Great Throughts Treasury

"A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country."

"A French poet famously referred to the aroma of certain cheeses as the ?pieds de Dieu??the feet of god. Just to be clear: foot odor of a particularly exalted quality, but still?foot odor."

"A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry."

"A charge often levied against organic agriculture is that it is more philosophy than science. There's some truth to this indictment, if that is what it is, though why organic farmers should feel defensive about it is itself a mystery, a relic, perhaps, of our fetishism of science as the only credible tool with which to approach nature... The peasant rice farmer who introduces ducks and fish to his paddy may not understand all the symbiotic relationships he's put in play--that the ducks and fishes are feeding nitrogen to the rice and at the same time eating the pests. But the high yields of food from this ingenious poly-culture are his to harvest even so."

"A good pot holds memories."

"A country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another. It would not be apt to confuse protein bars or food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with medicines. It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast-food outlet every day. And it surely would not be nearly so fat. Nor would such a culture be shocked to discover that there are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of ?unhealthy? foods, and, lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are. 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 crŠme 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."

"A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals."

"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule."

"According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born in 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. (An African American child's chances are two in five.) Because of diabetes and all the other health problems that accompany obesity, today's children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The problem is not limited to America: The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition--a billion--had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition--800 million."

"American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent."

"Americans will choose to watch other people cook on TV rather than cook themselves ? AND THEY DON?T GET TO EAT!"

"American women cook 78 percent of dinners, make 93 percent of the food purchases, and spend three times as many hours in the kitchen as men. And among those attempting to adhere to the slow food or locavore ethos, these meals have the potential to be much more complex and time-consuming than the rotisserie-chicken-and-frozen- veggie meals our own mothers served for us."

"Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it."

"Another theme, or premise really, is that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds. Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the composition of its flora and fauna. Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species?plants, animals, and fungi? with which we have coevolved to the point where our fates are deeply entwined. Many of these species have evolved expressly to gratify our desires, in the intricate dance of domestication that has allowed us and them to prosper together as we could never have prospered apart. But our relationships with the wild species we eat?from the mushrooms we pick in the forest to the yeasts that leaven our bread?are no less compelling, and far more mysterious. Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us. What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal?s pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat."

"Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever he does. He is in fact a wilderness advocate of a certain kind. It is when he respects and nurtures the wilderness of his soil and his plants that his garden seems to flourish most. Wildness, he has found, resides not only out there, but right here: in his soil, in his plants, even in himself..."

"Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about."

"As I?ve heard some bakers say, baking takes a lot of time, but for the most part it?s not YOUR time."

"Any item that has a health claim on the package is being marketed to you. When foods are processed, many of the nutrients are removed from them. Food products that advertise added vitamins and minerals are often replacing natural nutrients that had to be removed during processing. The nutrients which are healthy for you seem to change almost every day. Some things are good for you, then bad for you, then good for you again. Avoid 'products' that make claims and stick to eating food. If you want extra vitamins, eat more vegetables."

"Avoid foods you see advertised on television."

"Avoid foods you see advertised on television. Food marketers are ingenious at turning criticisms of their products -- and rules like these -- into new ways to sell slightly different versions of the same processed foods: They simply reformulate (to be low-fat, have no HFCS or transfats, or to contain fewer ingredients) and then boast about their implied healthfulness, whether the boast is meaningful or not. The best way to escape these marketing ploys is to tune out the marketing itself, by refusing to buy heavily promoted foods. Only the biggest food manufacturers can afford to advertise their products on television: More than two thirds of food advertising is spent promoting processed foods (and alcohol), so if you avoid products with big ad budgets, you'll automatically be avoiding edible food-like substances. As for the 5 percent of food ads that promote whole foods (the prune or walnut growers or the beef ranchers), common sense will, one hopes, keep you from tarring them with the same brush -- these are the exceptions that prove the rule."

"Be the kind of person who takes supplements -- then skip the supplements."

"Before the western diet comes in, populations did not have high levels of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc."

"As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food."

"As it happens, Lozupone and I had something in common, microbially speaking: we share unusually high levels of prevotella for Americans. Our gut communities look more like those of rural Africans or Amerindians than like those of our neighbors. Lozupone suspects that the reasons for this might have to do with a plant-based diet."

