modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.

A true gourmet - a judge - has the wisdom to know when to stop eating.

Judging foods without regard to price is a rich mans game, and yet poor people can be gourmets able to discern a good potato from a bad one.

The egg creams of Avenue A in New York and the root beer float....are among the high points of American gastronomic inventiveness.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

In nineteenth-century Russia, sauerkraut was valued more than caviar.

Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex.