Food Quotes

The thing you learn with Potage Parmentier is that simple is not exactly the same as easy.

~ Julie Powell

In America we have gone way beyond sustenance. Eating is an activity. 'Why don’t we get lunch, and then we’ll grab some pizza.

~ Jim Gaffigan

I'm eating' it quick... but I'll remember it a long time.

~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Radiation does discriminate. If you are sedentary and eating processed foods then you will be more affected than a person that exercises and eats fresh organic food.

~ Steven Magee

we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts.

~ Padma Lakshmi

Nearly every historic fruit and vegetable variety once found in the United States has disappeared.

~ Preeti Simran Sethi

Cohen testified that there was no 'direct relationship' linking heart disease to dietary fats, and that he had been able to induce the same blood-vessel complications seen in heart disease merely by feeding sugar to his laboratory rats. Peter Cleave testified to his belief that the problem extended to all refined carbohydrates. 'I don't hold the cholesterol view for a moment,' Cleave said, noting that mankind had been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. 'For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life... but, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up... that is a very different proposition.

~ Gary Taubes

Taste” is a noun and a verb: We all have it and we all do it. But we don’t all have a language or a system for understanding and expressing that experience… I knew chocolate was something I didn’t want to lose, but I didn’t have the words to communicate why it was so important to me, or the knowledge on how best to save it. Now I do.

~ Simran Sethi

How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck

~ Patrick O'brian

There are people who eat only organic food, and then there are people who don’t have tons of money to waste.

~ Jim Gaffigan

food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I’m going through or what I need. I don’t believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

~ Padma Lakshmi

There was currant toast squishy with butter, caramel-marshmallow squares, strawberry boats oozing custard, chocolate exclairs that exploded with cream when the cats bit into them with their little white teeth and-- a special treat for Pleasant-- a pie made from thick slices of Bramley apple, with just the right amount of tangy in the tangy-sweet.

~ Anne Michaels

Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

~ Padma Lakshmi

The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic, people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.

~ Michael Pollan

Planted, a single corn seed yielded more than 150 fat kernels, often as many as 300, while the return on a seed of wheat was something less than 50:1

~ Michael Pollan

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

Much was said, and much was ate, and all went well.

~ Jane Austen

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

Like Cheyenne Mountain, today's fast good conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade.

~ Eric Schlosser

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

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.

~ Michael Pollan

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].

~ Michael Pollan

Every day between now and his slaughter in six months, 534 [Pollan's steer] will convert 32 pounds of feed into four pounds of gain- new muscle, fat, and bone.

~ Michael Pollan

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.

~ Michael Pollan

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.

~ Michael Pollan

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)

~ Michael Pollan

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).

~ Michael Pollan

Buy books. Unlike high calorie food, they don't give heart attacks.

~ Tanushree Podder

The cakes and pies and casseroles beckoned like gastronomic sirens, and there was no one to lash me to the mast.

~ Chris Fabry

Food keeps us alive, as we all know. Nourishment allows us to grow and be healthy. But good cooking takes us beyond survival and into the realms of culture and pleasure.

~ Fernando Divina

The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few worries when you go to bed at night.

~ Amy Tan

My first encounter with a baguette, torn still warm from its paper sheathing, shattered and sighed on contact. The sound stopped me in my tracks, the way a crackling branch gives deer pause; that’s what good crust does. Once I began to chew, the flavor unfolded, deep with yeast and salt, the warm humidity of the tender crumb almost breathing against my lips.

~ Sasha Martin

That was when it became abundantly clear to me that simply eating in a way that avoided hurting others was never going to be enough if my eating habits were still hurting me.

~ Jasmin Singer