Much Depends on Dinner Quotes

“As people grow up, they teach themselves to do what distinguishes adults from children: they will choke and cough until they have mastered the cigarette, or force themselves to down bitter beer until they are ready to join the group that actually likes it.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Rice,” the Italians say, “is born in water and dies in wine.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“expenditure on food does not increase in the same ratio as income, but becomes relatively lower. People learn to expect that food will be cheap; money is for spending on other things.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“When Jesus called his followers “the salt of the earth,” he was telling them that they were irreplaceable, and that their mission was to give people what makes life worth living.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Fast-food outlets are cultural institutions dedicated not only to dealing with mankind's compulsion to eat and drink regularly, but also to doing battle with his twin and fatal limitations of space and time.”
― Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal

“We have all learned at an early age that the cold of ice cream is not very dangerous, and it is strange now to almost nobody. The great change in taste and attitude in our culture is not the least of the revolutions which the understanding and control of cold have wrought in our lives.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“When coffee first arrived in London in the seventeenth century, it was shudderingly described as a drink “of a soote colour, dryed in a Furnace, and that they drinke as hote as can be endured.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“In Athol Fugard’s play, The Island, an African eats an orange whole; at the play’s opening night in London, the audience sat coolly through the nude scenes on stage, but there were gasps of horror at the sight of a man enjoying a whole unpeeled orange.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Thy wife,” promises Psalm 128, “shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house; thy children like olive plants round about thy table.” (The image here is perhaps that of a cut stump “table” surrounded by green scions.)”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Perhaps the most important realization of all, although it is an uncomfortable one, is that the social ills attendant upon mechanized farming are the fault of the whole of society, and not only of the growers. The growers, after all, are trying to provide us with the two things we now demand: food which costs an unprecedentedly small proportion of our income, and the availability of the full range of all the varieties of food at all seasons of the year.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Doctrine of Signatures. It held that the medicinal qualities in plants were made visible as “signatures of Natures owne impression,” and writers quite commonly express the wish that human beings bore similar imprints so that one could tell a person’s worth by some sign on his person.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“In buying “light” food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place, eat less and so measure up to the desired norm, and receive as an added bonus the suggestion that our behaviour is “enlightened.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“First you took beeffat chopped with sheep’s stomachs and cows’ udders, soaked them in milk, and suspended the mixture in water and potash, at blood heat.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“The survivors of a nuclear war will be able, if they can make their way to Hutchinson, Kansas, and get 200 metres (650 feet) down into the salt-shafts, to retrieve an assortment of objects which have been chosen partly with them in mind. There are seeds of hybrid plants, the files of various commercial enterprises, secret formulae for making brand-name products, food for the treasure-finders, and even folding cots, just in case they bring their babies with them. There is a film library which includes Gone with the Wind, Polly of the Circus, and lots of Buster Keaton.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“God has distributed His benefits in such a manner that there is no area on the earth so rich that it does not lack all sorts of goods,” wrote the French political theorist Jean Bodin in 1568. “It appears that God did this in order to induce all the subjects of His Republic to entertain friendly relations with one another.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Less is paid for food, in terms of percentage of income, in North America than anywhere else on earth since the history of universal “incomes” began.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Mexican Indians still say that scattered corn which has not been picked up will complain to God about it.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea

“Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking today as they were in the past. Sometimes meat is added: for the early Indians that meat would often have been puppy.”
― Margaret Visser, Since Eve Ate Apples Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Mea