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Quotes by Educator
"We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding."
15
"Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we've more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us."
15
"Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites."
15
"The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he's pretty much on his own."
14
"Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food."
14
"Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz ketchup, a flavor principle in a bottle that kids, or their parents, use to domesticate every imaginable kind of food. We also now have the familiar salty-umami taste of fast food, which I would guess is based on salt, soy oil, and MSG."
14
"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."
14
"People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue."
14
"Barbecue is an incredibly democratic food. It's cheaper than McDonald's in many places and far more delicious. On the other hand, the only reason it can be that cheap is they use commodity hogs, the worst of the worst, which is - you know, it's an industry kind of ruining North Carolina."
14
"The longer I live, the more faith I have in Providence, and the less faith in my interpretation of Providence."
14
"Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life-the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids-is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air."
13
"Most enlightened men now recognize that General Jackson is not fitted to fill the office of President; his limited experience of anything to do with civil government and his great age make him incompetent."
13
"Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest."
13
"The majority is still at the General's disposal."
13
"All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties."
13
"Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care."
13
"Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily - they nourish us psychologically."
13
"In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn."
13
"What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties."
13
"A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry."
13
"Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread."
13
"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)"
13
"Even connoisseurship can have politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American) to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction."
13
"What gets a steer from 80 to 1100 pounds in fourteen months is tremendous quantities of corn, protein and fat supplements, and an arsenal of new drugs."
13
"At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind."
13
"I mean, we're really making a quantum change in our relationship to the plant world with genetic modification."
13
"My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me."
12
"Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share."
12
"The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."
12
"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."
12
"Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education... no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both."
12
"That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating."
12
"Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist."
12
"Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before."
12
"Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again."
12
"I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics."
12
"Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment."
11
"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."
11
"Smil estimates that two of every five humans on Earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process."
11
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