“The real conundrum is why we who live in a society which is constantly perfecting the art of mass-producing human bodies on the battlefield find humans good to kill but bad to eat.” – Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, 1991

“A college professor at Purdue University recalled recently that during the 1940′s he received a state grant ‘to figure out someway to use up all that food in a nonfood manner.’ The professor claimed not to be too successful at creating ‘nonfood.’ But then, he did not need to be. The perfect solution had been found elsewhere: in the American steer.”
- Frances Moore Lappé, 1975 revised introduction in Diet for a Small Planet

“Democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight, and tired blood.” – Marshall McLuhan citing an American officer post WWII in Understanding Media

“The same town that gave the world the golden arches also gave it a biker gang that stood for a totally antithetical set of values.” – Eric Schlosser on Anaheim, California, Fast Food Nation

“Is Ham Tasty? HELLZ YEAH!” – “Is Ham Tasty?“, science fair project, The Elementary School Kidz

If honey’s what you covet
You’ll find that they love it
Because they’ll guzzle up the thing you prize!

Beware, Beware, Beware, Beware, Beware!

- “Heffalumps and Woozles,” The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

“Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of the young animals. It’s about danger – risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first 207 Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your 208th may send you to bed with sweats, chills, and vomits.” – Anthony Bourdain, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” The New Yorker, 1999

“Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak (I didn’t want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience…. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses… that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more…. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” – Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 1964.

“Without the ability to smell, taste is a mere whisper. After the accident, my taste buds registered salty, sweet, bitter and sour. But there was nothing more. While my fractured pelvis and torn knee ligaments eventually healed, milk remained a viscous liquid, steak a slimy rubber, and ice cream was little more than freezing.” – Molly Birnbaum, “Finally, the Scent of the City” for The New York Times