Food And Drink

"As the World Food Programme accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, we look at the growing global hunger crisis amid the pandemic, the climate crisis and war. In the United States, as many as 50 million people could experience food insecurity before the end of the year — including one in four children. “It’s important to remember that hunger does not always happen because of natural disasters,” says Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It is often the result of things that we do to each other deliberately.”"

"The World Food Programme (WFP) is the leading humanitarian organization saving lives and changing lives, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience. As the international community has committed to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition by 2030, one in nine people worldwide still do not have enough to eat. Food and food-related assistance lie at the heart of the struggle to break the cycle of hunger and poverty. For its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict, WFP was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020."

"I want our children to grow up enjoying the taste of British apples as well as Cornish sardines, Norfolk turkey, Melton Mowbray pork pies, Wensleydale cheese, Herefordshire pears and of course black pudding."

"Born sinner: The opposite of a winner, remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner?"

"I hate to say it, but, after the novelty wore off, I had this cliché moment of a Russian émigré abroad: I really missed black bread. I know it’s stupid, but I really missed it."

"No man's pie is freed From his ambitious finger."

"There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance."

"The future... seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done."

"If you have goals and the stick-with-it-ness to make things happen, people will feel threatened by you, especially if your goals don’t include them. They believe that if you take a piece of pie, then that leaves less pie for them. Seeing you follow your dreams leaves them realizing that they’re not following theirs. In truth, there is unlimited pie for everyone!"

"The best of all pies is a grouse-pie; the second a black-cock pie; the third a woodcock pie (with plenty of spices;) the fourth a chicken-pie (ditto.) As for a pigeon-pie, it is not worthy of a place upon any table, so long as there are chickens in the world. A rook-pie is a bad imitation of that bad article; and a beef-steak-pie is really abominable. A good pie is excellent when hot; but the test of a good pie is, "how does it eat cold?" — Apply this to the examples above cited, and you will find I am correct."

"Our Transatlantic cousins are very fond of apple-pie. It is consumed to a large extent all over the country. Not raised apple-pie; but flat, and with a paste that is invariably very coarse and indigestible. You have a triangular-shaped slice put on your plate, and (in some parts of America) if you do not want to be singular you will eat it with a bit of cheese, Yorkshire fashion. As an American lady once graphically put it: "Apple-pie without cheese Is like a kiss without a squeeze.""

"On the : Morgenbesser, ordering dessert, is told by the waitress that he can choose between apple pie and blueberry pie. He orders the apple pie. Shortly thereafter, the waitress comes back and says that cherry pie is also an option; Morgenbesser says "In that case I'll have the blueberry pie.""

"PIE, n. An advance agent of the reaper whose name is Indigestion."

"He that hath eaten a bear-pie, will always smell of the garden."

"In general, in-door prospects are the best. ... What is an old roofless cathedral compared to a well-built pie?"

"The food industry’s playbook is familiar from the strategies of tobacco and climate-change denial over the past four decades. Yet it is poorly understood, and ignored by some media and academic journals in the field. It relies [...] on repeated use of the same set of techniques. Cast doubt on unhelpful science; fund more favourable, skewed science; offer gifts and consultancies; sponsor professional bodies; and use front groups posing as independent institutes. Finally, promote personal responsibility and self regulation rather than government intervention; capture advisory committees; and challenge regulation in court."

"Bullets for the kar sevaks, biryani for the Kashmiri militants."

"Of the poverty of these people, however, I had no idea till I this day saw the bread they eat. It is the grain of a kind of holcus, and looks like clover-seed: the flour, bran, husk and all, is made into thick coarse cakes, like those for elephants, and these are not baked as the elephants’ bread is, but laid on the fire and scorched or toasted there, so that part is raw dough, part ashes. To such a people potatoes must, indeed, be an exceeding and obvious blessing."

"Beef is as much a forbidden food in the Punjab as pork is in Hindostan to the natives; and to kill a cow across the Sutlege would subject the perpetrator of the deed to almost certain death."

"Pāṇini, ArthŚā, BṛSam and Vṛkṣ(S) define the word [for wheat] as a type of grain distinct from barley and rice [...] Additionally, NāmaMā makes a curious remark: it is a mlecchabhojya, 'a food of barbarians‘."

