Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
My work has gotten more political over time, but once you start exploring food, you find you're up against economics and politics and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to deal with.
Interpretation
Exploring food reveals its connections to various fields, such as economics, politics, and psychology.
In this quote, Michael Pollan reflects on how the exploration of food transcends mere culinary pursuits and delves into complex interrelationships between different disciplines. He emphasizes that as one investigates food, they inevitably encounter issues tied to economics, politics, psychology, and anthropology, highlighting the multifaceted nature of food and its broader implications in society.
In practice
During a food panel discussion, I cited this quote to illustrate the intertwined nature of culinary arts and social sciences.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
It's still possible to savor the remarkable foods that millennia of human ingenuity have teased from milk. A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth's innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.
Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships.
I like the fact that Melbourne always seems to support their chefs and promote them in ways I find really admirable.
It has been shown as proof positive that carefully prepared chocolate is as healthful a food as it is pleasant; that it is nourishing and easily digested... that it is above all helpful to people who must do a great deal of mental work.
...it was so rich and exotic I was seduced into taking one bite and then another as I tried to chase the flavors back to their source.
Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get a hamburger than a salad, and that's insane.
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