Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the changing value of resources over time, highlighting time as a precious commodity in our modern lives.
Adam Gopnik's quote reflects on the evolving perspective of what is deemed valuable in society. While protein was once considered the rarest and most valued ingredient due to its scarcity, in today's fast-paced world, it is our time that has become the scarce resource. This suggests that the ability to prepare and enjoy food is often neglected due to our busy schedules, prompting a reflection on our priorities and the importance of savoring life's experiences.
In practice
During a speech at a culinary conference to emphasize the importance of slow food.
The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
Now, if you notice how the swan, putting its neck down into the deep water, brings up food for itself from below, then you will discover the wisdom of the Creator, in that He gave it a neck longer than its feet for this reason, that it might, as if lowering a sort of fishing line, procure the food hidden in the deep water.
In the same way that I tend to make up my mind about people within thirty seconds of meeting them, I also make up my mind about whether a business proposal excites me within about thirty seconds of looking at it. I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics.
You may as well quit reading and hearing the Word of God, and give it to the devil, if you do not desire to live according to it.
Our blossoms of passion, gay and luxuriant flowers, are bright and full of fragrance, but they beguile us and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly.
Life is not quantifiable in terms of age, but I suppose in my fifties I am more grounded and more at ease in my own skin than when I was younger. I have a confidence that I didn't have before from the experiences I've had.
Better to master one mountain than a thousand foothills.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.