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

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

Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need it.

Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.

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.

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.

This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind - to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen.