Quotes by Journalists - Page 116

yelling while eating was like swallowing anger. It’s simply not good for us. It leaves us unhappy and unsatisfied, as if the meal didn’t count or wasn’t good, and an hour later we’re back looking for something to make us feel better.
Mary DeTurris Poust
Just as the Eucharist fuels our soul and our spirit, good healthful meals fuel our bodies for the work God calls each of us to do in his kingdom. Praying before we consume a meal or when we are feeling exhausted and stressed helps to bring this “body and soul” connection into the light
Mary DeTurris Poust
Sometimes it's good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.
Nigella Lawson
Workers who pick the food we eat cannot afford to feed themselves.
Barry Estabrook
In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles.
Paul Roberts
Vegans have a way of circling every conversation back to food, much like born-again Christians have a way of returning every conversation to the scripture.
Will Potter
So often, even when we stop to say a blessing before a meal, we’re mentally preparing to spoon some pasta or potatoes onto our plates. We’re not usually focused on the present moment, simply placing ourselves before our food and entering into the still, slow space where eating is done for eating’s sake and not something we do simply to get to the next thing on our list.
Mary DeTurris Poust
prepare your food in keeping with monastic traditions—simple, basic, healthy, balanced.
Mary DeTurris Poust
Whether we are feasting or fasting or somewhere in between, food should have a sacred role in our lives. It can be something we sacrifice, something we savor, something we share, and through it all we can remain fulfilled because we are grounded in God, the only One who can satisfy our hungry hearts.
Mary DeTurris Poust
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.
Michael Pollan
Today, if you pay a[n US] dollar for a pound of apples in the supermarketm only about six cents covers the farmwork used to get it there; (...)
Tracie McMillan
We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry.
Michael Pollan
Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar B) unpronounceable C) more than five in number or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup
Michael Pollan
. . . .how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.
Michael Pollan
For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?
Michael Pollan
My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won’t be reversed: by now the Jonathan’s as much an American as I am.
Michael Pollan
Pie may just be the Madonna-whore of the dessert world.
Pascale Le Draoulec
We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.
Michael Pollan
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.
Michael Pollan
Thin people, God bless them, God curse them, don't get it: If you're not thin, you need to be careful and conscious about when and how you suitors initially see you.
Frank Bruni
A growing body of research suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.
Michael Pollan
Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.
Michael Pollan
Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
P.J. O'Rourke
I don't have to tell you I love you. I fed you pancakes.
Kathleen Flinn
Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature - from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms - plants, animals, and fungi - to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance.
Michael Pollan
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.
Michael Pollan
Many Detroiters, for example, are beginning to see urban agriculture as a real part of the solution; to grow things right where people live, where they work, and definitely need healthier food on the table. Green city gardens are scattered throughout Detroit now, from the schoolyard at Catherine Ferguson Academy for pregnant teens and teen moms, to reclaimed land owned by a local order of Catholic friars (Earthworks), to a seven-acre organic farm in Rouge Park. Together, city gardeners, nonprofit organizations, and the Greening of Detroit resource agency are writing a new local-food story of urban Michigan.
Jaye Beeler
In the rather informal survey I have taken over the years on intensity of interest in food by profession, lawyers rank only a few trades below concert pianists....
Calvin Trillin
Each year, food companies use an amount of salt that is every bit as staggering as it sounds: 5 billion pounds.
Michael Moss
Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.
Michael Pollan
Back on the Hauser regime, I start the day with his notorious "pep breakfast" -- two raw eggs beaten in orange juice. Hauser describes it as a "creamy drink fit for a King's table." I do not feel the same way. This is so much worse than the raw eggs in milk that I drank for the Marilyn Monroe diet.If pneumonia were a food, this is what it would taste like.
Rebecca Harrington
Eating a burrito is like eating a living, breathing organism - you can feel the burrito's ingredients sigh inside with each bite, each squeeze.
Gustavo Arellano
Great food also had the ability to attract great talent. "I don't know what to do," senior engineer Luiz Barroso moaned to Jeff Dean the night he had to decide whether to join VMWare or Google. "I've made these lists. I've assigned points to all the pros and cons, and it's tied at 112 to 112." Jeff knew that the day of Luiz's interview at Google, Charlie had served creme brulee for lunch. "Did you factor in the creme brulee?" he asked. "Because I know you really like creme brulee." "Oh no! I didn't consider that," Luiz admitted. The next morning he accepted Google's offer.
