Quotes About Culture

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

In ancient Greece, the word for cook, butcher, and priest was the same -- mageiros -- and the word shares an etymological root with magic.

In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.

Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.

But the western mind can't bear an opt- out option. we're going to have to re-fight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt-out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. Joel Salatin

We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas.

Rule No. 41. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history;

My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.

In many cases science has confirmed what culture has long known

In order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.

We don't die well in America.

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.

It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.

It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.) .

Traditional diets are more than the sum of their food parts.

Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture.

Lawns are a form of television.

Nuestra cultura codifica las reglas para comer sabiamente en una complicada estructura de tabúes, rituales, recetas, modales y tradiciones culinarias que nos evitan tener que enfrentarnos de nuevo al dilema del omnívoro en cada comida.

La falta de una cultura de comida estable nos hace muy vulnerables a las lisonjas de los ingenieros alimentarios y los estrategas del marketing, para quienes el dilema del omnívoro no es tanto un dilema como una oportunidad. La industria alimentaria está muy interesada en exacerbar nuestra ansiedad ante lo que debemos o no comer, para así poder aliviarla después con nuevos productos.

In wildness is the preservation of the world, Thoreau once wrote; a century later, when many of the wild places are no more, Wendell Berry has proposed this necessary corollary: In human culture is the preservation of wildness.

Whatever else it impressed on the culture, Huxley's experience left no doubt in his mind or Osmond's that the 'model psychosis' didn't begin to describe the mind on mescaline. 'It will give that elixir a bad name if it continues to be associated, in the public mind, with schizophrenia symptoms, Huxley wrote to Osmond in 1955. 'People will think they are going mad, when in fact they are beginning, when they take it, to go sane.

which the Indians called barbacoa