Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year Of Food Life Quotes
"One person’s picture postcard is someone else’s normal."
"Even in the best of times desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting by mostly on vapor and their own life savings."
"For better or worse, we would soon be living on a farm."
"As it closes in on the million-souls mark, Tucson’s charms have made it one of this country’s fastest-growing cities."
"Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away."
"The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations."
"People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who didn’t really want to eat 700 more calories a day."
"A sturdy food tradition even calls to outsiders; plenty of red-blooded Americans will happily eat Italian, French, Thai, Chinese, you name it."
"Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region."
"This is what’s cruel about springtime: no matter how it treats you, you can’t stop loving it."
"The greatest rewards of living in an old farmhouse are the stories and the gardens."
"These flowers are gifts from a previous century, a tale, told in flowers, of one farm wife’s fondness for beauty and this place."
"Lawn decoration is high art in the South, make no mistake about it."
"I swoon over names like Moon and Stars watermelon, Cajun Jewel okra, Gold of Bacau pole bean."
"Heirloom vegetables are irresistible, not just for the poetry in their names but because these titles stand for real stories."
"Vegetables are gorgeous, especially spring greens, arriving brightly as they do after a long winter of visually humble grains and stored root crops."
"Humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history."
"The same trend holds in other countries, wherever the influence of industrial-scale agriculture holds sway."
"Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine."
"We’re losing [food crops] as fast as we’re losing rain forests."
"An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties."
"If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home."
"The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners."
"The variety comes automatically, as you eat loads of leafy greens in April, but find them petering out soon, with broccoli becoming the dark green vegetable of choice."
"The key to consuming enough produce and reaping maximum nutritional benefits is planning meals around whatever you have."
"The first step, shopping, is actually easier. When you peruse the farmers’ market for fresh produce, the options are clear."
"If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny."
"Waiting for a watermelon is harder. It’s tempting to reach for melons, red peppers, tomatoes, and other late-summer delights before the summer even arrives."
"But it’s actually possible to wait, celebrating each season when it comes, not fretting about its being absent at all other times because something else good is at hand."
"Industrial animal food production has one goal: to convert creatures into meat."
"CAFOs house them as tightly as possible where they never see grass or sunlight."
"Animals on pasture, by contrast, enrich the soil."
"The antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that grow in these conditions are a significant new threat to humans."
"What’s the going price these days for compassion, clean water, and the public health?"
"Heritage livestock favorites are as colorfully named as heirloom vegetables."
"Eggs and meat. We’ll only kill the mean ones."
"You don’t understand, Mama. I love my chickens as much as I love you."
"The cost-benefit ratios of neighborliness are as old as our species, and probably inescapable in the end."
"Our thrown-away food culture is the sole reason."
"Over thousands of years of history, a few isolated populations developed intimate relationships with their domestic animals and a genetic mutation gave them a peculiar new adaptation: they kept their lactose-digesting enzymes past childhood."
"This relatively recent mutation occurred about ten thousand years ago, soon after humans began to domesticate milk-producing animals."
"The gene for lifelong lactose digestion has an 86 percent frequency among northern Europeans."
"Among African Americans, adult milk-drinking tolerance is high, nearly 50 percent, owing to another interesting piece of human history."
"It’s no surprise that cultures the world over have found, through centuries of experimentation, countless ways to make [milk] more digestible."
"Milk is about 85 percent water; the rest is protein, minerals, butterfat, vitamins and trace elements, and sugars (lactose)."
"As a rule, the harder the cheese, the lower the lactose content."
"Our chevre and fromagina were so tasty, and digestible, we were inspired to try hard cheeses."
"Why do we do this? It’s hard to say. Some are refining exquisite products, while others of us are just shooting for edible, but we’re all dazzled by the moment of alchemy."
"In the forum of media and commerce, the notion of returning to the land is still reliably stereotyped as a hare-brained hippie enterprise."
"Although most people think of chickens and turkeys as grain-eaters, they consume a lot of grass and leaves when they’re allowed to forage."
"My kids find this hard to believe, but when I was a child I’d never heard of zucchini."
"We always kept one of these on the cool attic stairs all winter and sawed off a piece every so often for our winter orange vegetable intake."
"We picked our first baby yellow crooknecks at the beginning of the month, little beauties that looked like fancy restaurant fare when we sautéed them with the blossoms still attached."
"I don’t think there’s much doubt, on either side, as to which class is winning the culture wars."
"But meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture are the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu."
"Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional."
"The basic canning process is as simple as this: tomatoes are dropped into boiling water and peeled, or else cooked down with other ingredients into sauce."
"If farm animals have civil rights, what aspect of their bondage to humans shall they overcome? Most wouldn’t last two days without it."
"To envision a vegan version of civilization, start by erasing from all time the Three Little Pigs, the boy who cried wolf, Charlotte’s Web, the golden calf, Tess of the d’Urbervilles."
"In so many ways, disaster makes us take stock."
"If you warm up the globe, you eventually pay for it."
"Children have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up."
"I wasn’t thinking so much of my household budget or the national one but the big budget, the one that involves consuming approximately the same things we produce."
"It’s hard on the body when that happens frequently, and has been linked to Type II diabetes."
"The simple pastas still taste of sunshine and grain; the tomatoes dressed with fruity olive oil capture the sugars and heat of late summer."
"We the living take every step in tandem with death, naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven, whether we can see that or not."
"Food is one of our most intensely personal systems of preference, so obviously it’s a touchy subject for public debate."
"Nobody (including me) wants to be told what church to attend or how to dress, and people don’t like being told what to eat either."
"Praise the harvest. We made it through one more turn of the seasons."
"Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice."
"Our locavore project nudged us constantly toward new personal bests. But it always remained fascination, not fanaticism."
"We always explained, 'We’re converts in progress, not preachers. No stone tablets.'"
"A perfect turkey is no more important than any other part of this ritual: lighting the candles, passing the gravy, telling some of the same stories every time."
"Having more than enough, whether it came from the garden or the grocery, is the agenda of this holiday."
"Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn."
"Thanksgiving is Creation’s birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality."
"Those of us who give body and soul to projects that never seem to end—child rearing, housecleaning, gardening—know the value of the occasional closed door."
"In most cases it may only be a pageant, but holidays are symbolic anyway, providing the dotted lines on the social-contract treasure map we’ve drawn up for our families and nations."
"We are a household of mixed spiritual backgrounds, and some of the major holidays are not ours, including any that commands its faithful to buy stuff nobody needs."
"Motherhood is the largest work of most lives, and natural selection cannot favor a huge investment of energy in genes that are not one's own."
"We are made of different stuff, with new connections to our place. We have a new relationship with the weather."
"One can only hope they’ve lost any sense of the porcine dignities stolen from them."
"It’s the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture."
"We want to believe it’s possible to come back from our saddest mistakes, and have another chance."
"The cure involves reaching down into ourselves and pulling out a new kind of person."
"Our fretful minds had started us on a project of abstinence from industrial food, but we finished it with our hearts."
"We have babies. This was about the youngest creature we had ever seen, tottering on wobbly legs, falling over its feet."