Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Stephen Markley

Quote by Stephen Markley

“For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy.”

Quote by Stephen Markley

Book:Ohio
Create image

Work

Ohio

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Stephen Markley

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Stephen Markley. more

You May Also Like

“Nautical blue? Nah.” Her best friend, Chantal, used her fingertip to reveal the next set of colors. “Back in Chicago, with Lake Michigan nearby, maybe. But out here?” Her tone indicated just what she thought of the rural Illinois town. She tapped another hue on the swatch. “What you want here is cornflower blue.” Grinning, Simone shook her head. She’d missed joking around with Chantal. And nothing could dim her pride in the town’s agriculture. Their corn fed the nation. Lake Michigan was picturesque but cold and forbidding half the time.”

CornThrowing ShadeColor Blue
Book:Stirring Up Love
Create image

“He handed over a Brew-ha Cafe bag filled with corn and cheese muffins and a ginataang mais cupcake that I was testing out, plus a lavender chai latte. She went straight for the cupcake. "Ooh, this is new. What is it?" "The cupcake has a sweet corn cake base and is topped with coconut cream cheese frosting, a coconut jam drizzle, and toasted puffed rice. A new recipe I'm toying with for this weekend's Corn Festival booth menu." Cupcakes were a little fussier than the desserts I usually prepared (I loved a gorgeously decorated pastry, but as the cafe's only baker, I had to focus on speed and taste, not appearance), but these were simple enough and impressive-looking enough that I was willing to make the effort for a special event.”

CornPastriesFilipino CuisineRice PuddingCupcake
Book:Guilt and Ginataan
Create image

“Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.”

CornAmerican CultureObesityFast FoodBig BusinessAmericansAgribusinessObesity EpidemicYou Are What You EatHfcsGeorge McgovernNixon AdministrationCorn Corn CornIt S All About The CornSolyent Green Is Corn
Book:The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Create image