Taras Grescoe > Quotes

“A few reasonable policies won't do much good if the surrounding society is insane.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Devil's Picnic

“Walking back across the St-Esprit bridge, to the ghetto I'd instinctively gravitated toward, I mentally erected a more appropriate statue on the square. It would depict an unknown Sephardic Jew, kneeling over a stone tripod covered with crushed cacao beans destined for a cup of chocolate for one of the gentiles of Bayonne.
It would be a symbolic piece, executed in smooth, chocolate-hued marble, and dedicated to all the other forgotten heroes--coffee-drinking Sufi dervishes, peyote-eating Native Americans, Mexican hemp-smokers--who, throughout history, have faced the wrath of all the sultans, drug czars, and Vatican clerics who have resorted to any spurious pretext to squelch one of the most venerable and misunderstood of human drives: the desire to escape, however briefly, everyday consciousness.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Devil's Picnic

“The twentieth century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat. We were building more for cars’ mobility than children’s happiness. —Enrique Peñalosa, 2008”
― Taras Grescoe, Straphanger: Surviving the End of the Automobile Age

“America’s infinitely ramified rail network, whose veins and capillaries once reached into every small town in the nation, has shrunk to 100,000 miles, the same level as in 1881.”
― Taras Grescoe, Straphanger: Surviving the End of the Automobile Age

“* Engineers have had to invent a new category for the commuter trains of Mumbai, whose Western Railway Line is the world's single most crowded public transport corridor. When fourteen or more people are standing per square meter - above 275 percent capacity - the train has attained "Super Dense Crush Load." In Mumbai, of course, this means people are actually sitting on the roof and hanging out the open doors.”
― Taras Grescoe, Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile

“For Peñalosa, TransMilenio was a crucial victory. “If, in a democracy, all citizens are equal before the law, then a bus with one hundred passengers should have the right to one hundred times more road space than a car carrying only one person. When a fast-moving bus passes cars stuck in a total traffic jam, it is an unconscious and extremely powerful symbol that shows that democracy is really at work, and it gives a whole new legitimacy to the state and social organization.”
― Taras Grescoe, Straphanger: Surviving the End of the Automobile Age

“Gandhi said that we have enough resources for the need of us all, but not for the greed of us all,” he recited. “And this is Thomas Kocherry’s quotation: ‘The life of the planet, and the dependent health of humanity, cannot be sacrificed for the greed of a few.”
― Taras Grescoe, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

“Food safety experts have discovered that some people who believe they have shellfish allergies are actually exhibiting reactions, like itching and swelling, to antibiotic residues in farmed species.”
― Taras Grescoe, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood

“Raised in privilege, Robert Moses was always cushioned from real life; from the age of nine, he slept in a custom-made bed and was served dinner prepared by the family’s cook on fine china. As Parks Commissioner, he swindled Long Island farmers and homeowners out of their land to build his parkways—essentially cattle chutes that skirted the properties of the rich, allowing those well-off enough to own a car to get to beaches disfigured by vast parking lots. He cut the city off from its waterfront with expressways built to the river’s edge, and the parks he built were covered with concrete rather than grass, leaving the city grayer, not greener, than it had been before. The ambient racism of the time hardly excuses his shocking contempt for minorities: of the 255 new playgrounds he built in the 1930s, only one was in Harlem. (Physically separated from the city by wrought-iron monkeys.) In the decade after the Second World War, he caused 320,000 people to be evicted from their homes; his cheap, sterile projects became vertical ghettos that fomented civic decay for decades. If some of his more insane schemes had been realized—a highway through the sixth floor of the Empire State Building, the Lower Manhattan Expressway through today’s SoHo, the Battery Bridge whose approaches would have eliminated Castle Clinton and Battery Park—New York as we know it would be nearly uninhabitable. There is a name for what Robert Moses was engaged in: class warfare, waged not with armored vehicles and napalm, but with bulldozers and concrete.”
― Taras Grescoe

“If this book has one message, it's this: diversity is resiliency.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

“Everybody who eats cheap, factory-made meat is eating suffering.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

“To my father Paul Grescoe (1939-2023), who taught me that to tell any story well, you need curiosity, attentiveness, and compassion.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

“PREDIMED, a Spanish study of 7,500 adults at higher risk of heart disease and stroke, found that those who consumed four tablespoons or more of extra-virgin olive oil – that's a quarter cup a day – showed 30 percent fewer cardiovascular events compared to those who consumed a low-fat diet.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

“Viewed from the aisles of a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, plummeting nutritional diversity might seem like an overblown threat. We live in a time, after all, when you can find calzone in Tokyo, fajitas in Rome, and sushi in the Mall of America, and when high-end supermarkets stock organic beef, micro brews, heirloom tomatoes, kale, matcha smoothies, and once-exotic cereals like quinoa, amaranth, and spelt. But this apparent embarrassment of riches obscures a poverty of nutritional content and genetic diversity.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

“This book makes the case that the future of food lies in the past, including such lost, forgotten, or nearly vanished foods as emmer wheat. The fact that bread, the age-old staff of life, has lately come to stand for all the ills of civilization is a basic mistake and an indication of how much we need to learn – or relearn.

Don't blame the grain, in other words, blame what we've done with it.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

“The latest research shows that dietary diversity ¬– eating a minimum of thirty different kinds of plants a week ¬– is more predictive of good health and freedom from disease than whether or not you follow a vegetarian or vegan diet. Yet of the 10,000 plants that have nourished Homo sapiens over the millennia, only 150 are cultivated for food today, and just 14 animal species provide 90 percent of the calories we get from livestock.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

“This loss of diversity is taking a toll on human health. In Mexico, a vast variety of landraces of corn, each with its own distinct flavor and nutritional qualities, has been usurped by transgenic yellow corn, deficient in micronutrients, imported from north of the Rio Grande.”
― Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past