Quotes About Food

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.

there's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion

Cooking, in effect, took part of the work of chewing and digestion and performed it for us outside of the body, using outside sources of energy.

which the Indians called barbacoa

Mare parte din atractivitatea lan?ului trofic industrial ?ine de facilitatea lui: le ofer? oamenilor ocupa?i un mod de a delega altora g?titul (?i conservarea alimentelor).

Foods are more than the sum of their nutrient parts, and those nutrients work together in ways that are still only dimly understood. It may be that the degree to which a food is processed gives us a more important key to its healthfulness: Not only can processing remove nutrients and add toxic chemicals, but it makes food more readily absorbable, which can be a problem for our insulin and fat metabolism.

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!)

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel.

Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists reach the public) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. In form this is a quasireligious idea, suggesting the visible world is not the one that really matters, which implies the need for a priesthood. For to enter a world where your dietary salvation depends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help.

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.)

Ninety percent of a cooked egg is digested whereas only 65 percent of a raw egg is; by the same token, the rarer the steak, or more al dente the pasta, the less of it will be absorbed. Dieters take note.

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.

whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water—of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.

Eat Your View!

An act as quotidian and practical as making your own sauerkraut represents nothing less than a way of engaging with the world. Or rather, with several different worlds, each nested inside the other: the invisible world of fungi and bacteria; the community in which you live; and the industrial food system that is undermining the health of our bodies and the land.

To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction.

It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, . . that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.

Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy ,is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers , and who further could distinguish among them and remember where in the landscape they'd seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance.

Also, by demonizing one nutrient -fat- we inevitably give a free pass to anther , supposedly good, nutrient -carbohydrates in this case - and then proceed to eat much of that instead.

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.

Don't take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.

there is a school of archaeological thought that contends that the reason humanity turned to agriculture was to secure a more reliable supply of alcohol, not food.

If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Solomon Katz put forth the arresting theory that it was the human desire for a steady supply of alcohol, not food, that drove the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Beer, in other words, came before bread, and as soon as people got a taste of it, Katz reasoned, they would have wanted more than could be produced by gathering seeds or fruits or honey.