The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives.

Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community.

Salt is the policeman of taste: it keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker.

food is never just something to eat.

One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: 'light' food. In buying 'light' food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place.

It is the nature of human beings not to be able to leave nature alone.