Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.
For rave-worthy soups, skip the store-bought stock. You can extract a cleaner, stronger broth from a combination of water and several pantry ingredients. It's all about layering powerful flavor-enhancers that you probably already have on hand - bacon, tomato paste, herbs, peppercorns, a Parm rind, and, of course, kosher salt.
Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment.
When I cook at home, most of the people I cook for want to be in the kitchen while I'm cooking. I love nothing more than someone monitoring how much salt I put into something, how much pepper I add - but nothing that you can offer is going to sway how I decide to deliver information to you; you'll either receive it or you won't.
Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food.
I grew up listening to an album start to finish, and you don't skip songs. You don't listen to a Paul Simon record and skip a song: you listen to it the same way you would eat a meal... the way the person who prepared that meal for you means for you to experience it. That's how you should do it before you add salt and pepper to it.
I worked for Union Pacific. I started out as a conductor at an intermodal switching facility outside of Salt Lake City. We'd pull in trains from all over the country, break them apart, consolidate the freight, and build other trains. It was great until I screwed up and took a management position. Then it became no fun very quickly.
To be honest, I was the world's worst vegetarian. You see - I didn't really like vegetables very much. I'd spent most of my childhood terrified of them - horrid bland mushy things. It's only as an adult I realise that part of the problem is my mother's cooking - she hates using salt and has a tendency to overboil things. Thanks, Mum.
I love KIND bars. My favorites are coconut and almond and the dark chocolate and sea salt because staying fueled helps keep me from getting sick or injured. Bananas have also made a great comeback in my life. My kids eat them all the time on the go, which has inspired my go-to pre-run morning meal of peanut butter and banana on toast.
I read the 'Twilight' books before the movie and the whole craze happened. And then I loved it. I was in love with Edward before every other girl that says she's in love with him was. Because I read them a long time ago shooting a movie in Salt Lake City, and one of Stephenie Meyer's friends said, 'Make sure you read my friend's book.'
I work out like a maniac, three times more than anything I did in the past. I am off carbs, salt, sweets, and live on a fish diet. And I promise I am not going to indulge in food again. See, when I was 49 years old, I was fine, but the moment I touched 50, I felt that something within me had changed drastically. My metabolic rate dropped.
I'm happy to say that at 62, I think I've reached that point where stuff doesn't bother me as much, and my gratitude level has gone way up, especially having gone through the loss that I've had, and losing so many of the great artists that I was close to. They taught me how to see it with a grain of salt and a lot of humor and perspective.
I'm focused on the next generation, because I think it's very hard to break the habit of adults who've got salt and sugar addictions and just ways of being in this world. It's very hard even for the most enlightened people at famous universities that are very wealthy to spend the money that it takes to feed the students something delicious.
Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath the Earth's crust, in pure salt crystals, and inside the rocks of the dry valleys of Antarctica.
Gandhi, when he was on the salt march, had everyone singing the song of Rabindranath Tagore, which goes, 'Walk alone, walk alone...' Now there's some paradox in that, with a million people on the march! But he was cultivating the thought that each individual has dignity, and the dignity consists partly in the willingness to stand up to authority.
