Michael Pollan

So if you accept the dopamine model of addiction, I think you have to include food.

I've often wondered like, okay, these food companies are trying to get us to eat their food.

Doesn't your mom do that too when she cooks you a beautiful meal?

And I realized, no, it's a different game.

She wants to satisfy you.

She doesn't wanna fill you up necessarily or addict you to her food.

And being satisfied is different than being full.

And the food industry is really trying to get us to eat as much as possible.

That's their goal is using our bodies to dispose of the surplus.

And the other thing we haven't talked about is how cheap these foods are.

I mean, given their complexity, it's remarkable how inexpensive they are.

But that goes back to your point about subsidies.

This is the kind of food that gets subsidized.

The EU and the U.S.

government are subsidizing the least healthy calories in the diet.

They're subsidizing the worst things for us to eat.

It's artificially cheap.

The price of a hamburger or french fries at McDonald's is partly being picked up by the taxpayers.

It's extraordinary.

And it's very hard to subsidize whole foods because whenever you subsidize something, as we learned from the monocultures of corn and soy, you get overproduction.