Quotes About Food

Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer.

Incidentally, the long-held idea that spices were used to mask rotting food doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. The only people who could afford most spices were the ones least likely to have bad meat, and anyway spices were too valuable to be used as a mask.

In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.

The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek in their fascinating study, Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste, "MSG is the food additive that has been subjected to the most thorough scrutiny of all time," and no scientist has ever found any reason to condemn it, yet its reputation in the West as a source of headaches and low-grade malaise now appears to be undimmed and permanent.

A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. (Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.)

Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, in 1969 food scientists from all over the world convened at 'An Origin of Corn Conference' at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times personal, that the conference broke up in confusion, and no papers from it were ever published.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent. We live in a paradoxical situation. For centuries, people ate unhealthily out of economic necessity. Now we do it out of choice.

Eventually, not to say improbably, Alvin was constructed by General Mills, the food company, at a factory where it made the machines to produce breakfast cereals.

it became fixed in many people's minds that MSG was a kind of toxin. In fact, it isn't.

The British are surely the only people in the world who have made a culinary feature of boiled cartilage and phlegm.

Even more appallingly, in the United States 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals , mostly to fatten them. Fruit growers can also use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops. In consequence, most Americans consume secondhand antibiotics in their food (including even some foods labeled as organic) without knowing

acute, chronic. These two are sometimes confused, which is a little odd as their meanings are sharply opposed. Chronic pertains to lingering conditions, ones that are not easily overcome. Acute refers to those that come to a sudden crisis and require immediate attention. People in the Third World may suffer from a chronic shortage of food. In a bad year, their plight may become acute.

Unlike the curled shoe tongues that are consumed in Britain or the boringly crisp, regimented strips we go for in America, Australian bacon has a rough, meaty, fair dinkum heartiness. It looks as if it was taken off the pig while it was trying to escape. You can almost hear the squeal in every bite. Lovely.

The main thing to bear in mind is that carbohydrate, upon being digested, is just more sugar – often quite a lot more. That means that a 150g serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar.

It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes.

though I confess a certain fondness for the old-style Wimpy's with their odd sense of what constituted American food, as if they had compiled their recipes from a garbled telex).

The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers' dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant (which seems about right to me, at least as far as the lima beans go).

I can remember when you couldn't buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine.

Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.

Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.

84 percent of chicken breasts, nearly 70 percent of ground beef, and getting on for half of pork chops contained intestinal E. coli, which is not good news for anything but the coli. *1

People tend to blame the last thing they ate , but it's probably the thing before the last thing they ate.

Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.