Grocery Quotes

“He carried the deep, intuitive understanding of the power of food to connect people, knew that food was not simply a device for entertaining or filling our bodies and pleasing our senses but rather that it served as a direct channel to the greater pleasures of being alive, and that it could be so only when that food was shared with friends and lovers and family.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“There are people who can afford to eat healthfully and there are people who cannot. I’d say that represents a fundamental brokenness of our system and our food supply. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“It seems to me that all these factors—from the industrialization of our food to the belief that cooking for our family is a chore rather than a fundamental luxury with unrecognized benefits for the people we love—are directly responsible for our food-related diseases and illnesses, and what will ultimately drive our need to turn our food confusion into knowledge and our anxiety into assuredness.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“The social food researcher Harry Balzer noted without prompting that Americans are not cooking more, they’re simply eating more meals at home.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“share of stomach.” “It’s a good buzzword,” Jeff said. “You can only eat so much. America is testing that a bit. But you can only eat so much food. And people want it differently than they did thirty years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago.” Indeed they do—I don’t think I’d ever heard of kale ten years ago, or wanted a quinoa salad. “They’re not going to eat more food,” he continued. “What’s going to change is how they eat it, and how they get it. And that was the beginning of prepared foods. And everybody went into it.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“Right now prepared foods account for 4 to 6 percent of our sales,” Carin told me. “In Chicago, that number is 8 percent. And I expect it will see double-digit growth, which is unheard of in any other department.” “What accounts for the growth?” I asked. “The driving force is women in the workforce and how much time people have,” she said. This seems intuitive, but her second reason for the growth was, to me, ominous. “Also, nobody knows how to cook anymore. It’s mind-boggling. Some women don’t even know how to hold a knife.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“And we’re going to be here for fifty years, so whatever is not right, we’ll get right.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“Regardless of the recent hunger for handcrafted foods, they remain a niche market within the grocery store. America simply didn’t have many centuries during which a unique food heritage created by small pre-industrial farms might take hold. Add to that the evolving technology to process food on a commercial scale, and the large buildings we created to store and distribute these goods—the American supermarket—and you end up with a culinary tradition that consists of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, Swanson’s TV dinners, Birds Eye frozen peas, and Kraft Singles.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“While Americans were increasingly interested in food—watching cooking shows on television, posting photographs of their meals to Instagram, turning restaurant chefs into media stars—we were also cooking less and less, a fact confirmed by food researcher Harry Balzer.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“As a culture,” Pollan writes, “we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America

“More troubling is that when faced with an array of complex options,” the article says, “consumers tend to throw reason out the window and pick a product based on what’s easiest to evaluate, not what’s most important, says Sheena Iyengar, director of the Global Leadership Matrix Program at the Columbia (University) Business School. ‘We stick to the familiar or go by price because we don’t want to deal with so many choices and scrutinize label claims or nutrition information,’ she says.”
― Michael Ruhlman, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America