Top 100 Food Culture Quotes
#1. Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.
Barbara Kingsolver
#2. Moving to the US was quite a transition for me, to say the least! There were, and still are so many new things to get used to: the language, food, culture, even the style of basketball is different here!
Yao Ming
#3. In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
#4. We live in a fast-food culture, in which we are led to believe that we need to have everything now; it is a culture that causes people to lose a sense of a future worth waiting for.
Hamza Yusuf
#5. People don't think that bread is part of Asian culture or Asian food culture, but it's quite prevalent in Northern China, and you see it throughout Japan and as you go to Taiwan.
David Chang
#6. In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.
Jeremy Rifkin
#7. Clearly, America's dysfunctional food culture must bear some of the blame for our excess pounds, but it's likely our walking-averse lifestyles contribute as well.
Andrew Weil
#8. I think that the Japanese - and I do love Japanese cuisine and adore Japanese food culture - I think that they're going to plow through the entire world's fishing. They're going to eat everything anyways.
David Chang
#9. America is a country of abundance, but our food culture is sad - based on huge portions and fast food. Let's stop with the excuses and start creating something better.
David Chang
#10. One of the things is challenging yourself to do a Rome show when everybody's done a Rome show. To find some aspect of food culture or chef culture that people can look at in a new way.
Anthony Bourdain
#11. Food culture is like listening to the Beatles - it's international, it's very positive, it's inventive and creative.
Alice Waters
#12. You can't have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.
Adam Gopnik
#13. There is a lot of food culture that goes on in the home and in the community in non-traditional ways. Food is a lot more than restaurants.
Eddie Huang
#14. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.
Michael Pollan
#15. It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#16. I know the community mostly for its art and culture ... and of course its food, I eat at their restaurants." "They make you feel like taking off your shoes ... it feels like home.
Erykah Badu
#17. Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.
Mark Kurlansky
#18. We can have all the food and water we need, but without the sustenance of
real story, real art - without the wisdom, insight, and "life instruction" it brings - we will stagnate as a culture and become a swamp where quality life can no longer be sustained. So share your gifts! Share your art!
Derek Rydall
#20. [The 'corporate takeover of people's lives'] also accounts for a lot of homogenization of culture. There are fast food restaurants everywhere. Every place tastes the same.
Ani DiFranco
#21. I think every culture is passionate about food; some are just passionate about food and the food is shitty.
Jonathan Gold
#22. It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.
Joel Salatin
#23. Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships.
Winona LaDuke
#24. Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
John Cage
#25. Food is very representative of a city's culture. In order to really get to know a place and the people, you've got to eat the food.
Emeril Lagasse
#26. It sounded so weird when people called shoyu "soy sauce." It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.
Cynthia Kadohata
#27. Spain is a fascinating mix of people, languages, culture and food, but if there is one thing all Spaniards share, it's a love of food and drink.
Jose Andres
#28. Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.
John Updike
#29. I grew up with coconuts as the main flavor in food in Jamaica. It's part of our culture.
Ziggy Marley
#31. Realize that the banality around us that passes as "hipness" or "mass culture" is as satisfying as "mass food"-only it comes in much more unappetizing portions.
Perry Brass
#32. I feel it is an obligation to help people understand the relation of food to agriculture and the relationship of food to culture.
Alice Waters
#33. I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.
Anthony Bourdain
#34. Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I've yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#35. The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person's culture.
Fannie Flagg
#36. [T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]
Ludwig Feuerbach
#37. News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
Rose Macaulay
#38. Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved me the most.
Roman Coppola
#39. Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#40. [On Los Angeles:] This city is a hundred years old but try and find some trace of its history. Every culture is swallowed up and spat out as a franchise. Taco Bell. Benihana of Tokyo. Numero Uno Pizza. Pup 'N' Taco. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fast food sushi. Teriyaki Bowl.
Anne Finger
#41. I fell in love with food because of my mother. So, I will definitely be sharing and expanding more recipes from my culture (as well as many other cultures), and will be sharing recipes that I have experienced from my whole culinary life.
