Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on how lawns, as maintained environments, distort the natural cycles of life and death.
Michael Pollan's quote suggests that lawns represent a human-made space where natural processes like life, death, and reproduction are suppressed. This artificiality may appeal to people because it creates an aesthetic devoid of the chaos and change inherent in nature, leading to a disconnect from the realities of the natural world.
Themes
LawnsNatureLifeDeathArtificiality
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on environmental awareness, one might reference this quote to highlight the importance of embracing natural ecosystems.
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.
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
The first gatherings of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby - how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.
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It was Autumn, and incessant Piped the quails from shocks and sheaves, And, like living coals, the apples Burned among the withering leaves.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowRead
Allow nature to teach you stillness.
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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
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If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.
Terence MckennaRead
Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe. There's no place that we know about that can support life as we know it, not even our sister planet, Mars, where we might set up housekeeping someday, but at great effort and trouble we have to recreate the things we take for granted here.
Sylvia EarleRead