Food Culture Quotes

How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein ~ Michael Pollan

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston. ~ John Updike

We're committed, as she gets older, to teaching her about her birth culture. And of course she already loves the rice. Actually, it was her first solid food. ~ Celeste Ng

If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody.
Open your mind, get up off the couch, move. ~ Anthony Bourdain

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Indian food has been huge in the UK forever and ever, but that's because it has a historical rooting. America, I think is really ripe for it. There's been so much interest in Indian culture. ~ Aarti Sequeira

Food culture is like listening to the Beatles - it's international, it's very positive, it's inventive and creative. ~ Alice Waters

. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.

Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home. ~ Bill Mollison

In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats. ~ Michael Pollan

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region. Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of "food" and "dirt" in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one's supply chain to learn where things are coming from. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

New York is fast paced, with enthusiastic fans and lots of media attention. Houston's slower paced, and there's more of a southern culture to the city. But both cities have unbelievable food. ~ Jeremy Lin

Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice. ~ Martin Jacques

You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together. ~ Adam Gopnik

In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

Food is a lens for culture. ~ Dana Goodyear

Mitt Romney has won the 2012 presidential nomination by promising Republicans that he would end a so-called 'culture of dependency' on welfare - welfare defined as 'free stuff' and food stamps for poor folks, not tax breaks for Big Oil or tax shelters for Bain executives. ~ Christine Pelosi

I swear, I didn't really go in thinking, 'I'll be the Simon Cowell' of 'Top Chef.' I was just used to being a judge on British food shows where people are much more outspoken and rather rude. That's the culture over here. ~ Toby Young

I think that the Japanese - and I do love Japanese cuisine and adore Japanese food culture - I think that they're going to plow through the entire world's fishing. They're going to eat everything anyways. ~ David Chang

Americans, more than any other culture on earth, are cookbook cooks; we learn to make our meals not from any oral tradition, but from a text. The just-wed cook brings to the new household no carefully copied collection of the family's cherished recipes, but a spanking new edition of 'Fannie Farmer' or 'The Joy of Cooking'. ~ John Thorne

We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture. ~ Alice Waters

America is a country of abundance, but our food culture is sad - based on huge portions and fast food. Let's stop with the excuses and start creating something better. ~ David Chang

A person who can get a good table at Chez Panisse at the last minute is a very important person indeed. Royalty begins with Alice Waters. ~ Willard Spiegelman

Moving to the US was quite a transition for me, to say the least! There were, and still are so many new things to get used to: the language, food, culture, even the style of basketball is different here! ~ Yao Ming

I think America's food culture is embedded in fast-food culture. And the real question that we have is: How are we going to teach slow-food values in a fast-food world? Of course, it's very, very difficult to do, especially when children have grown up eating fast food and the values that go with that. ~ Alice Waters

I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture. ~ Alice Waters

Maybe our story will turn out differently if we take the left fork, maybe the bad things that are waiting to happen to us won't happen, maybe there's happiness at the end of the left fork and warm places with the people who love us and no Noise but no silence neither and there's plenty of food and no one dies and no one dies and no one never never dies.Maybe.But I doubt it. ~ Todd Hewitt

The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology, and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement's primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America's political, social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movements, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, makes us feel good. It, too, promises to protect and serve us. It, too, promises to life us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television's imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. An ~ Chris Hedges

My mother always said you could eat off her floor; you could eat of my floor too, there's so much food down there. ~ Elayne Boosler

Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated process. ~ Gordon S. Wood

Life without sinning was like food without salt, pure but tasteless. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

What you think, what you eat, and what you see today, shapes who you will be tomorrow. ~ Crystal Woods

To him who is stinted of food a boiled turnip will relish like a roast fowl. ~ Saadi

Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. They beat the curiosity out of kids. They outnumber kids. They vote. They wield resources. That's why my public focus is primarily adults. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Eating wheat, like ice climbing, mountain boarding, and bungee jumping, is an extreme sport. It is the only common food that carries its own long-term mortality rate. ~ William Davis

We are molding Jesus into our image. He's beginning to look a lot like us because, after all, that is who we are most comfortable with. The danger now is when we gather in our church buildings to sing, and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshiping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshiping ourselves. ~ David Platt

Pleasant words are the food of love. ~ Ovid

When you are hungry,you seek for food you get desperate if you don't find it, you feel like you gonna die,you should feel exactly like that for God, hungry, desperate to meet him. ~ Deepa

It wasn't a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who'd never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed ...
... and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city. ~ Terry Pratchett