Wolfgang Puck
#42. America is a melting pot of immigrants. So actually, if you took all of the immigrants outside of America, you'd be missing a lot of flavor, starting with the food, with the culture, with the dance, with everything.
Wyclef Jean
#43. It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.
Marcus Samuelsson
#44. Christian men ought not refrain from the sexual pollutions that surround us because they object to lovemaking; they refrain because they object to the wanton vandalism of it. Our culture is doing to sex what people who chew with their mouths open do to food.
Douglas Wilson
#45. We have to bring children into a new relationship to food that connects them to culture and agriculture.
Alice Waters
#46. Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.
Masaharu Morimoto
#47. There's certain things in life that I love. One is architecture. And music, culture, food, people. New Orleans has all of that.
Lenny Kravitz
#48. The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.
Steven Pinker
#49. My mum is Brazilian and very proud. I'd love to do a Brazilian film. I've been brought up in the Brazilian culture. My mum brought me up on my own, I cook Brazilian food, I've never spoken a word of English to my mother.
Kaya Scodelario
#50. Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable - the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#51. Once you become an elaborate and well-developed culture, anything from Rome or the Etruscans, for that matter, the food starts to become a representation of what the culture is. When the food can transcend being just fuel, that's when you start to see these different permutations.
Mario Batali
#52. I think the place fed me completely. Not only was I in Uganda, but I was around many people who had a personal relationship with Idi Amin. I was eating the food constantly. I was culturally hanging out with the people. You can't help but absorb the energy, and try to get inside the culture.
Forest Whitaker
#53. Iowa City is okay as Midwestern cities go, but there's no food, no culture, no ocean.
Elin Hilderbrand
#54. If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words
food and exercise.
George MacDonald
#55. My mother have taught me that food is a universal passport. Whatever the constraints of language, culture or geography, food crosses over all boundaries. To offer food is to extend the hand of friendship; to accept is to be accepted into the most closed of communities. I
Joanne Harris
#56. I swear, I didn't really go in thinking, 'I'll be the Simon Cowell' of 'Top Chef.' I was just used to being a judge on British food shows where people are much more outspoken and rather rude. That's the culture over here.
Toby Young
#57. Fermented foods contain natural probiotics, or healthy bacteria, that can take your health to the next level. Nearly every culture has a version of a fermented food: yogurt, kefir, miso, and fermented vegetables, including sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi.
Sara Gottfried
#58. The thing I absolutely love about food is it's a common thread that connects us no matter what culture we come from.
Poh Ling Yeow
#60. It's often suggested that as a culture, we're only interested in immediate gratification. Fast food. Self-checkout. Downloadable music, movies, books. Instant coffee, instant rebates, instant messaging. Instant weight loss! Shall I go on?
Stephanie Perkins
#61. In Buddhist culture, offering food to the monk symbolizes the action of goodness, and if you have no opportunity to support the practice of spirituality, then you are somehow left in the realm of darkness.
Nhat Hanh
#62. Our culture tries to convince us on just about every front that more is better. More is a sign of wealth, luxury, power. Gone are the days when meals were moments of connection and conversation; now it's all about consumption and calories.
Mary DeTurris Poust
#63. Culture is the intersection between people and dealing with the journey of life itself. How to deal with life, how a people deals with life is literally manifested in its culture, in its food, in its music, in its art, in the way you dance, the way you communicate.
Wendell Pierce
#64. I have slipped chile under your skin
secretly wrapped in each enchilada
hot and soothing
carefully cut into bitefuls for you as a
toddler
increasing in power and intensity as
you grew
until it could burn
forever
Carmen Tafolla
#65. If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.
Naomi Wolf
#66. Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.
Raj Patel
#67. As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.
Michael Moss
#68. Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[ ... ] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?
Daniel Quinn
#69. You can attract the best smart creatives with factors beyond money: the great things they can do, the people they'll work with, the responsibility and opportunities they'll be given, the inspiring company culture and values, and yes, maybe even free food and happy dogs sitting desk-side.
