15 quotes
Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite.
The Botany of Desire (2001)
The most important thing about your diet is who cooks it, a human or a corporation.
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013)
You're better off eating the real thing in moderation than binging on 'lite' food products that pack less flavor but more chemical additives.
Food Rules: An Eater's Manual (2009)
The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever.
The family meal is the nursery of democracy.
Evolution doesn’t depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.
The Botany of Desire (2001)
Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.
The Botany of Desire (2001)
There are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, then there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.
The Botany of Desire (2001)
Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don’t think so.
Corn is an efficient way to get energy calories off the land and soybeans are an efficient way of getting protein off the land, so we've designed a food system that produces a lot of cheap corn and soybeans resulting in a lot of cheap fast food.
I was starting to appreciate that the conventional journalistic narrative that usually organizes a story like this—evil technology foisted by greedy corporation—leaves out an important element, which is us and our desire for control and uniformity.
The Botany of Desire (2001)
At a certain point, a point already long past, the farmer’s attempt at the perfect control of nature evolved into the control of the farmer by the corporations that promoted that dream in the first place. It is only because that dream is so elusive that the control of farmers by its merchants became so inescapable.
The Botany of Desire (2001)
We forget how much time it can take simply to avoid cooking: all that time spent driving to restaurants or waiting for our orders, none of which gets counted as 'food preparation'. And much of the half-hour saved by not cooking is spent watching screens.
Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring nature as a machine, yet nothing else in agriculture is so poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a vast field of identical plants will always be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds, and disease—to all the vicissitudes of nature. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and from which virtually every agricultural product is designed to deliver him.
The Botany of Desire (2001)
Home cooking is good for you, and I eat out less. But that's the least of it. What has surprised me is how stimulating it is. How satisfying. You learn a lot about plants and animals. You begin to recognise your place in the world.