Fire and Knowledge

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I have been thinking a lot about food lately. This is because I am not getting any. My wife, you see, recently put me on a diet. It is an interesting diet of her own devising that essentially allows me to eat anything I want so long as it contains no fat, cholesterol, sodium, or calories and isn’t tasty. In order to keep me from starving altogether, she went to the grocery store and bought everything that had “bran” in its title. I am not sure, but I believe I had bran cutlets for dinner last night. I am very depressed.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 222.

I am quite sure that if you slow-baked, say, an oven glove and covered it sufficiently with ketchup, [my father] would have declared, after a ruminative moment’s chewing, “Hey, this is very tasty.” Good food, in short, was something that was wasted upon him, and my mother labored diligently for years to see that he was never disappointed.

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 143.

Cows must have some friends in high places. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary. Apparently it is more important to protect the cows than the people eating them. Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.

—Steven Hopp in Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 230.

Our national cuisine seems to be food without obvious biological origins.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), pp. 154.

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 54.

We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 31.

Much of the litter that now defaces our country is fairly directly caused by the massive secession or exclusion of most of our people from active participation in the food economy. We have made a social ideal of minimal involvement in the growing and cooking of foods. This is one of the dearest “liberations” of our affluence. Nevertheless, the more dependent we become on the industries of eating and drinking, the more waste we are going to produce.

—Wendell Berry, “Waste” in What Are People For? (1990), pp. 127-128.