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Don't eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn't recognize as food.. stay away from these
Michael Pollan
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Choose natural and whole foods that are recognizable and familiar from our ancestral diet.

Michael Pollan's quote encourages individuals to be mindful of their food choices, suggesting that we should eat only those foods that our ancestors would have recognized as real food. This serves as a caution against processed and artificial food products that have proliferated in modern supermarkets, highlighting the importance of returning to simpler, more natural eating habits for better health.

Themes

FoodHealthNutritionDietAncestors

In practice

Example use cases

This quote is perfect for a health seminar discussing the benefits of whole foods.

More from Michael Pollan

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
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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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