Food-what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cook….

Animals are murdered to produce meat; vegetables are torn up, peeled, and chopped; most of what we eat is treated with fire; and chewing is designed ….

One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indee….

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousa….

A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled, enticements, variety, patterning and pl….

Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboo….

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community..

This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, ….

food is never just something to eat..

The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives..

Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture..

The ancient Greeks did not have to wrestle with the philosophical problem of the existence of evil. They did not claim their gods were good, just mag….

Food is "everyday"-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultiv….

Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction..

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. ... It preserves things from cor….

Believing in fate has probably always arisen in part because of the delights and terrors of storytelling. We have to realize--to learn--that in life ….

It is the nature of human beings not to be able to leave nature alone..

Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need it..

Salt is the policeman of taste: it keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker..