Great Throughts Treasury

"Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower?s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring."

"Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward."

"Don?t eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn?t recognize as food. There are a great many food-like items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn?t recognize as food? stay away from these."

"Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose."

"Do all your eating at a table. No, a desk is not a table. If we eat while we're working, or while watching TV or driving, we eat mindlessly -- and as a result eat a lot more than we would if we were eating at a table, paying attention to what we're doing. This phenomenon can be tested (and put to good use): Place a child in front of a television set and place a bowl of fresh vegetables in front of him or her. The child will eat everything in the bowl, often even vegetables that he or she doesn't ordinarily touch, without noticing what's going on. Which suggests an exception to the rule: When eating somewhere other than at a table, stick to fruits and vegetables."

"Don't eat anything incapable of rotting."

"Don?t get your fuel from the same place your car does."

"Does beauty have a purpose? Of course, like all of our (Apollonian) efforts to order and categorize nature, this one goes only so far before the (Dionysian) pull of things as they really are begins to take its inevitable toll."

"Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk. This should go without saying. Such cereals are highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates as well as chemical additives."

"Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris."

"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

"Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. All the guests were required to dress in colors that flattered those of the tulips. At the appointed moment a cannon sounded, the doors to the harem were flung open, and the sultan's mistresses stepped into the garden led by eunuchs bearing torches. The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne."

"Eat animals that have themselves eaten well."

"Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself. That gets at a lot of our issues. I love French fries, and I also know if I ate French fries every day it would not be a good thing. One of our problems is that foods that are labor or money intensive have gotten very cheap and easy to procure. French fries are a great example. They are a tremendous pain to make. Wash the potatoes, fry potatoes, get rid of the oil, clean up the mess. If you made them yourself you?d have them about once a month, and that?s probably about right. The fact that labor has been removed from special occasion food has made us treat it as everyday food. One way to curb that and still enjoy those foods is to make them. Try to make your own Twinkie. I don?t even know if you can. I imagine it would be pretty difficult. How do you get the cream in there?"

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

"Eat meat that has itself eaten well."

"Eat only foods that will eventually rot."

"Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks."

"Eat mostly plants, especially leaves."

"Eat real food."

"Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored. For many of us, eating has surprisingly little to do with hunger. We eat out of boredom, for entertainment, to comfort or reward ourselves. Try to be aware of why you're eating, and ask yourself if you're really hungry -- before you eat and then again along the way. (One old wive's test: If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you're not hungry.) Food is a costly antidepressant."

"Eating in our time has gotten complicated ? needlessly so, in my opinion. I will get to the needlessly part in a moment, but consider first the complexity that now attends this most basic of creaturely activities. Most of us have come to rely on experts of one kind or another to tell us how to eat ? doctors and diet books, media accounts of the latest findings in nutritional science, government advisories and food pyramids, the proliferating health claims on food packages. We may not always heed these experts? advice, but their voices are in our heads every time we order from a menu or wheel down the aisle in the supermarket. Also in our heads today resides an astonishing amount of biochemistry. How odd is it that everybody now has at least a passing acquaintance with words like antioxidant, saturated fat, omega-3 fatty acids, carbohydrates, polyphenols, folic acid, gluten, and probiotics? It?s gotten to the point where we don?t see foods anymore but instead look right through them to the nutrients (good and bad) they contain, and of course to the calories ? all these invisible qualities in our food that, properly understood, supposedly hold the secret to eating well."

"Eating is an agricultural act, as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world?and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing."

"Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place."

"Escherichia colia O157:H7 is a relatively new strain of the common intestinal bacteria (no one had seen it before 1980) that thrives in feedlot cattle, 40 percent of which carry it in their gut. Ingesting as few as ten of these microbes can cause a fatal infection; they produce a toxin that destroys human kidneys."

"Even if you can't feed the world organically, and I don't know that you can't-there are very good arguments that you can-even if you just feed half the world organically, you'd be doing so much for the land, so much for our health, so much for the atmosphere, that it's well worth doing. So the fact that you might not be able to get all the way does not damn the effort to try. And so I don't think people should be discouraged by that."

"Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before."

"Every cuisine has its characteristic 'flavor principle,' Rozin contends, whether it is tomato-lemon-oregano in Greece; lime-chili in Mexico; onion-lard-paprika in Hungary, or, in Samin's Moroccan dish, cumin-coriander-cinnamon-ginger-onion-fruit. (And in America? Well, we do have Heinz ketchup, a flavor principle in a bottle that kids, or their parents, use to domesticate every imaginable kind of food. We also now have the familiar salty-umami taste of fast food, which I would guess is based on salt, soy oil, and MSG."

"Every new genetically engineered plant is a unique event in nature, bringing its own set of genetic contingencies. This means that the reliability or safety of one genetically modified plant doesn't necessarily guarantee the reliability or safety of the next."

"Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing."

"Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can."

"Farmer's markets are a great place to find food. Almost everything sold there is fresh and local. Find a farmer's market near you and become a regular. The temptations of the supermarket aren't there and the food is more nutritious because it is freshly picked."

"Food labels have a tremendous amount of information. Don't be distracted by all the numbers. Look to the ingredient list. The shorter the better. If you don't know what something is on that ingredient list, put it back. Better yet, buy things without labels, such as produce, fish and meat."

"For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food."

"Food is alive, and it should die. Snort. His point is, if it doesn?t eventually go bad, it is not real food. I saw a feature once on a woman who kept a McDonalds hamburger and fries for YEARS and it didn?t rot. I think that pretty much illustrates his point. The key, he says, is do you want to pay the price for good food, or do you want to spend the money at the doctor?s?"

"For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history."

"For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?"

"For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours."

"For though we may be the Earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role - that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem."

"For look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature?s double nature?that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spring toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were names the Greeks gave to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing?Could that be it?right there, in a flower?the meaning of life?"

"Forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation."

"For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I?m talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia dating to the Carter administration. The latter was when, in 1977, a Senate committee had issued a set of ?dietary goals? warning beefloving Americans to lay off the red meat. And so we dutifully had, until now. What set off the sea change? It appears to have been a perfect media storm of diet books, scientific studies, and one timely magazine article. The new diet books, many of them inspired by the formerly discredited Dr. Robert C. Atkins, brought Americans the welcome news that they could eat more meat and lose weight just so long as they laid off the bread and pasta. These high-protein, low-carb diets found support in a handful of new epidemiological studies suggesting that the nutritional orthodoxy that had held sway in America since the 1970s might be wrong. It was not, as official opinion claimed, fat that made us fat, but the carbohydrates we?d been eating precisely in order to stay slim. So conditions were ripe for a swing of the dietary pendulum when, in the summer of 2002, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the new research entitled ?What if Fat Doesn?t Make You Fat?? Within months, supermarket shelves were restocked and menus rewritten to reflect the new nutritional wisdom. The blamelessness of steak restored, two of the most wholesome and uncontroversial foods known to man?bread and pasta?acquired a moral stain that promptly bankrupted dozens of bakeries and noodle firms and ruined an untold number of perfectly good meals."

"Get out of the supermarket. I know, it?s easier said than done, depending on where you live. But it really is key to finding fresher, healthier food."

"Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food."

"Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for its high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites."

"Have a glass of wine with dinner."

"Government regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa."

"He showed the words chocolate cake to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. Guilt was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: celebration."

"Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the supermarket and the home-meal replacement have succeeded in obscuring. yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one's pronouncements."

"High-quality food is better for your health."