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.
Michael PollanRead
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.
Michael PollanRead
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.
Michael PollanRead
[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.
Michael PollanRead
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.
Michael PollanRead
Similar quotes
If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)… Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.
Murray BookchinRead
It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days.
Henry David ThoreauRead
There must be something strangely sacred about salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.
Khalil GibranRead
That grand old poem called Winter
Henry David ThoreauRead
The sea is not a bargain basement.
Jacques Yves CousteauRead
I believe climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs.
Hillary ClintonRead