"The savage, by his chace and the perpetual war in which he lives with the elements, is enabled to devour almost raw the flesh of the animals he has killed. In more civilised nations, the plowman from his labour is enabled to digest in its coarsest preparations the wheat he has sown. Either of these foods would destroy the common inhabitant of Indostan, as he exists at present: his food is rice. To provide this grain, we see a man of no muscular strength carrying a plough on his shoulder to the field, which the season or reservoirs of water have overflown. This slender instrument of his agriculture, yoked to a pair of diminutive and feeble oxen, is traced, with scarce the impression of a furrow, over the ground, which is afterwards sown. The remaining labour consists in supplying the field with water; which is generally effected to no greater a toil than undamming the canals, which derive from the great reservoir. If in some places this water is drawn from wells, in most parts of India it is supplied by rain; as the rice in those parts, when the rainy season is of two or three months duration, is always sown just before this season begins. When reaped, the women separate the grain from the husk in wooden mortars, or it is trampled by oxen. Instead of hedges, the field is inclosed with a slender bank of earth. A grain obtained with so little labour, has the property of being the most easily digestible of any preparation use for food, and is therefore the only proper one for such an effeminate race as I have described. There is wheat in India; it is produced only in the sharper regions, where rice will not so easily grow, and where the cultivator acquires a firmer fibre than the inhabitant of the plain. It was probably introduced with the Alcoran, as all the Mahomedans of northern extraction prefer it to rice, as much as an Indian rejects a nourishment which he cannot well digest even in its finest preparation."

"Water is the only drink of every Indian respectable enough to be admitted into their assemblies of public worship, as all inebriating liquors are forbore through a principle of religion; not that the soil is wanting in productions proper to compose the most intoxicating, nor themselves in the art of preparing them for the outcasts of their own nation, or others of persuasions different from their own, who chuse to get drunk. They have not equally been able to refrain from the use of spices and these the hottest, without which they never make a meal. Ginger is produced in their gardens as easily as radishes are in ours; and chilli, the highest of all vegetable productions used for food, insomuch that it will blister the skin, grows spontaneously: these, with turmeric, are the principal ingredients of their cookery, and by their plenty are always within the reach of the poorest. A total abstinence from animal food is not so generally observed amongst them as is imagined; even the Bramins will eat fish; but as they never prepare either fish or flesh without mixing them with much greater quantities of spices than Europeans suffer in their ragouts, animal food never makes more than the slightest portion of their meal, and the preference of vegetables, of which they have various kinds in plenty is decisively marked amongst them all. The cow is sacred every where: milk, from a supposed resemblance with the ‘amortam’ or nectar of their gods, is religiously esteemed the purest of foods, and receives the preference to vegetables in their nourishment. If the rice harvest should fail, which sometimes happens in some parts of India, there are many other resources to prevent the inhabitant from perishing: there are grains of a coarser kind and larger volume than rice, which require not the same continuation of heat, and at the same time the same supplies of water, to be brought to perfection: there are roots, such as the Indian potatoe, radish, and others of the turnip kind, which without manure acquire a larger size than the same species of vegetables in Europe, when assisted with all the arts of agriculture, although much inferior to those of Peru, of which Garcilaffa della Vega gives so astonishing a description: there are ground fruits of the pumpkin and melon kind, which come to maturity with the same facility, and of which a single one is sufficient to furnish a meal for three persons, who receive sufficient nourishment from this slender diet. The fruit-trees of other countries furnish delicacies to the inhabitant, and scarcely any thing more; in India there are many which furnish at once a delicacy and no contemptible nourishment: the palm and the coco trees give in their large nuts a gelatinous substance, on which men, when forced to the experience by necessity, have subsisted for fifty days: the jack-tree produces a rich, glewy, and nutritive fruit: the papa and the plantain-tree grow to perfection, and give their fruit within the year: the plantain, in some of its kinds, supplies the place of bread, and in all is of excellent nourishment. These are not all the presents which the luxuriant hand of nature gives as food to the inhabitant of India…The sun forbids the use of fuel in any part of the year, as necessary to procure warmth; and what is necessary to dress their victuals, is chiefly supplied by the dung of their cows."

"Ibn Battuta’s description of the preparation of samosa would make one’s mouth water even today: “Minced meat cooked with almond, walnut, pistachios, onion and spices placed inside a thin bread and fried in ghee.”"

"Should any European enter their houses, they imagine them to be the polluted: neither will they eat or drink anything that has been touched by Europeans, or even Moors, who they hate – and not without reason, for they are a lazy, haughty people, oppressing without mercy where they have any power."

"The food of those who can afford it is partly of meat, mutton of goats or sheep, which sells at about three pence per pound. Beef is not procurable, as the Sikh ruler punishes the death of a cow capitally. The chief food of the people is vegetable; turnips, cabbages, and radishes, the Sinhara, or water-nut, and rice. The turnips are purple, or reddish, and speedily become woolly: the radishes are mostly white and strong: the cabbages do not head, but the leaves are frequently stripped. Besides these, lettuces, spinach, and other common vegetables are in extensive use, boiled into a sort of soup, with a little salt, or even the leaves of the dandelion, dock, plantain, and mallow; and the catkins of the walnut are employed as food, seasoned with a little salt, mustard, and walnut oil... Another principle article of the food of the common people, the Sinhara, or water-nut, grows abundantly in the different lakes in the vicinity of the capital, and especially in the Wular lake, which yields an average return of ninety-six to a hundred and twenty thousand ass-loads a year. It is fished up from the bottom in small nets, and affords employment to the fishermen for several months. It constitutes the almost only food of at least thirty thousand persons for five months in the year. After being extracted from the shell the nuts are eaten, raw, boiled, roasted, fried, or dressed in various ways, after being reduced to flour. The most common preparation is boiling one ser of the flour with two quarts of water, so as to form a sort of gruel, which, though insipid, is nutritive. The Sinhara, in the shell, is sold in about a rupee per load... Another article of food derived form the lakes is the stem of the Nymphaea Lotus. In the autumn, after the plate of the leaf has begun to decay, this has acquired maturity, and, being boiled till tender, furnishes a wholesome and nutritious article, which supports, perhaps, five thousand persons in the city for nearly eight months."

