|
791c80b
|
, though Peter. 'Eat,' said Leo Matienne again, very gently. Peter looked the truth of what he had lost full in the face. And then he ate.
|
|
grief
loss
family
food
|
Kate DiCamillo |
|
51d7553
|
Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.
|
|
earth
sustainable
ethics
eating
food
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
ecec743
|
Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.
|
|
pastry
food
|
P.D. James |
|
fa2a333
|
What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.
|
|
professional-cooking
food-writing
cooking
kitchen
food
|
Anthony Bourdain |
|
faa2177
|
This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.
|
|
cooks
cooking
kitchen
food
|
Anthony Bourdain |
|
69c5f27
|
"In ancient Greece, the word for "cook," "butcher," and "priest" was the same -- mageiros -- and the word shares an etymological root with "magic."
|
|
magic
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
2ed1dd4
|
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
|
|
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
5ea1fe4
|
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]
|
|
farming
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
e236470
|
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.
|
|
farming
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
be59545
|
Obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time in food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower it's rate of obesity.
|
|
homemade
obesity
health
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
2b71293
|
Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.
|
|
farm
local
sustainable
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
f3cf570
|
I don't cook anything fancy. Sheba's appetite isn't up to much and I've never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven and watches me while I work. At a certain point, she usually asks for wine. I have tried to get her to wait until she's eaten something, but she gets very scratchy when I do that, so these days I tend to give in straightaway and pour her a small glass from the carton in the fridge. You choose your battles. Sheba is a bit of a snob about drink and she keeps whining at me to get a grander sort. 'Something in a bottle, at least', she says. But I continue to buy the cartons. we are on a tight budget these days. And for all her carping, Sheba doesn't seem to have too much trouble knocking back the cheap stuff.
|
|
snob
food
|
Zoë Heller |
|
0011e43
|
Today's orthodoxy thrives on someone else doing the cooking. The single-service packet from the supermarket has replaced the sit-down home-cooked meal as the most common food choice. Easy foodism disengages people from the process and creates a level of food illiteracy unthinkable just a few short decades ago.
|
|
home-cooking
food
|
Joel Salatin |
|
0594adb
|
"Shergahn and friend lay like poleaxed steers, and the Daranfelian's greasy hair was thick with potatoes, carrots, gravy, and chunks of beef. His companion had less stew in his hair, but an equally large lump was rising fast, and Brandark flipped his improvised club into the air, caught it in proper dipping position, and filled it once more from the pot without even glancing at them. He raised the ladle to his nose, inhaled deeply, and glanced at the cook with an impudent twitch of his ears. "Smells delicious," he said while the laughter started up all around the fire. "I imagine a bellyful of this should help a hungry man sleep. Why, just look what a single ladle of it did for Shergahn!"
|
|
laughter
sleep
good
humorous
defeat
funny
humor
lump
steer
yummy
stew
triumph
delicious
shame
bully
food
|
David Weber |
|
2c994de
|
We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God. Her culinary prowess was one of our family's primal stories, like the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents' marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us. We were the family that chose its battles wisely, and used wit to get out of binds, and loved the food of our matriarch.
|
|
heritage
grandmother
food
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
a490da4
|
Don't you just love the idea of cooking flowers? I imagine them bursting into bloom, right in the pan.
