Quotes About Food

By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle

The problem starts with the nutrient. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, a seemingly unavoidable approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points out Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.

Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice. At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically managed the omnivores dilemma have lost their sharpness here or simply failed. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food American's have never had a single, strong, stable, culinary tradition to guide us.

It was either a ritual sacrifice, or more nuts and berries for dinner.

IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER.

The ratio of feed to flesh in chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat, which is why chicken costs less than beef.

Madison, Deborah. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmer's Markets (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). Nabhan

Hand taste, however, involves something greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it—the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it.

REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM

When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms—about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it's possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food (and health).

DON'T LOOK FOR THE MAGIC BULLET IN THE TRADITIONAL DIET.

In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.

Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.

TRY NOT TO EAT ALONE.

Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.

Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice—reducing food or drug plants to their most salient chemical compounds—can lead to problems.

Indeed, the surest way to escape the Western diet is simply to depart the realms it rules: the supermarket, the convenience store, and the fast-food outlet.

COOK AND, IF YOU CAN, PLANT A GARDEN.

The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead." This

Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)

For us, the first big change came ten thousand years ago with the advent of agriculture. (And it devastated our health, leading to a panoply of deficiencies and infectious diseases that we've only managed to get under control in the last century or so.) The biggest change in our food environment since then? The advent of the modern diet.

Try as we might, each of us can eat only about 1500 pounds of food a year. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1% every year (growth of American population).

imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

Isn't it curious how in so many of our pastimes and hobbies we play at supplying one or another of our fundamentally creauturely needs—for food, shelter, even clothing?