Quotes About Food

I remember debating the finer points of flaky pastry with my chicken-pot-pie-obsessed American dad. I remember the divine mix of Thai food, TV dinners, and hearty, homemade goodness that have shaped this palate of mine to this day. I remember all this, but I still Google my husband's birthday. Thank God he's famous.

We all mourn in our own way. I mourn with a great steak.

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

...Poetic injustice...having made over Japan in our own image. The Japanese, ...are now, next to us, the greatest consumers of meat in the world.

It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age - that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.

You never see a French person eating alone.

... the food was good solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and protein and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone.

I believe mustard to be one of the most amazing condiments.

I'm not an amazing cook. But I can follow a recipe!

The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

T]he whole human population of the world cannot live on imported food. Some people some where are going to have to grow the food. And where ever food is grown the growing of it will raise the same two questions: How do you preserve the land in use? And how do you preserve the people who use the land? The farther the food is transported, the harder it will be to answer those questions correctly.

When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact.

And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.

Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here is monopoly, not consumer's health.)

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. . . . One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. ("The Pleasures of Eating," 1989)

The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

Oh Lord, make us able To eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't got Bring it to us while it's hot

This view of farming has been dominant now for a generation, and so it is not too soon to ask: How well does it work? We must answer that it works as any industrial machine works: very "efficiently" according to the terms of an extremely specialized accounting. That is to say that it apparently makes it possible for about 4 percent of the population to "feed" the rest.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey—it looked like a naked child.

Characteristic of the overall difference between Boston and New York, the population at the Acropolis was far less forlorn. Its customers were just those who, for whatever reason, wanted to eat coffee-shop food at very strange hours.

Unlike corn or other insipid foods, meat rouses the demon in the heart of a warrior.

She is the epitome of injustice, is my mistress. I never sulk, I am no glutton, and at that time I was barely thirty years of age, although to a fourteen-year-old anyone above twenty is an ancient, and I admit that, when it comes to food, I do have the refined tastes of a connoisseur.