|
|
flowers
food
|
Ruth Reichl |
|
d16e6fb
|
I cooked with so many of the greats: Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz. Rick Bayless taught me not one but two amazing mole sauces, the whole time bemoaning that he never seemed to know what to cook for his teenage daughter. Jose Andres made me a classic Spanish tortilla, shocking me with the sheer volume of viridian olive oil he put into that simple dish of potatoes, onions, and eggs. Graham Elliot Bowles and I made gourmet Jell-O shots together, and ate leftover cheddar risotto with Cheez-Its crumbled on top right out of the pan. Lucky for me, Maria still includes me in special evenings like this, usually giving me the option of joining the guests at table, or helping in the kitchen. I always choose the kitchen, because passing up the opportunity to see these chefs in action is something only an idiot would do. Susan Spicer flew up from New Orleans shortly after the BP oil spill to do an extraordinary menu of all Gulf seafood for a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner Maria hosted to help the families of Gulf fishermen. Local geniuses Gil Langlois and Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard joined forces with Gale Gand for a seven-course dinner none of us will ever forget, due in no small part to Gil's hoisin oxtail with smoked Gouda mac 'n' cheese, Stephanie's roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and light-as-air chickpea fritters, and Gale's honey panna cotta with rhubarb compote and insane little chocolate cookies. Stephanie and I bonded over hair products, since we have the same thick brown curls with a tendency to frizz, and the general dumbness of boys, and ended up giggling over glasses of bourbon till nearly two in the morning. She is even more awesome, funny, sweet, and genuine in person than she was on her rock-star winning season on Bravo. Plus, her food is spectacular all day. I sort of wish she would go into food television and steal me from Patrick. Allen Sternweiler did a game menu with all local proteins he had hunted himself, including a pheasant breast over caramelized brussels sprouts and mushrooms that melted in your mouth (despite the occasional bit of buckshot). Michelle Bernstein came up from Miami and taught me her white gazpacho, which I have since made a gajillion times, as it is probably one of the world's perfect foods.
|
|
cuisine
dishes
food
|
Stacey Ballis |
|
1db6b19
|
When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.
|
|
coping
life-lessons
life
worry
food
|
Robin McKinley |
|
f161285
|
Despite a few exceptions, I have found that Americans are now far more willing to learn new names, just as they're far more willing to try new ethnic foods... It's like adding a few new spices to the kitchen pantry.
|
|
names
kitchen
spices
food
|
Firoozeh Dumas |
|
0371c94
|
There really was no advantage, that I could see, in having brothers: they chewed with their mouths open, and ate every single Poppin' Fresh roll before I'd even had one.
|
|
food
|
Meg Cabot |
|
2e7cdfa
|
How bad do you want cancer? Bad enough to eat a rainbow of it? Personally, I think the red cancer would be the worst, but anything you swallow with artificial hues in it is going to pop a tumor out of your body the day after you eat it.
|
|
humor
snark
food
|
Laurie Notaro |
|
cff6ec0
|
!Se sentia tan sola y abandonada! Un chile en nogada olvidado en una charola despues de un gran banquete no se sentiria peor que ella.
|
|
loneliness
cooking
food
soledad
tristeza
|
Laura Esquivel |
|
9e82d06
|
Food, the stoking-up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.
|
|
food
|
E.M. Forster |
|
03f925f
|
My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French cafe, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen door, but I didn't care about any of it. There, I ordered chicken Dijon, or beef Bourguignon, or a simple green salad, or a pate sandwich, and when it came to the table, I melted into whatever arrived. I lavished in a forkful of spinach gratin on the side, at how delighted the chef had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese, like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love. Sure, there were small distractions and preoccupations in it all, but I could find the food in there, the food was the center, and the person making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it.
|
|
food-sensor
la-lyonnaise
moods
rose-edelstein
enjoyment
ingredients
emotions
french
food
|
Aimee Bender |
|
71676dd
|
"Cheese is all about the dark side of life" - Sister Noella; aka The Cheese Nun"
|
|
death
life
fermentation
foodie
decay
cooking
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
9b9d57f
|
The dream of control is seductive but it leads to monoculture in the field and fortified white bread in the supermarket.
|
|
monoculture
control
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
fa91c91
|
If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise & kill a great many more of them. And indeed, this has become the rule with disastrous results for both the animals & the land... If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little as we possibly can. Something that the humble cook-pot allows us to do.
|
|
philosophy
ethics
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
75549b0
|
No matter where he went in the City, there was an odoriferous mix of food and vehicles, like the alchemic concoctions of some mad gourmet mechanic: Kung Pao Saab Turbo, Buick Skylark Carbonara, Sweet-and-Sour Metro Bus, Honda Bolognese with Burning Clutch Sauce.
|
|
funny
food
|
Christopher Moore |
|
109588f
|
At the fairgrounds we saw them in the parking lot inhaling the effluvium of carnival, the smells of fried dough, caramel and cinnamon, the flap-flapping of tents, a carousel plinking out music-box songs, voluptuous sounds bouncing down tent ropes and along the trampled dust of the midway. Wind-curled handbills staple-gunned to telephone poles, the hum of gas-powered generators and the gyro truck, the lemonade truck, pretzels and popcorn, baked potatoes, the American flag, the rumblings of rides and the disconnected screams of riders -- all of it shimmered before them like a mirage, something not quite real.
