Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where we learn to share; it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we've been so blithely doing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Family meals teach important social skills that are essential for a functioning democracy.
In this quote, Michael Pollan emphasizes the significance of sharing meals with family as a foundational aspect of social development and democratic values. He suggests that family meals foster essential skills such as sharing and healthy debate, which are crucial for harmonious living in a community, and he warns against neglecting this important tradition.
Themes
FamilyDemocracySharingDebateMealtime
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote during a discussion on the importance of family bonding in community development.
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
Is my mother my friend? I would have to say, first of all she is my Mother, with a capital 'M'; she's something sacred to me. I love her dearly...yes, she is also a good friend, someone I can talk openly with if I want to.
Sophia LorenRead
Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone.
Colson WhiteheadRead
My mother never watched me train in Romania. She wasn't allowed, it just wasn't done back then. My training was paid for by the government. My parents were not at the Olympics with me, either. I never expected them to be.
Nadia ComaneciRead
I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals.
Konrad LorenzRead
The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
Louise ErdrichRead
It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.
Friedrich SchillerRead