Margaret Visser Quotes

#1. 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.

Margaret Visser

#2. 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 magnificent.

Margaret Visser

#3. 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 cooking and eating it-is one of the means by which a society creates itself and acts out its aims and fantasies.

Margaret Visser

#4. 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 we are not the readers but the authors of our own narratives.

Margaret Visser

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

Margaret Visser

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

Margaret Visser

#7. Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.

Margaret Visser

#8. 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.

Margaret Visser

#9. 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 plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form, but also the details matter intensely.

Margaret Visser

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

Margaret Visser

#11. As people grow up, they teach themselves to do what distinguishes adults from children: they will choke and cough until they have mastered the cigarette, or force themselves to down bitter beer until they are ready to join the group that actually likes it.

Margaret Visser

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

Margaret Visser

#13. Food is never just something to eat.

Margaret Visser

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

Margaret Visser