"At its most basic, the story of life on earth is the competition among species to capture and store as much energy as possible?either directly from the sun, in the case of plants, or, in the case of animals, by eating plants and plant eaters. The energy is stored in the form of carbon molecules and measured in calories: The calories we eat, whether in an ear of corn or a steak, represent packets of energy once captured by a plant. The C-4 trick helps explain the corn plant?s success in this competition: Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn. (Ninety-seven percent of what a corn plant is comes from the air, three percent from the ground.) The trick doesn?t yet, however, explain how a scientist could tell that a given carbon atom in a human bone owes its presence there to a photosynthetic event that occurred in the leaf of one kind of plant and not another?in corn, say, instead of lettuce or wheat. That?s because all carbon is not created equal. Some carbon atoms called isotopes, have more than the usual complement of six protons and six neutrons, giving them a slightly different atomic weight. C-13, for examples, has six protons and seven neutrons. (Hence ?C-13.?) For whatever reason, when a C-4 plant goes scavenging for its four-packs of carbon, it takes in more carbon 13 than ordinary?C-3?plants, which exhibit a marked preference for the more common carbon 12. Greedy for carbon, C-4 plants can?t afford to discriminate among isotopes, and so end up with relatively more carbon 13.The higher the ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12 in a person?s flesh, the more corn has been in his diet?or in the diet of the animals he or she ate. (As far as we?re concerned, it makes little difference whether we consume relatively more or less carbon 13.) One would expect to find a comparatively great deal of carbon 13 in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn?Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more wheat than corn?114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the more refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people (except perhaps the proud corn-fed Midwesterners, and they don?t know the half of it), though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little old fashioned. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn?t lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of North Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. ?When you look at the isotope ratios,? Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who?s done this sort of research, told me, ?we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.? Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar."

"At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind."

"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."

"Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce."

"But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar."

"Boiled food is life,? Levi-Strauss writes, ?roast food death.? He reports finding countless examples in the world?s folklore of ?cauldrons of immortality,? but not a single example of a ?spit of immortality."

"But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter."

"By now you will not be surprised to learn that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called Air and Dreams. he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound. joy is aerial, and the sensation of freedom defies the bonds of gravity. Air, Bachelard writes, is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy. Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity, inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday life."

"Break the rules once in a while. ?All things in moderation. Including moderation.?"

"But 'can organic feed the world?' is a question really up for grabs. The honest answer is, we don't know. I've seen research that suggests with really smart rotations and cover cropping there is enough nitrogen to do it. I also think that if we changed our relationship to meat, we probably could."

"Beginning in the fifties and sixties, the flood tide of cheap corn made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of on grass, and to raise chickens in giant factories rather than in farmyards. Iowa livestock farmers couldn?t compete with the factory- farmed animals their own cheap corn had helped spawn, so the chickens and cattle disappeared from the farm. And with them the pastures and hay fields and fences. In their place the farmers planted more of the one crop they could grow more of than anything else: corn. And whenever the price of corn slipped they planted a little more of it, to cover expenses and stay even. By the 1980s the diversified family farm was history in Iowa, and corn was king. [Fritz Haber and the fixing of Nitrogen allowing synthetic fertilizer to be developed]"

"But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you."

"Cheap food is great, and we have to acknowledge that achievement, but we also have to acknowledge the cost of it."

"But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to help preserve freshness. According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse. Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill."

"Cool, scentless, and somewhat aloof?It is no accident that botanical illustrators and photographers have so often brought their scrupulous eye to bear on this particular flower: it rewards that particular gaze like no other."

"Cooking allowed our brains to expand and our gut to shrink ? we?re kinda going backwards now."

"Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you."

"Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring - to the carelessness of both producers and consumers."

"Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom."

"Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food."

"Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal?unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of manufacturing a controlled substance. Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge."

"Corn is not the only source of cheap energy in the supermarket ? much of the fat added to processed foods comes from soybeans ? but it is by far the most important. As George Naylor said, growing corn is the most efficient way to get energy ? calories ? from an acre of Iowa farmland. That corn-made calorie can find its way into our bodies in the form of an animal fat, a sugar, or a starch, such is the protean nature of carbon in that big kernel. But as productive and protean as the corn plant is, finally it is a set of human choices that have made these molecules quite as cheap as they have become: a quarter of a century of farm policies designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other. Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest."

"Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us."

"Corporate food has built-in problems."

"Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share."

"Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds."