Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses the beauty and wonder of nature, particularly in gardening and the potential of unharvested crops.
Michael Pollan reflects on the profound joy and excitement he experiences when encountering ripe vegetables in the garden. He illustrates how each unharvested plant carries the promise of life and sustenance, transforming the garden into a place filled with endless possibilities waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.
Themes
NatureGardenPossibilityVegetablesJoyLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about sustainable farming practices, one might quote this to emphasize the beauty of crops.
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
Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet, when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures.
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyRead
Nature is wont to hide herself.
HeraclitusRead
Awakened at midnight by the sound of the water jar cracking from the ice
Matsuo BashoRead
As we kill nature, we are killing ourselves, and God incarnate as the world as well.
Masanobu FukuokaRead
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
William BlakeRead
In the world in which we live, it is almost a necessity to be able to regain one's strength of body and spirit, especially for those who live in the city, where the conditions of life, often feverish, leave little room for silence, reflection and relaxed contact with nature.
Pope Benedict XviRead