Browse 131 quotes about Food Anthropology.
“A discussion of the pie in movies would hardly be complete without mention of the classic comic device of custard-pie throwing, now legitimized and made semi-serious as the subversive political act of 'entarting'. 'Entarting' is delivering (by 'lovingly pushing', not throwing) a cream pie into the face of a deserving celebrity, preferably in full view of the world's media, in order to make a point.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“When the pies were taken out of the oven, melted fat was poured in through a hole in the lid to exclude air, thus preserving the contents. Once the pie was cut this airtight seal was broken, leaving the contents prone to rapid spoilage - which perhaps gave rise to the old superstition that it is unlucky to take just one slice from a pie.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“In modern society, where anyone in theory can make money, it is difficult to appreciate that once upon a time wealth was tied absolutely to social class, and therefore social class determined what you ate, even to the extent of determining the type of pastry making up your pie. Farming and household manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clearly instructed that the piecrust for the master's family be made from the finest wheat flour, whereas for the servants' piecrust the second milling of wheat or barley was to be used, or maslin (a mix of wheat and rye) or rye.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“Orengeado is candied orange peel, and it was enormously popular from Elizabethan times until well into the eighteenth century. A pie made from orengeado, perhaps layered with apples, was a very expensive delicacy.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“Dessert pies have moved well beyond fruit and custard, and the line is blurred between pies and cakes with some pies resembling cakes with a crust (pecan pie springs to mind). Some sweet pies are even made with vegetables.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“Pies such as these - repositories of a week's leftovers - were once so commonplace as to earn their own names. I advise you to have no illusions as to the content of Scrap pies, Saturday pies or Old Maid pies.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“The meat pie is the point at which many of the fine lines between frugality, harmless deception and sinister intent can meet.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“the mince(meat) pie may have lost its meat, and its other ingredients may now be freely available all year round, but it has not lost its association with Christmas. Seventeenth-century Puritans tried hard to ban it (calling it 'idolatrie in crust') but they did not succeed: the Christmas mince pie lives.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“In the fishing village of Mousehole in Cornwall it is traditional to eat 'stargazy pie' on the evening of 23 December. It is an intriguing pie, made with pilchards placed so that their heads poke through the crust at the centre of the pie, gazing at the stars, as it were. It is made in honour of a local mythical hero, Tom Bawcock ('bawcock' is an old word meaning 'a fine fellow'), whom legend says sent out on a bad night during a bad season, returning with sufficient fish to save the locals from starvation.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“The city of Gloucester, by ancient custom, presented a lamprey pie to the sovereign at Christmas time, as a token of loyalty. Lampreys are scaleless freshwater sucker-fish resembling eels, desirable in the past for their oily, gamey flesh. The tradition of gifting lamprey pies to the royal family continued until the end of Queen Victoria's reign, but was revived for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 when a 42-pound pie was cooked by the RAF catering crops.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“We humans are constantly on the move around the world, and when we migrate we take our eating habits with us. We do so to use our agricultural and culinary knowledge, and because eating familiar food maintains our link with home and eases our homesickness. We may have to substitute ingredients and adapt our cooking methods, but even after several generations, our heritage is still evident in the food we serve at home.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“Today's pasty is the working man's version, a perfect meal in the hand, easily transportable to the mines or the fields.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“It is a lonely occupation, being someone who wrestles to control their responses to food, given that modern life is steeped with things to eat, both real and imaginary.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Learning how to eat better - which is quite different from going on a diet - is within anyone’s grasp.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Eating is - or should be - a daily source of delight rather than something to fight against.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. How we eat - how we approach food - is what really matters.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“Cod meat has virtually no fat (.3 percent) and is more than 18 percent protein, which is unusually high even for fish. And when cod is dried, the more than 80 percent of its flesh that is water having evaporated, it becomes concentrated protein - almost 80 percent protein.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“Newfoundlanders debated over when "the cod was coming back". Few dared ask if. Or what happens to the ocean if they don't come back?”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“How did the Vikings survive in greenless Greenland and earthless Scotland? How did they have enough provisions to push on to Woodland and Vineland, where they dared not go inland to gather food, and yet they still had enough food to get back? What did these Norsemen eat on the five expeditions to America between 985 and 1011 that have been recorded in Icelandic sagas? There were able to travel to all these distant, barren shores because they had learned to preserve codfish by hanging it in the frosty winter air until it lost four-fifths of its weight and became a durable woodlike plank.”