|
|
fairs
senses
food
|
Anthony Doerr |
|
026c05b
|
[...]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. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.
|
|
organic
sustainability
meal
natural
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
c67537b
|
There is, I must admit, something very satisfying about making things from scratch, to know every dish in a meal was made by your own hands. As a lazy person, I'm a fan of premade things, but it was a lot of fun and deeply relaxing to make, for example, my own dough and my own cherry filling for a beautiful cherry pie. I felt productive and capable.
|
|
feminism
cooking
food
|
Roxane Gay |
|
ff9a152
|
"Industrial processes follow a clear, linear, hierarchical logic that is fairly easy to put into words, probably because words follow a similar logic: First this, then that; put this in here, and then out comes that. But the relationship between cows and chickens on this [Polyface] farm...takes the form of a loop rather than a line, and that makes it hard to know where to start, or how to distinguish between causes and effects, subjects and objects. . . Joel would say this is precisely the point, and precisely the distinction between a biological and an industrial system. "In an ecological system like this everything's connected to everything else, so you can't change one thing without changing ten other things. . .This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has proper scale."
|
|
scale
industrial-farming
closed-loop
ecological
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
d07e7ff
|
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.
|
|
history
culture
eating
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
526d048
|
"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 creme 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."
|
|
french-paradox
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
8f74e47
|
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).
|
|
hfcs
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
613eeb0
|
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)
|
|
hfcs
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
09cc873
|
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.
|
|
hfcs
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
183563a
|
One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the back-breaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.
|
|
social-commentary
society
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
120d40a
|
"The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of warm, tan flour that slowly accumulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a whiff. Freshly milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I'd read about the etymology of the word "flour" -- that it is the flower, or best part, of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled delicious."
|
|
flour
wheat
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
7bb34cb
|
"The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, is a parable about the folly of human ingenuity -- about how our species can sometimes be too smart for its own good. After figuring out an ingenious system for transforming an all but nutritionally worthless grass into a wholesome food, humanity pushed on intrepidly until it had figured out a way to make that food all but nutritionally worthless yet gain! Here in miniature, I realized, is the whole checkered history of "food processing." Our species' discovery and development of cooking (in the broadest sense of the word) gave us a handful of ingenious technologies for rendering plants and animals more nutritious and unlocking calories unavailable to other creatures. But there eventually came a moment when, propelled by the logic of human desire and technological progress, we began to overprocess certain foods in such a way as to actually render them detrimental to our health and well-being. What had been a highly adaptive set of techniques that contributed substantially to our success as a species turned into a maladaptive one -- contributing to disease and general ill health and now actually threatening to shorten human lives."
|
|
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
10dd588
|
How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck
|
|
patrick-o-brian
food
|
Patrick O'Brian |
|
e23b684
|
Dessert was an over baked chocolate chip cookies the size of a hockey puck and just about as tasty.
|
|
humour
funny
dessert
joke
food
|
Carl Hiaasen |
|
afb78e0
|
I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt's and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter's and Pink's, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver Lake and Rae's charbroiled burgers on Pico and the garlicky hummus at Carousel in Glendale. I ate an enormous range of food, and mood. Many favorites showed up- families who had traveled far and whose dishes were steeped with the trials of passageways. An Iranian cafe near Ohio and Westwood had such a rich grief in the lamb shank that I could eat it all without doing any of my tricks- side of the mouth, ingredient tracking, fast-chew and swallow. Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held. I asked the waiter if I could thank the chef, and he led me to the back, where a very ordinary-looking woman with gray hair in a practical layered cut tossed translucent onions in a fry pan and shook my hand. Her face was steady, faintly sweaty from the warmth of the kitchen. Glad you liked it, she said, as she added a pinch of saffron to the pan. Old family recipe, she said. No trembling in her voice, no tears streaking down her face.
