Michael Pollan

And I see family meals as one of the most important institutions of our culture.

I mean, think about what happens at that table.

You know, it's where we learn how to share and take turns and argue without fighting.

The values, I mean, in one of the things I wrote, I refer to the family dinner table as the nursery of democracy.

And to lose this to the food industry's greed is just a tragedy.

I think it's sad at a cultural and political level, but it's obviously a disaster from a health point of view because we now know these foods don't give the body everything it needs.

Then you get into this category of children's food, which is historically a very new thing.

It used to be children ate the same thing adults ate.

And now you go to any restaurant and they have a menu for kids, you know, and look at that food.

It's always chicken fingers and French fries and hamburgers and pizza.

Yeah, and I think it's a really unhealthy development, and I hope it doesn't spread.

What's so powerful about plants, and what have we lost?

Plants are very important to human health.

Every cell in a plant has a wall, and that wall is what we call fiber.

And the microbes that inhabit our gut, our large intestine, that's their preferred food.

So that if you're not eating plants, you're not feeding your microbiome.

And that's critically important.

There's a huge loss when you take plants out of the diet, and I think we're paying the price for that.

Well, first of all, when you're eating plants, you're getting all this bulk.

You're getting fewer calories per bite per unit of food, which is very helpful with weight.