Source: Summary & Study Guide Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
“The medieval church imposed fast days on which sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh were forbidden, but eating "cold" foods was permitted. because fish came from water, it was deemed cold, as were waterfowl and whale, but meat was considered hot food.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“Cod became almost a religious icon - a mythological crusader for Christian observance.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“The word cod is of unknown origin. For something that began as food for good Catholics on the days they were to abstain from sex, it is not clear why, in several languages, the words for salt cod have come to have sexual connotations. In the English-speaking West Indies, saltfish is the common name for salt cod. In slang, saltfish means "a woman's genitals", and while Caribbeans do love their salt cod, it is this other meaning that is responsible for the frequent appearance of the word saltfish in Caribbean songs such as the Mighty Sparrow's "Saltfish".”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“Massachusetts had elevated cod from commodity to fetish.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“Since the industrial revolution, Great Britain had been developing an ever-increasing market for groundfish - especially cod, haddock, and plaice - because fried fish, later fish-and-chips, became the favorite dish of the urban working class.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“How much above zero still produces zero is not known.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“How fragile is a world so connected and tied together that a change in food fashion in one place can lead to starvation halfway through the world?”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“Food is also the stuff of international politics, and the power of one country to control the daily bread of another has always been politically important.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“There is no culture where everyone cooks in the same way.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“A foodie is somebody who thinks about food not just as biological sustenance, but also a key part of their identity, and a kind of lifestyle.”
Source: Foodies
“Only from our position of power can we afford to ignore where things really come from, because we know that all things drain, like syrup through a pipeline, from the edges of the world into the centre. What we want will appear, as if by magic, on the shelves of our supermarkets because were have the money to pay for it. We don’t have to know - other people grow it and process it, and buy it and sell it until all we see is the brand, a language we understand without effort. All those strange substances are fuzed together for our convenience, our health, our pleasure.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“Foodways like any other aspect of culture, are never static. Even without the influence of other cultures, we would be eating and cooking differently from the generations that came before us.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“How old does a recipe have to be in order to be traditional? What should we think when an old industrial food like salted (corned) beef or pickled herring becomes a part of “traditional” ethnic cuisine?”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“Food is packed with meaning, as well as vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. It satisfies needs beyond those of the body and the pocketbook. Food is a medium to build families, religious communities, ethnic boundaries and a consciousness of history.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“The idea that foods and diets will “just mix” when they come into contact is clearly a vast oversimplification.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“But instead of being frozen in time, I want to show that “local” and “authentic” food are as much creations of modernity as survivors from before it. Authenticity is therefore a problem, not something we can ever depend on as some kind of naturally occurring category. Tradition is crafted, just as much as modernity is manufactured.”
Source: Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists
“Nature may have even less patience than politicians.”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks?”
Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
“Wheat from northern Italy is 'soft' - that is, it is already low in gluten so is ideal for pastry-making. Butter was the fat of choice for cooking in northern Italy (and a sign of wealth), compared with the oil of the south of the country, and there is no doubt that butter makes the finest pastry for sweet pies and tarts. (...) The situation in Britain was different. In Britain, butter was food for the poor. The wealthy in Britain preferred lard, maybe because the animal had to be killed to obtain the fat, thus its perceived value was higher. Lard makes superb huge 'raised' or 'standing' pies full of meat, which flourished to become one of the jewels in England's culinary crown.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“Contrary to the popular view, malnutrition is very seldom about an absolute lack of food.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“After all, as omnivores, we were not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“Our urge to avoid eating something that makes us feel sick is often at the root of disordered eating, as we swerve away from whole categories of foods that we imagine would make us feel uneasy.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do, like breathing. It is something we learn.”
Source: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
“A pie is only as good as its pastry, and one of the delights of a good pie is the contrast in texture between the crisp pastry and the filling - whatever it might be. In a perfect pie, each component is independently perfect - the mouthfeel of the pastry (buttery, flaky, crumbly) and the mouthfeel of the filling (rich, unctuous, tender, sticky, crunchy, etc.); and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“Pastry-making, as every amateur baker fears, is as much about technique as ingredients. The rationale behind the well-known advice to keep the hands, implements and kitchen cool while making pastry, to use minimal water and to handle it lightly is obvious, now that we understand the process. Cool handling lengthens the time that the fat in the dough stays solid; using minimum amount of water reduces the gluten content and also allows the dough to be crisper; minimal handling also reduces the gluten, so we do not knead pastry dough as we do bread.”
Source: Pie: A Global History
“There was no doubt in the minds of nineteenth-century cooks and cookbook writers that there was something about pie - a difficult to grasp something that made it universally esteemed in a way that cake or stew or soup was not.”
Source: Pie: A Global History