Quotes About Culture

Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)

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.

How do the alchemies of the kitchen transform the raw stuffs of nature into some of the great delights of human culture?

there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.

A maneira de comer é um dos meios mais poderoso que um povo tem de expressar e preservar sua identidade cultural. (...) Tornar as opções alimentares mais científicas é esvaziá-las de seu conteúdo étnico e de sua história.

The Romantic Tree is in fact the mirror image of the Puritan Tree: if Puritans clear trees to redeem nature, romantics worship trees to redeem culture. Both regard nature and culture as opponents; they just vote differently

These days 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the car.

We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the "French paradox," for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

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; --Harvey Levenstein

Wes Jackson calls our species "homo the homogenizer.")

For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

Nutritionism tends to foster a great deal of anxiety around the experience of shopping for food and eating it.

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century gastronomist, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which "feed," and humans, who eat, or dine, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology.

Simply put, I'm glad that manga as an expressive form is expanding.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

If I know you, and you want to touch my hair, you should ask me first, and most of the time I'll say yes. But if I don't know you, and you just reach out and touch me without asking or touch while simultaneously asking, I'm going to give you a side eye.

We live in a media world simultaneously obsessed with technology and personality.

In my 40s, the two cultures finally came to peace with one other inside me, and I have come to identify myself as both 100% Chinese and 100% American simultaneously.

Sin is geographical.

Indian junk food is my sin, even though I pretend to like Japanese.

Everything is blurred on what's right and what's wrong. Sin becomes fine. Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there.

Some of my other heroes around that time were, oddly enough, Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole and people like that - I was always more inclined to listen to ballads.

I listen to some rap music. I'm from the Bahamas so I like reggae as well. And then I slow it down with a little Frank Sinatra.