Quotes About Food

In the West the word "delicious" is likely to conjure up something laced with sugar, fat and salt, whereas in Japan it signifies a flavour found in mushrooms, grilled fish and light broths.

No home-cooked food, no matter how delicious, can match the power of bringing people together in misty-eyed recollection of industrially produced food.

Siblings have always marked out territory through food.

Anything can start to taste good if you have enough positive memories of being fed it by a parent.

It is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food; and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.

We speak of having better food choices, but for the most part, we eat the foods that food companies want to sell us.

The true value of food goes beyond price, and once we collectively start to realize this once again, the challenge will be for policy makers to build food environments that encourage people to make better food choices rather than berating them for making bad ones.

It was little trouble to boil up mutton and water and mash in some leeks, garlic, and green herbs, then leave it to bubble away in its own good time. The elementary pattern these Mesopotamian recipes took was: prepare water, add fat and salt to taste; add meat, leeks, and garlic; cook in the pot; maybe add fresh coriander or mint; and serve.

Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed 'not to forget'.

But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there's something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods

The existence of birthday cake ice cream suggests that we can no longer distinguish celebration foods from everyday ones. We are also not too sure whether we are children or adults.

The gap in quality between the diet of the poorest and that of the richest is wide and widening. The poorest families in America may not look hungry in the way that Victorian orphans looked hungry, but they eat fewer dark green vegetables, fewer whole grains, and fewer nuts.

We are the first generation to be hunted by what we eat. Since the birth of farming ten thousand years ago, most humans haven't been hunters, but never before have we been so insistently pursued by our own food supply. The calories hunt them down even when we are not looking for them.

As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough about the corporations that profit from selling them. We spend a lot of time discussing unhealthy foods in terms of individual guilt and willpower and not enough looking at the morality of big food companies that have targeted some of the poorest consumers in the world with products that will make them sick, or the governments that allowed them to do so.

Before we can resolve our endless quandaries about food - such as 'where the zucchini came from and how far it had to travel' - we should first establish the basic paradigm that at certain times, every day, we stop, we sit and we eat.

As society, we haven't quite figured out what a new structure for meals would look like that isn't just a hasty sandwich in the car on the way to something more important.

In the US from 1980 to 2011, it became more than twice as expensive for Americans for purchase fresh fruit and vegetables compared to purchasing sugary carbonated beverages. Tomatoes and broccoli are far more expensive on average than they used to be for American shoppers. Energy-dense foods such as cakes and burgers have become far cheaper now in comparison to fruits and vegetables.

Japan shows the extent to which food habits evolve.

Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all our yearnings.

Each bite that you see the other person take reinforces your liking. Or not: it is hard to sit calmly by and carry on eating if you share a table with someone who is grumbling that peas are 'gross' and pinging them at you with a knife.

When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!

We are all born with echoes of our mother's diet, which means that no one is a totally blank slate when it comes to flavour.

When fairy-tale children seek their fortune, food is the main thing they're after.

Our childhood experiences with food can trap us in destructive patterns for the rest of our lives.