Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

I think that food ties us to our community and our traditions, and it's the thing that makes us feel good and connected.

There is a level of intimacy in sharing the foods that have shaped me.

Food is culture. Food is an identity, a footprint of who you are.

For me, cooking is an expression of the land where you are and the culture of that place.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

We all have incredible relationships to what we eat, to what we don't eat, to what we've eaten since childhood and what we were fed, to what food means to us. And so I find it a really powerful tool in storytelling and in opening people's hearts and their minds.

I love seeing what people are eating. It's a great way of looking at what is similar and what is different about people. It's sociology and anthropology and history rolled into one.

More than anything, a lot of our family's history is tied to food. It's just one of those things.

It is weird, the relationship between people and food. It's always deeper than you think. It always stands for something else.

I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the great works of [hu]mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.

Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

Americans don't have deep gastronomic roots. They wanted to get away from the cultures of Europe or wherever they came from. We stirred up that melting pot pretty quickly.

The arts are a response to our individuality and our nature and help to shape our identity. The arts are not a frill and should not be treated as such.

I know when I was little, having my Thai mom, even I was weird about fish sauce and fish heads and clams. I kind of sided with my dad because he was a big American guy. So, we were very meat and potatoes, but I really wish I had grown up appreciating my mom's taste a bit more.

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

The arts are beyond price; they're beyond value. They're of incalculable worth in what it means to be a human being.

I realized very early the power of food to evoke memory, to bring people together, to transport you to other places, and I wanted to be a part of that.

The arts are so important not only to society but to ourselves as human beings. It keeps in touch with our own humanity. So access to the arts in any way, shape, or form is vital.

For me, food is all about nostalgia.

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.

I grew up in San Diego with immigrant parents, before the food blogs, before this kind of celebrity chef culture we know now.

My grandmother was the genesis of my connection and passion to food.