Your self-image tells about what you think about yourself and how you appear to yourself in your own conscience. Self-image is the picture of yourself carried in your own mind. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Food tastes better when you wear it! ~ Erin Dealey

As wars dwindled to skirmishes and our strength grew, so David was able to spend less time with military commanders and more with the engineers and overseers who were fanning out throughout the land, digging cisterns, making roads, fortifying, connecting, and generally making a nation out of our scattered people. ~ Geraldine Brooks

I'm not saying looting is good, ... But I'm saying surely at a time when your child needs diapers and you need food, when does looting stop ... ~ Bill Cosby

'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed. ~ Allan Gurganus

The problem is, lahat na lang kasi ng pelikula pinipilit gawing pampamilya. one size fits all. kaya tuloy ang material for movies nagiging too mature for kids and too cheesy for adults. ~ Bob Ong

Giddard presented them with a collection of Sulese memorabilia and commentaries. Loosely translated, some of them would have read: "The grass sparkled with dew droppings." Warton, I am not sure if that is intended as a beautiful or a horrible image. "I was tort to extinguish riyt from rong." Bede, apparently not. "Sulese are always inviting you to go for dinner to get murdered." Kian, it would seem from this that Sulese are enthusiastically hospitable, transparent of motive, and not very good at committing murder. All are grave errors. "Sulese food on heads with never eat hats." Cayde, Sulese order word important very is. It must learn you. ~ Jonathan Renshaw

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating! ~ Iris Murdoch

When elected officials and others contribute to a climate and culture that fosters hyper-partisanship, we've got to blow the whistle. ~ Mark McKinnon

It was a huge mistake," Chris recalls. "I had a real case of culture shock. I was a crew-cut kid who had been working as a ranch hand in the summers in Montana, and there I was, with a whole bunch of long-haired city kids, most of them from New York. And these kids had a whole different style than I was used to. I couldn't get a word in edgewise at class. They were very inquisitive. Asking questions all the time. I was crammed into a dorm room. There were four of us, and the other three guys had a whole different other lifestyle. They were smoking pot. They would bring their girlfriends into the room. I had never smoked pot before. So basically I took to hiding in the library. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Food should be fun. ~ Thomas Keller

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture ~ Arthur Koestler

With faith and courage, generations of Armenians have overcome great suffering and proudly preserved their culture, traditions, and religion and have told the story of the genocide to an often indifferent world. ~ Jerry Costello

For over two centuries (or so historians tell us), it was from the St. Petersburg salons that our country's culture advanced. From those great rooms overlooking the Fontanka Canal, new cuisines, fashions, and ideas all took their first tentative steps into Russian society. ~ Amor Towles

Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

We don't walk. We overeat because we've made it easy to overeat. We have fast-food joints on every corner. By the way, the 'we' is all of us. It's not the government. It's all of us doing this together. ~ Mehmet Oz

I was just wondering, what would you say to a pair of kittens?"
""Hi, snack food? ~ Kaje Harper

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime. ~ Edward Abbey

People always say "pop culture." As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Life," said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night. ~ Henry Miller

I worked in a health food store once. A guy asked me, 'If I melt dry ice, can I take a bath without getting wet? ~ Steven Wright

I try to eat healthily, but I love fried food and bad things. Give me a plate of bread, some oil and salt and I'm happy. But you can't eat like this all the time. ~ Penelope Cruz

There is a dependence in the region that breeds a culture of defeatism, ~ Stephen Harper

I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul. ~ Scott A. Sandage

I've always believed in a rainbow diet. As many colors and foods as you can eat, the better, because if you focus on one food, there's bound to be a report that comes out that says, 'Broccoli actually ... ' So I mix it up a lot. And I take vitamins, like Biosil, which I take for my hair, skin, and nails. ~ Christie Brinkley

The human spirit collapses not when it is deprived of food but when it is denied a dream.
- Andy Paula, LifeBeyondNumbers ~ Andy Paula

I don't think you can get away with putting your talents in a toilet bowl and not having them flushed away. Forever. There is a level of murder of one's soul and of the culture that they're supposed to be feeding vitamins to ... ~ Sean Penn

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing. ~ Florence Nightingale

Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We have talked about the manner and mode of preaching, but contextualization also has much to do with the content. A sermon could be unengaging to a person because, though expressing accurate biblical truth, it does not connect biblical teaching to the main objections and questions people in that culture have about faith. ~ Timothy Keller

There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison. ~ Paul Goodman

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression ~ Gilles Deleuze