michael Pollan emphasizes that gardening helps individuals combat reliance on cheap energy and fosters a sense of community and connectedness, ultimately leading to a more sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle.
Themes
GardeningEnvironmentSustainabilityIndependenceCarbon Footprint
In practice
Example use cases
I shared this quote during a community gardening event to inspire participants to recognize their impact.
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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