Quotes About Food

If the omnivore's dilemma is to determine what is good and safe to eat amid the myriad and occasionally risky choices nature puts before us, then familiar flavor profiles can serve as a useful guide, a sensory signal of the tried and true. To an extent, these familiar blends of flavor take the place of the hardwired taste preferences that guide most other species in their food choices. They have instincts to steer them; we have cuisines.

Great cooking is all about the three 'p's: patience, presence, and practice.

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

Umami…is the quasi-secret heart and soul of almost every braise, stew, and soup.

The cook in the kitchen preparing a meal from plants and animals at the end of this shortest of food chains has a great many things to worry about, but "health" is simply not one of them, because it is given.

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

Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.

Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing — without a human brain, it is inert — so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen.

how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

worshippers of the market are a bit more realistic than worshippers of nature: they long ago stopped relying on the free market to supply us with such necessities as food and shelter. Though they don't like to talk about it much, they accept the need for society to "garden" the market.)

Boiled food is life,' Levi-Strauss writes, 'roast food death.' He reports finding countless examples in the world's folklore of 'cauldrons of immortality,' but not a single example of a 'spit of immortality.

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;

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

Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the supermarket and the home-meal replacement have succeeded in obscuring. yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one's pronouncements.

Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food.

Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity.

perhaps by sitting down to enjoy one of the microwavable organic TV dinners(four words I never expected to see conjoined)stacked in the frozen food case.

Today promised not to be about the ecstasy of life on a farm. Today was the day we were processing broilers or, to abandon euphemism, killing chickens.

The food never tastes so good as when everybody at the table worked on it and everybody knows what went into it. (Interview in Lucky Peach 6)

Only the big food manufacturers have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world. Generally, it is the products of modern food science that make the boldest health claims, and these are often founded on incomplete and often bad science.

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

farmers who get the message that consumers care only about price will themselves care only about yield. This is how a cheap food economy reinforces itself.

A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.

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.