Douglas Edwards
No matter our age, everyone in our household knows that cooking and eating together is where the fun is
Corky Pollan
The barbeque is the root of all civilization
Michael Petch
But 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.
Michael Pollan
Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.
Michael Pollan
I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
Joan Didion
It is worth remembering that at some point in the very distant past, no human had ever drank milk from a cow.
Michael Petch
Humans look just like livestock now. We achieve a state of buttery plumpness before we've even reached sexual maturity. We experience powerful cravings for food that is slowly making us sick. We are...programmed to eat the wrong food. We aren't born calorie zombies, but that's what we have become.
Mark Schatzker
Goats' refusal of young blackbrush shoots, furthermore, is outright. They want nothing to do with it. Provenza pointed at his hand, then his arm and body, and said, "Every organ and every cell has receptors similar to what's in your nose and on your tongue." Creatures communicate within their environment the same way they communicate within their own bodies -- through chemical trigger substances that bind to receptors and produce responses. "It's all part of a feedback system," Provenza said, "that tells the body what's good and what isn't."Goats are not stupid after all. They don't bumble through the world eating what they were born to like. They experience need states, satisfaction, and delight along with aversions to strong a mere hint of something can make them turn away in disgust. Flavor is what nutrition feels like to a goat. If goats had a word for delicious, it would have two meanings. The first would be: I like this. The second would be: This is what my body needs. For goats, they are the same thing.
Mark Schatzker
...the question of portion size. When I ate Doritos or a Big Mac, I dept on eating and eating, and later experienced McRegret. So why when I ate a fourteen-week-old barred rock [heirloom breed chicken] or a grapefruit did I find it tremendously delicious and yet tremendously satisfying? If these foods tasted better, shouldn't I have just kept on gorging?Fred Provenza believes the difference comes down to what he calls "deep satiety." "Fundamentally," he told me, "eating too much is an inability to satiate." Wen food meets needs at "multiple levels," it provides a feeling of "completeness" and offers a satisfaction that's altogether different from being stuffed.
Mark Schatzker
Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.
Michael Pollan
Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact.
Calvin Trillin
Chauncy made a huge effort to control himself. “I had lunch at Maisie’s Diner.”“And?”“And what? It was the most revolting lunch it has been my misfortune to consume.”“And after?”“Diarrhea, of course.
Douglas Preston
I've never seen anyone get so excited by breakfast before.""Are you serious? It's the most important meal of the day. Sometimes, at bedtime, I plan what I'm going to make for breakfast and then get so excited I can't sleep.
Holly Bourne
The food problem is a flavor problem. For half a century, we've been making the stuff people should eat--fruits, vegetables, whole grains, unprocessed meats--incrementally less delicious. Meanwhile, we've been making the food people shouldn't eat--chips, fast food, soft drinks, crackers--taste ever more exciting. The result is exactly what you'd expect.
Mark Schatzker
Modern food may be the most compelling lie humans have ever told.
Mark Schatzker
The rise in obesity is the predictable result of the rise in manufactured deliciousness. Everything we add to food just makes us want it more. And no matter how hard we try, we can't make our outsized desires go away. If anything, we're lucky, inexplicably so, that only 8.3 percent of women and 4.4 percent of men have a BMI consistent with total food addiction. But remember the children...The percentage of slender Americans will gradually work its way down to zero. (82)
Mark Schatzker
Like Cheyenne Mountain, today's fast good conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade.
Eric Schlosser
Leave something on your plate... 'Better to go to waste than to waist
Michael Pollan
As grandmothers used to say, 'Better to pay the grocer than the doctor
Michael Pollan
Farmers facing lower prices have only one option if they want to be able to maintain their standard of living, pay their bills, and service their debt, and that is to produce more [corn]
Michael Pollan
Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!
Michael Pollan
By 1900, European scientists recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt... After Nixon's 1972 trip the first major order the Chinese government placed was for thirteen massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have probably starved.
Michael Pollan
[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.
Michael Pollan
Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.
Michael Pollan
There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.
Michael Pollan
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
Michael Pollan
A mere four giant meatpacking companies (Tyson subsidiary IBP, Cargill subsidiary Excel, Swift & Company, and National) now slaughter and market four of every five beef cattle born in this country
Michael Pollan