Food Culture Quotes

“Buccal list: A list of food a person has never tried before but wants to taste during their lifetime.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“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;”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“The guidebooks aren't wrong; Osaka is not a textbook beautiful city. Not a seamless stretch of civilization, but a patchwork of skyscrapers and smokestacks, Gucci and ghettos, that better approximates life as most of us know it.
With all this in mind, it's not surprising that Osaka is a center of casual food culture. Its two most famous foods, okonomiyaki (a thick, savory pancake stuffed with all manners of flora and fauna) and takoyaki (a golf-ball-sized fritter with a single chewy nugget of octopus deposited at its molten core), are the kind of carb, fatty, belly-padding drinking food that can sustain a city with Osaka's voracious appetite for mischief.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates the whole problem of choice. At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically managed the omnivores dilemma have lost their sharpness here or simply failed. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with its own culture of food American's have never had a single, strong, stable, culinary tradition to guide us.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The traditional TV dinner has been portrayed as a dirty secret consumed in isolation. This drove perceptions and created the pathetic stereotype that changed during the pandemic. Forced to eat at home, people tried different options and experienced the changes in quality and variety of frozen meals. The products are now viable options for the one, the few, and the many.”
― Jeff Swystun, TV DINNERS UNBOXED: The Hot History of Frozen Meals

“French fries are America’s vegetable of choice, and the average American eats the fat equivalent of one whole stick of butter each day. This has forced airlines to add more fuel to planes to compensate for heavier passengers, manufacturers increase the size of car seats for children while selling seat belt extenders for adults, and curved shower curtain rods are creating space for those needing extra room while bathing. There is no way one size can possibly fit all. Time reports, “As Americans have grown physically larger, brands have shifted their metrics to make shoppers feel skinnier—so much so that a women’s size 12 in 1958 is now a size 6.” Disguising this doubling in size is called vanity sizing but has been derided as “insanity sizing”.”
― Jeff Swystun, TV DINNERS UNBOXED: The Hot History of Frozen Meals