Top 84 Food History Quotes
#1. Food history is as important as a baroque church. Governments should recognize cultural heritage and protect traditional foods. A cheese is as worthy of preserving as a sixteenth-century building.
Carlo Petrini
#2. Much of the way food has been shaped and formed in prisons is due to the cultural thought about prisoners in general, and how they should be treated by society and by the state. Food in prison is a reflection of culture and cultural thinking about criminal justice and reform.
Erika Camplin
#3. As the most powerful people in history, we have climbed to the top of the world food chain, so to speak. Facing not one single enemy or predator who poses to us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left: ourselves.
Gavin De Becker
#4. I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.
Salma Hayek
#5. In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#6. Biological evidence indicates that man, evolving with his food plants, developed horticulture and agriculture in both hemispheres at a time which may well have reached far back into the Pleistocene.
Russell Lord
#7. According to his dad's journal, vampires had been through some of the worst epidemics in history. And apparently, during the days of the Black Plague, their biggest complaint had been rotten "food".
Heather Brewer
#8. We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.
Wenonah Hauter
#9. America is becoming more and more dependent upon imports from foreign manufacturers than we are exports from our country in all fields: in appliances, in clothing, even food. This year America may become for the first time in its history a net food importer.
Marcy Kaptur
#10. Foodiedom
Never in the history of foodiedom
has food at a newly discoveredrestaurant
tasted as good on the second visit.
Beryl Dov
#11. I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
John Kennedy Toole
#12. Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#13. My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.
James Boswell
#14. The avalanche of prefabbed, precooked, often portable food into every corner of American society represents the most dramatic nutritional shift in human history.
Melanie Warner
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. From food trucks to hot dog stands to county fair favorites, 'street food' has enjoyed a rich and storied history in American cuisine. However, street food has been around for thousands of years. In fact, street food is believed to have originated as far back as Ancient Rome.
Homaro Cantu
#19. The history of man is the record of a hungry creature in search of food. Wherever food was plentiful, thither man has travelled to make his home. - Page 22
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
#20. Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.
Judith Clancy
#21. President Obama is the most successful food stamp president in American history. I would like to be the most successful paycheck president in American history.
Newt Gingrich
#22. I can't think of a time in the history of man when food was in excess. We're dealing with the same old problems we've dealt with for 60,000 years.
Homaro Cantu
#23. I love Thanksgiving. In Canada, we don't really have a lot of history with Thanksgiving, and it's a holiday devoted to food, and that warms the cockles of my being.
Mackenzie Davis
#25. Their menu points out that: "It took Vikings many centuries to create the smorgasbord. It brings you the fish of the sea, the meats of the range... the fruits of the land and the wings of the sky in a gracious gesture of hospitality and welcomes you to the meal that follows....
William C. Speidel Jr.
#26. Marmite - like that other little black-jar job, Bovril - is so much a Mark 1 staple-of-Empire brand, so much part of the Edwardian world of enamel advertising signs, the history of grin-and-bear-it industrial food.
Peter York
#27. Great food, like all art, enhances and reflects a community's vitality, growth and solidarity. Yet history bears witness that great cuisines spring only from healthy local agriculture.
Rick Bayless
#28. In all history, art has been the food of the poor,
Cameron Jace
#29. Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key, who would work?
Daniel Quinn
#30. Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.
Howard Zinn
#31. You wanna start a fire I've got the coal, that's what history is to me. And it attracts the right person to do something with it to create the next fire. And fires are fuel and food and energy and life.
Nora Guthrie
#32. The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.
Adam Leith Gollner
#33. I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona.
Frances Mayes
#34. Mathilde let him eat two doughnuts, and his eyes filled with tears because they were the most amazing doughnuts in the history of glazed doughnuts, food of the gods. He was full of joy.
Lauren Groff
#35. Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.
John Shelton Reed
#36. The history of government regulation of food safety is one of government watchdogs chasing the horse after it's out of the barn.
David Aaron Kessler
#37. I love places that have an incredible history. I love the Italian way of life. I love the food. I love the people. I love the attitudes of Italians.
Elton John
#38. Fraud and deceit have been practiced since the beginning of history ... Brass has been called gold; glass has been sold as diamonds; and poison has been hawked as excellent food. The story of fraud throughout the ages forms an ugly chapter of human history.
