Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael PollanRead
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The abundance of inexpensive, unhealthy food has negatively impacted public health.
In this quote, Michael Pollan highlights the consequences of the U.S. food system's focus on producing cheap calories since the late 1970s. While this may have made food more affordable, it has also led to serious public health issues, emphasizing the need to consider not just the cost of food, but its nutritional quality and impact on well-being.
Themes
FoodHealthNutritionPublic HealthCalories
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about nutrition 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.
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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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