|
|
walks-of-life
moods
rose-edelstein
restaurants
emotions
food
|
Aimee Bender |
|
bf85d10
|
"What do you eat?" she asked. "Mulligan stew," said Bob. "My friends and I collect scraps of food all day, and then we cook it up in a big pot and share it. It's always different, but very tasty." "Why is it called mulligan stew?" asked Stephen. "There was once a hobo named Mulligan," said Bob. "He made the first mulligan stew." "Was he a good cook?" asked Todd. "No, he was eaten by cannibals."
|
|
mulligan
stew
hobo
food
school
|
Louis Sachar |
|
101d60c
|
When he looked back at the menu as an old man, it brought back everything; the food, the wine, the private dining room, the pride he took in being able to pay for such a dinner, the convergence of his life as a writer and his life as an oenophile, the conviviality that grew as the night continued and everyone had a little too much to drink but not enough to impair the quality of the conversation, some of which, I feel sure, was about the wines themselves.
|
|
food
wine
memory
|
Anne Fadiman |
|
c3ec1c1
|
If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us way back in the 1970's, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level- at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds.
|
|
environment
home
kitchen
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
834fbae
|
Building with Its Face Blown Off How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper of a second story bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had answered the explosion wearing only its striped pajamas. Some neighbors and soldiers poke around in the rubble below and stare up at the hanging staircase, the portrait of a grandfather, a door dangling from a single hinge. And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed by its uncovered ochre walls, the twisted mess of its plumbing, the sink sinking to its knees, the ripped shower curtain, the torn goldfish trailing bubbles. It's like a dollhouse view as if a child on its knees could reach in and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture. Or it might be a room on a stage in a play with no characters, no dialogue or audience, no beginning, middle, and end- just the broken furniture in the street, a shoe among the cinder blocks, a light snow still falling on a distant steeple, and people crossing a bridge that still stands. And beyong that-crows in a tree, the statue of a leader on a horse, and clouds that look like smoke, and even farther on, in another country on a blanket under a shade tree, a man pouring wine into two glasses and a woman sliding out the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.
|
|
exposed
ruined
food
city
|
Billy Collins |
|
30036a1
|
Is there any more feudal, soul eradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking but it is not enjoyable & surely not ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self & humanity.
|
|
time
homemade
foodie
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
99aff33
|
Yet, running just beneath the surface of food industry feminism was an implicit anti-feminist message. Then as now, ads for packaged foods are aimed almost exclusively at women and so reinforced the retrograde idea that responsibility for feeding the family fell to mom. The slick new products would help her do a job that was hers & hers alone.
|
|
feminism
women
cooking
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
cb2839b
|
"This ambivalence about the value of cooking raises an interesting question: Has our culture devalued food-work because it is unfulfilling by it's very nature or because it has traditionally been "women's work"?"
|
|
feminism
women
society
food
|
Michael Pollan |
|
8d75d4d
|
The meal she served was unlike any I had encountered in Vienna, or anywhere else: red seaweed garnished with pickled radishes; black rice noodles and spotted mushrooms boiled in wine, grilled squid stuffed with flying fish roe; and yellow cherries sauteed in butter. The hot bread was laced with cinnamon and paprika. The goat cheese was coated with thyme honey.
|
|
food
|
Nicholas Christopher |
|
f602141
|
Wszyscy przeczuwamy niebezpieczenstwo. Nasze jedzenie powstaje kosztem ogromnego cierpienia.Gdy ktos proponuje nam obejrzenie filmu o produkcji miesa, spodziewamy sie horroru. Mozliwe, ze wiemy wiecej, niz nam sie wydaje. Wolimy jednak odsuwac od siebie te swiadomosc. Jedzac mieso, spozywamy udreczone zwierze. Z bialka pochodzacego od torturowanych stworzen powstaja nasze miesnie.
|
|
food
|
Jonathan Safran Foer |
|
595bcab
|
Wil ate without enthusiasm. His bacon tasted like nothing. Like a dead animal, fried. His eggs, aborted chickens.
|
|
appetite
lexicon
food
|
Max Barry |
|
bf57e32
|
"Je me souviens d'un fromage qui s'appelait "la Vache serieuse" ("la Vache qui rit" lui a fait un proces et l'a gagne)."
|
|
vache
cow
food
|
Georges Perec |