Quotes About Food

Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents.

Is she dead?" called Zenda. Sort of," I shouted, "And the pizza's completely fucked too.

the team that had found that people could beat the salt habit simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity.

It's not that food companies are teaching children to like sweetness; rather, they are teaching children what foods should taste like. And increasingly, this curriculum has been all about sugar.

As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.

On average, we consume 71 pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That's 22 teaspoons of sugar, per person, per day.

Some of the largest companies are now using brain scans to study how we react neurologically to certain foods, especially to sugar. They've discovered that the brain lights up for sugar the same way it does for cocaine.

Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.

If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful. A

Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore...Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn't, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns.

the sweeter the industry made its food, the sweeter kids liked their food to be.

When consumers tried to improve their health by shifting to skim milk, Congress set up a scheme for the powerful dairy industry through which it has quietly turned all that unwanted, surplus fat into huge sales of cheese—not cheese to be eaten before or after dinner as a delicacy, but cheese that is slipped into our food as an alluring but unnecessary extra ingredient. The toll, thirty years later: The average American now consumes as much as thirty-three pounds of cheese a year.

Using high math and computations, he engineers them, with one goal in mind: to create the biggest crave. "People say, 'I crave chocolate,' " Moskowitz told me. "But why do we crave chocolate, or chips? And how do you get people to crave these and other foods?

The notion that some foods behave like narcotics goes back at least twenty years in scientific circles.

If you mapped categories of food advertising, especially advertising to kids, against the Food Guide Pyramid, it would turn the pyramid on its head," he

Many of the Prego sauces—whether cheesy, chunky, or light—have one feature in common: The largest ingredient, after tomatoes, is sugar.

we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling...The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear.

This is not some big corporate plot to fatten up kids. This is what kids want. There are very few kids out there who will eat rice cakes and tofu.

The transition of food to being an industrial product really has been a fundamental problem," Willett said. "First, the actual processing has stripped away the nutritional value of the food. Most of the grains have been converted to starches. We have sugar in concentrated form, and many of the fats have been concentrated and then, worst of all, hydrogenated, which creates trans-fatty acids with very adverse effects on health.

cheese and pizza contributed more than 14 percent of the saturated fat being consumed.

Didn't anybody respect tradition, making food by hand, the slow way? Hadn't anyone frittered away a Sunday afternoon at the bodega gorging themselves on the bounty of the land—the sparkling wine, the beautifully constructed chorizo?

Here where vegetables are scarce—or, it seems, scarcely eaten—there are times when ham (gorgeous, fantastic ham!) is the starter, the vegetable, and the main dish, all in one.

Take your hallowed halls of Congress or the littered floor of the Stock Exchange, America is built on its pancake houses!

Laughing brings out the good in food. It's good to laugh. If you don't laugh, you're going to magnify. And if you magnify, you're going to die.