Quotes About Consumption

our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows. -Martin Renner

Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].

It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.

Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.

But I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it—in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone—is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.

Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.

the typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there

researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.

Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only "good to eat"—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, "good to think," for among all the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas.

When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more.

One-fifth of America's petroleum consumption goes to producing and transporting our food.)

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

how economists seem to view the question of work and leisure: as antithetical terms that neatly line up with the equally antithetical categories of production and consumption. But perhaps that view says more about them, and consumer capitalism, than it does about us. For one of the most interesting things about cooking today—optional cooking—is how it confounds the rigid categories of work and leisure, of production and consumption.

Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person.

David] Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries.

From a typical McDonald's meal] this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%).

To eat corn directly is to consume all the energy in the corn, but when you feed that corn to an animal, 90% of its energy is lost... what this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children than just mine, and that behind the 4,510 calories in our meal, tens of thousand corn calories could have been used to feed many more people.

Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income (10%), than any other industrialized nation... meaning that we could afford to spend more on food if we chose to.

AÈ™adar, este lipsa voinÈ›ei de a cheltui mai mult pe mâncare în mod real o chestiune de accesibilitate sau una care È›ine de priorit??i?

A recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition compared the "energy cost" of different foods in the supermarket. The researchers found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies; spent on a whole food like carrots, the same dollar buys only 250 calories. On the beverage aisle, you can buy 875 calories of soda for a dollar, or 170 calories of fruit juice from concentrate.

You are what you eat" is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

De fapt, chiar È™i cei mai fervenÈ›i adepÈ›i ai alimentelor locale spun c? este în regul? o "cump?n? a alimentelor" (un termen specific unui lanÈ› trofic local, care face o analogie cu "cump?na apelor"), fiind permis? achiziÈ›ia bunurilor care nu se pot produce local - cafea, ceai, zah?r, ciocolat? -, o practic? ce precede globalizarea hranei noastre cu câteva mii de ani. (Fir-ar s? fie!)

In the course of a lifetime, sixty tons of food pass through the gastrointestinal tract, an exposure to the world that is fraught with risk.