Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.
So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They are more American than anything else.
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.
Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.
Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude.
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.
Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.
The sharing of food is like breaking bread, it's very symbolic.
Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
Food is culture. Food is an identity, a footprint of who you are.
A very, very religious man. Every time I eat a peanut, I feel immortal.
There are few relationships that give as unconditionally as food. I have opened and shut down restaurants and slept on the streets, but I have always bounced back because my belief in the relationship has been strong.
You have to have a lot of respect for hot dogs. It's completely different from sandwich. First of all, the hot dog is American. Sandwiches are not American. They're different. Second of all, a hot dog is like a pop idol. Hot dogs are cute. It's a pop image - everyone knows what a hot dog is.
I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.
Food for her is not food, it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruit she always offered us were picked from the destroyed brances of out family tree.
The food to me is just a hook, it's a button, it happens to be the social construct and the cultural totem that I'm most familiar with. So of course I built the show around food because it's where I'm familiar.
[On peanut M&Ms:] It is the eggness of them. A shell, chocolate placenta, proteiny peanut baby. Life shape, birth shape, cell shape, protoplasmic-ooze shape. A shape that calls straight through civilization to our reptilian brains.
Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.
Food is life. Food is also very sensual, and in Pushing Daisies, pie being reflective of life and a man who was disconnected from the living but could bring the dead back to life being a pie maker felt like I got the symbolism of food as life.
The Caprese salad perfectly represents the colors of the Italian flag. While I am not so sure that the colors of the flag stem from the cuisine, there is no denying that those colors do evoke a typical Italian plate.
Food is one of the great organizing tools.
Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.
A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.
Most of the traditional foods we eat on Jewish holidays start out with a seasonal reason as to why we eat them, and later a religious significance is tacked on.
It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. There's meaning hidden underneath each dish.