"It ain't my birthday, but I've got my name on the cake."

"There are four types among those who sit before the sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer and the sieve. [...] The sieve rejects the coarse flour and retains the fine flour."

"While you still have light, grind the flour."

"Quando la gente non avea farina, Lo re diceva : Mangiate pollanie."

"Ah, English food! At first you think it’s crap and then you regret that it’s not."

"The only thing they ever did for agriculture was the mad cow disease. One cannot trust people who have such bad food. After Finland, it’s the country where food is the worst."

"If it’s cold, it’s soup; if it’s warm, it’s beer."

"The English have only one sauce, melted butter."

"There are in England sixty different religions and only one sauce."

"When... a mother of two living in Oakland, California, signed up for a study evaluating whether an organic diet could make a difference in the amount of pesticides found in her body, she didn’t know what researchers would find. But her family, and the three others across the country that participated, would discover that they all had detectable levels of the pesticides being tracked. They would also discover that after only six days on an organic diet, every single person would see significant drops in those pesticides, including several linked to increased risk of autism, cancer, Parkinson’s, infertility, and other significant impacts on health."

"When you choose organically-grown products, you’re guaranteed they were not grown with chlorpyrifos or the roughly 900 synthetic pesticides allowed in non-organic agriculture. Many of these pesticides are now understood to cause cancer, affect the body’s hormonal systems, disrupt fertility, cause developmental delay for children or Parkinson’s, depression, or Alzheimer’s as we age. This study shows that eating organic can dramatically decrease the pesticides you’re exposed to."

"Unfortunately, the vast majority of food produced in the U.S. is still grown using synthetic pesticides...with long-term costs to our health and the environment. Fortunately, organic agriculture offers a promising, healthier option."

"Organic agriculture offers... many health and environmental benefits... Keeps food free of harmful pesticide residues; Stops exposing farm workers and their communities to toxic chemicals; Builds healthy soil; Protects pollinators and promotes biodiversity;Saves antibiotics for humans;Reduces water contamination; Combats climate change and makes farms more resilient;Encourages creativity and innovation..."

"Buying organic food is among the actions people can take to curb the global decline in insects, according to leading scientists. Urging political action to slash pesticide use on conventional farms is another, say environmentalists... The vanishing of insects threatens a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”, the review concluded, because of their fundamental importance in the food chain, pollination and soil health."

"The keynote speaker['s] presentation... “Decades of Deceit: A Critical Eye on Pesticides, Science and Industry," discussed the agriculture company Monsanto’s practice of ghostwriting scientific research papers.. in order to convince consumers that the herbicide glyphosate, an ingredient in some of Monsanto’s products, was safe... the company’s scientists edited and drafted independent research papers. But other research, notably from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, indicated that glyphosate was a human carcinogen, and was the contributor to diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. The herbicide was also shown to decrease cognitive function and increase behavioral problems in children."

"The bulk of U.S. farming subsidies go to only 4 percent of farms — overwhelmingly large and corporate operations... Instead of supporting factory farms and mono-crops, we could provide incentives for crop rotations, reduced usage of pesticides and herbicides, pasture-raised meat, and organic practices. Expanding the market for food farmed sustainably and ethically grown would benefit all consumers."

"Immune system"

"The study tested the urine of four diverse American families in Oakland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Baltimore after eating their typical diet of conventional food for six days and then after a controlled diet of all organic food for six days."

"Sunbathing"

"A new peer-reviewed study shows that eating a completely organic diet—even for just one week—can dramatically reduce the presence of pesticide levels in people, a finding that was characterized as "groundbreaking" by critics of an industrial food system that relies heavily on synthetic toxins and chemicals to grow crops and raise livestock...the study... found that switching to an organic diet significantly reduced the levels of synthetic pesticides found in all participants."

"Social determinants of health"

"Vegetarianism"

"Where there is no grain, this is a sign of vengeance turned towards a city."

"Whether it is roasted or not, you should sprinkle the grain."

"Our production system takes abundant grain, which hungry people can't afford, and shrinks it into meat, which better-off people will pay for. But … our production system not only reduces abundance but actually mines the very resources on which our future rests."