H. L. Mencken Quotes

It's hard to escape bullies that come in many shapes and forms. The processed food industry, corrupt religious organizations, and celebrity worship culture are just a few that we deal with in modern times.

That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology; it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.

There sure are a lot of these 'instant' products on the market. Instant coffee, instant tea, instant pudding, instant cereal... instant dislike.

The growing attention Americans are paying to what they put into their mouths has touched off a new scramble by the processed-food companies to address health concerns.

That is the one single word that the food industry hates: 'addiction.' They much prefer words like 'crave-ability' and 'allure.'

The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.

Let's keep the chemists over here and the food over here, that's my feeling. What do I know? But that is a big aspect of fast food is their ability to artificially taint the colors and the smells and stuff to stimulate appetite.

A Big Mac - the communion wafer of consumption.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

Who bothers to cook TV dinners? I suck them frozen.

The artificial is everywhere; everywhere food is adulterated, filled with ingredients that supposedly make it last longer, or look better, or pass as "enriched" or whatever else the industry's admen want us to believe.

We now eat at the end of a very long and opaque food chain. Food comes to us ready-made in packages that obscure as much information as they reveal.

You can make real food in 20, 30 minutes, but we've convinced ourselves that it is a rocket science. It's a shame. It's the media and the food industry: they've fed our panic around time.

With the Industrial Revolution, the production of food was delegated to big companies in order for women and men to be in the labour force, to come home, stick something in the oven, and eat. It became a big industry that does not have a love affair with food nor is really concerned about nurturing you or giving you the right nutrition.

If food is processed - like canned or frozen - you can reduce the risks of pathogens.

Food is the new Internet.

By modernizing the process of food preservation, Birdseye nationalized and then internationalized food distribution... facilitated urban living and helped to take people away from the farms... and greatly contributed to the development of industrial-scale agriculture.

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs.

Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.

Convenience is the American way.

The idiot who invented instant grits also thought of frozen fried chicken, and they ought to lock him up before he tries to freeze-dry collards.

I was on a bus once, it was in the middle of the night, and I had a box of crackers and a can of Easy Cheese. It was dark, and it was a surprise how much cheese I had applied on each cracker. That's why they should have a glow-in-the-dark version of Easy Cheese. It's not like the product has any integrity to begin with. If you buy a room-temperature cheese that you squeeze out of a can, you probably won't get mad because it glows in the dark too.

Fast food is both evil and genius. Because of it we can feed a large number of people fairly decently at an affordable price. However, all the artificial flavors and artificial ingredients in some of their products are unacceptable. And it's designed so you can eat fast so you get back to work more quickly. Not good.

One of the reasons we eat fast food is that we don't have to cook fast food. We are out-sourcing cooking to corporations, they tend to cook with far too much salt, fat, and sugar.