food
If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.
Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 41.
Insult my sexual prowess, my intellect, but not my pancakes.
“He’s Sensitive About the Pancakes,” by Lizette Alvarez, The New York Times, March 25, 2010.
Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].
Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 55.
Avoid food products that make health claims.
Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 19.
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 18.
I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a “wonderful catastrophe.” It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring. One thing I am crazy about is the seafood—the littleneck clams. I like them very much, at that place in Grand Central Station.
“Dieter Rams, Designer of Stereos, Shaves and Shelves,” The New York Times, May 11, 2011.
I love how you can snap a pea’s stem and pull the string and how it leaves a perfect seam that opens easily under your thumbnail. And then you find those sweet, starchy peas in their own canoe of crisp, watery, and almost sugary pod.
Blood, Bones & Butter (New York: Random House, 2011), 14.
The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.
Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 19.
You know, it’s funny. By the time we develop real taste in food, and begin to learn how to prepare it, digestive disorders set in and weight piles up. When I think what I could have done in my youth, when I ate like a horse with no bad results at all, with the knowledge I’m getting now, I could cry.
February 27, 1954 letter to Julia Child in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 164.
My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.
“Questions for Ruth Reichl: Clearing the Table,” interview by Deborah Solomon, The New York Times, October 15, 2009.
Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.
Pale Fire: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 1989), 21 (foreword).
It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)
Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 45.