John Andreas Widtsoe
#39. I went to Seattle as just another geek in the food chain, thinking, "Well, in my own puny little way, I'd rather be a part of history than just sit and watch it on TV." So, the fact that so many people are starting to ask the right questions and rack their brains for solutions does give me hope.
Jello Biafra
#40. Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism ... inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon) ... And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
Matt Haig
#41. That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found ...
Martine Bailey
#42. Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter.
Karl Polanyi
#43. The Iraqi Free Press, which did not exist 18 months ago because there was no such thing as the Iraqi Free Press, broke a story about the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, which could potentially turn out to be the largest scandal in history.
Chris Chocola
#44. A cherry pie is ... ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.
Nick Harkaway
#45. I promised her an interesting life and good food, and the rest is history.
Bob Ehrlich
#46. When you celebrate, there is sure to be cake."
Florence Ditlow, in "The Bakery Girls.
Florence Ditlow
#47. Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.
Anthony Bourdain
#48. We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.
Lester R. Brown
#49. Utrip makes it easy for travelers to experience the destination highlights that most interest them, be it food, art or history. Just like a culinary experience, every palate is different, and Utrip is all about personalizing travel for their users.
Tom Douglas
#50. [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
#51. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.
Heston Blumenthal
#52. History is the most patient of teachers. If Man doesn't get the lesson, it keeps repeating itself until he finally gets it.
Christian Adam Ribeiraud
#53. As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.
John Hodgman
#54. The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.
Dan Barber
#55. The kitchen's a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.
Alton Brown
#56. We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food-stamp president in the American history, in Barack Obama, and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.
Newt Gingrich
#58. A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. ... I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.
William Powell
#59. Here's the irony in what I do: When I go out to eat, I like classic French food. I like amazing Japanese food that has such a history that it goes back hundreds of years. And I also like really innovative food as well.
Grant Achatz
#60. 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
#61. If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.
Ruth Reichl
#62. At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#63. Kip Keino, Moses Tanui, Paul Tergat, they all come from my tribe. Some say it is the food we eat that makes us strong, the way we live. In the history of our people we wear no clothes and we are used to drinking the blood of animals.
Martin Lel
#64. I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#65. That's human nature - we want to completely rewrite history so it can be comfortable. Without getting too profound, I'm pretty sure that's where the invention of the afterlife comes from. "We don't really become worm food. We go to a magical place with bunnies and rainbows."
Bobcat Goldthwait
#67. I am inspired by music, travel, great architecture, and good, healthy food. I look for opportunities to learn about history, art, and cooking. When I learn, I grow.
Tim Matheson
#68. New Orleans has a unique history as a great melting pot of all kinds of cultures, and that manifests itself now through the food, the music, and the kinds of people who live there.
Scott Bakula
#69. If the food supply runs out, try trapping or hunting animals. For most people, this won't be easy. If you can't catch any animals, it's time to throw a Donner party.
Andrew Shaffer
#70. My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.
Michael Pollan
#71. Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.
Henry Hampton
#72. Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.
Tess Gerritsen
#73. If humanity will one day grasp the importance of natural food, this will be the beginning of a new era in the history of human life; it will simply be the PARADISE.
Arshavir Ter Hovannessian
#74. 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
#75. A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
Willa Cather
#76. Eating connects us to our histories as much as it connects our souls to our bodies, our bodies to the earth.
Evan D.G. Fraser
#77. And me having kids, with my family history? My mom: mentally ill, shot and killed her last husband. My father: six ex-wives, four heart attacks. Both of my parents think alcohol is a food group.
Christopher Titus
#78. History is the necessary food of good and noble sentiments. It ought to give us at once humility and confidence in the face of greatness.
Vincent Massey
#79. Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#80. There is no need to rush in life. Just with one word at a time, your sweet life history will be written boldly in capitals and highlighted for easy access. Be sure you are passing the test of patience!
Israelmore Ayivor
#81. Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents.
Michael Krondl
#82. People love information. Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don't know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.
Marco Arment
#83. One of the richest countries in the history of the world having communities where people have to go over half an hour to get to fresh produce and food is unacceptable.
Wendell Pierce
#84. You want to be a country that creates food stamps? In which case, frankly, Obama is an enormous success the most successful food stamp president in American history. Or do you want to be a country that creates jobs?
Newt Gingrich
