Michael Moss Quotes

You can't simply slash the sugar in food; otherwise, people simply won't accept it.

The optimum amount of sugar in a product became known as the 'bliss point.' Food inventors and scientists spend a huge amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us over the moon and send products flying off the shelves.

It's not the sugar that makes the tea sweet, but the stirring.

There's no perfect relationship. All relationships are work. If you put in the work, you'll reap the rewards.

It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What you do? You integrate it with cream; you make it weak. If you pour too much cream in, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it’ll put you to sleep.

Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.

But real life doesn't travel in a perfect straight line; it doesn't necessarily have that 'all lived happily ever after' bit. You have to work on where you're going.

Because that’s the thing about the exact moment when you get somewhere that has required effort: There’s a freeze-frame instant of total fulfillment, when every expectation has been met and the world is perfect.

As more consumers demand less sugar, the food and beverage manufacturers will eventually come into line with what the consumers want.

Take pains. Be perfect.

Granola didn't sell very well when it was good for you. Now it has caramel, chocolate, marshmallow, saturated fat and sweeteners with a small amount of oats and grains. Sales picked up.

The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.

It's not an overnight thing. I can legitimately say I've been working my ass off for a long time and the fact that I'm getting this concert movie is perfect because it's coming at just the right time in my life.

Practice makes perfect.

The values my mother taught me were like, if you're going to do something, don't half-ass it. I remember her literally saying that to me. Like the first time I ever heard the term half-ass was coming from my mother's lips. I was probably 8 or 9. If you're going to do something, go ahead and throw 115 percent at it, and if you get 100 percent back, well, there you go - you're perfect.

Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive - it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.

You're always striving to play that perfect match.

The ego is not a thing but a subtle effort, and you cannot use effort to get rid of effort - you end up with two efforts instead of one. The ego itself is a perfect manifestation of the Divine, and it is best handled by resting in Freedom, not by trying to get rid of it, which simply increases the effort of the ego itself

You ought to make every effort to free yourselves even from venial sin, and to do what is most perfect.

What I think I've learned is that you're never going to get it all right, and you can't obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something like that, as long as you tried as best you could. If you've done the kind of research that you're sure is pretty good, then you just have to have confidence in it, so that nothing is perfect in life. I think that is what the criticism has helped me to understand.

No coffee can be good in the mouth that does not first send a sweet offering of odor to the nostrils.

I never fancied broiling fowls; - though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.