Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The Western diet is characterized by overwhelming choices and marketing that complicates our food decisions.
Michael Pollan highlights the impact of modern food marketing on our dietary choices, noting that the vast array of new products and advertising have overshadowed traditional eating practices. As a result, people increasingly depend on external sources like science and media to navigate their food decisions rather than relying on cultural traditions.
Themes
DietMarketingTraditionNutritionFood Choices
In practice
Example use cases
Discussing food choices at a health seminar.
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
Since long workdays lead to more errors, shorter workdays could reduce accidents. Overtime is deadly. Tired surgeons have been found to be more prone to slip'ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets.
Rutger BregmanRead
It is not the soul alone that should be healthy; if the mind is healthy in a healthy body, all will be healthy and much better prepared to give God greater service.
Saint IgnatiusRead
That is the one single word that the food industry hates: 'addiction.' They much prefer words like 'crave-ability' and 'allure.'
Michael MossRead
No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.
Atul GawandeRead
I got a taste when I was in Kenya a while ago of what medical care was in rural Africa. I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.
Paul AllenRead
I believe well-designed places and objects can actually improve healing, while poor design can inhibit it.
Michael GravesRead