Eric Schmidt
#70. New York is fast paced, with enthusiastic fans and lots of media attention. Houston's slower paced, and there's more of a southern culture to the city. But both cities have unbelievable food.
Jeremy Lin
#71. Beer culture is a part of the world of food and drink. It's not just a commodity in cans and bottles, but has a value as an agricultural product with good ingredients.
Michael Jackson
#72. I think globalization actually maintains and fosters various elements of national and cultural identities. I don't think everything is being homogenized. If anything, your food, your culture, and your ethnicity might become part of the globalized world, and thus absorbed by other countries.
Nouriel Roubini
#73. To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#74. Our food is a sign of what we've lost in general. I think if we could start slowing down for food, and rebuilding the quality of our plates, we could start rebuilding what we've lost in our culture. As my boss says, culture starts in the kitchen, not in the opera house.
Rod Dreher
#75. Mitt Romney has won the 2012 presidential nomination by promising Republicans that he would end a so-called 'culture of dependency' on welfare - welfare defined as 'free stuff' and food stamps for poor folks, not tax breaks for Big Oil or tax shelters for Bain executives.
Christine Pelosi
#76. Our heavily meat-centered culture is at the very heart of our waste of the earth's productivity ...
Frances Moore Lappe
#77. In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing.
Alan Moore
#78. This culture of waste has made us insensitive even to the waste and disposal of food, which is even more despicable when all over the world, unfortunately, many individuals and families are suffering from hunger and malnutrition.
Pope Francis
#79. The more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#80. Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice.
Martin Jacques
#81. I have come to the conclusion that just as the Japanese live to work, Asians live to eat.
Anastacia Oaikhena
#82. In a lot of ways I think food is starting to take the place in culture that rock and roll took 30 years ago.
Jonathan Gold
#83. The crusade is never off my mind
the exercise I do, the food I eat, the thought I think
all this and how I can help make my profession better-respected. To me, this one thing
physical culture and nutrition
is the salvation of America.
Jack LaLanne
#84. Florentine cuisine is surely something worth discovering. I believe I learned a lot about Florentine culture and traditions from observing how they live their relationship with food.
Elaine Bertolotti
#85. There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#86. Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.
H.P. Lovecraft
#87. Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.
Joel Salatin
#88. But what I'm very interested in, whether it's writing, whether it's hosting a show, whether it's cooking food, I'm just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.
Eddie Huang
#89. My mother always cooked, every day, proper food. We didn't have fast food. It was probably pretty much meat and two veg, but as time went on and new things came into the culture, she embraced all of that. I grew up with mealtimes and sitting around the table with proper cooking and eating.
Lesley Manville
#90. This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.
Michael Lewis
#91. Don't wanna ever take your shoes off in coconut land. Never know when you're gonna have to run.
Dianne Harman
#92. The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that's what's happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.
Michelle Obama
#93. For the vast majority of world history, human life - both culture and biology - was shaped by scarcity. Food, clothing, shelter, tools, and pretty much everything else had to be farmed or fabricated, at a very high cost in time and energy.
Martha Beck
#94. A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Naomi Wolf
#95. I like a lot of food. I like Taiwanese food, of course. I like baguettes, especially the ones that my dad buys. Vancouver has a lot of variety, with pizza, hot dogs, Italian, Indian, seafood - a great combination of culture.
Godfrey Gao
#96. I like to say, 'Chop suey's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another,' because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means 'tsap sui,' which, if you translate back, means 'odds and ends.'
Jennifer Lee
#97. How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein
Michael Pollan
#98. Indian food has been huge in the UK forever and ever, but that's because it has a historical rooting. America, I think is really ripe for it. There's been so much interest in Indian culture.
Aarti Sequeira
#99. Hong Kong and Macau are both very dynamic cities. I am always inspired about the culture, people and food in these two cities. There is always so much to do and so much to explore!
David Beckham
#100. Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.
Michael Pollan
