Jayson Lusk > Quotes

“The nutritional composition of beef provides much-needed protein, vitamins and iron.... Let us also not gloss over what is beef's most obvious benefit: Livestock take inedible and untasty grains and convert them into a protein-packed food most humans love to eat.”
― Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

“We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.”
― Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

“Mortality rates for cage-free hens can be twice as high as those for hens in cages. So even though the hens have more amenities and freedom than in the battery-cage system, they die at a much higher rate. Some of that is a result of more fighting (the phrase “pecking order” is not some abstraction but a reality in hen houses).”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“It is instructive to recognize that the gluten-free diet fad is a decidedly American (and to some extent Canadian and western European) phenomenon even though wheat is widely consumed everywhere in the world without reports of the wide-ranging maladies gluten supposedly causes (beyond celiac disease, which affects about 2 percent of the population).”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“The hypocrisy is astounding. So now, “in the City by the Bay, if you want to roller skate naked down Castro Street wearing a phallic-symbol hat and snorting an eight-ball off a transgender hooker’s chest while underage kids run behind you handing out free heroin needles, condoms and coupons … that’s your right as a free citizen of the United States. But if you want to put a Buzz Lightyear toy in the same box with a hamburger and fries and sell it, you’re outta line, mister!”3”
― Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

“Right now the robot arms don’t chop or cut, but Oleynik told me that giving the robotic hands a knife is not a big deal.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“There are different ways of creating double haploids. One method is by crossing wheat with corn. Wheat thinks it’s being pollinated by another wheat plant and sends over half its genes (the haploids), but when they can’t match up with the corn’s genes, you’re left with the single haploids that you wanted in the first place.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“Only about 5 percent of the U.S. population is vegetarian or vegan, and 84 percent of the people who are vegetarians and vegans eventually go back to eating meat.7”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“Not only are eggs nutritious, but it’s hard to imagine how we could make some foods without them.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, eds., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“One of the leaders in the field is the Swiss company Evolva, which is already selling vanillin and stevia (a zero-calorie sugar substitute) produced by genetically engineered yeast.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“4. M. Ogle, In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). 5.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“Elites mistakenly believe they know more than they actually do, and successes within their own specialties of knowledge lead them to overestimate their competence in other areas—such as policy”
― Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

“Peter Singer put it when discussing the use of biotechnology in food, “It is a mistake to place any moral value on what is natural. I mean many things are natural, including racism, sexism, war, and all sorts of diseases that we try to fight all the time. So the argument about [genetically engineered] food being unnatural and therefore wrong oversimplifies this debate.”14”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“modern liberalism “is an ideology of good intentions” wrapped up in a “cult of action.”16”
― Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

“Sometimes the scribes would leave their own feelings about their task in the margins of medieval documents with notes like “Oh, my hand,” “Thank God, it will soon be dark,” or “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”1”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“The comedian Jon Stewart, who was more than willing to jump on the Big-Food-is-bad bandwagon, remarked that pink slime should instead be called “ammonia-soaked centrifuge-separated by-product paste.”15 He was working off a popular narrative. He could have instead featured the harm to a family-owned business that was innovating to make food safer and more affordable by preventing food waste. But that’s not very funny.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“This not only illustrates the challenge of being a profitable commercial farmer in today’s world, but it helps us begin to appreciate one reason why food is so abundant and affordable in the United States: the myriad technological innovations and concomitant options available to today’s farmers.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“So important was manure to crop yields that the ancient Romans elevated excrement to deity status by paying homage to Stercutius, the god of manure.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“The nutrient-rich biotech crops could arguably do much more good in the world than the original pesticide-resistant crops, but many of the entrepreneurs and inventors who have developed the biofortified crops lack the legal teams, political power, and financial resources to clear the regulatory hurdles. Potrykus is hopeful that golden rice will be approved by regulators throughout Asia by 2019, two decades after its creation.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“There is no perfect government except in textbooks.”
― Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

“Compared to the late 1970s, farmers now use 19 percent less feed, 33 percent less land, and 12 percent less water to produce a given quantity of beef while generating 19 percent less manure and creating a carbon footprint that is 16 percent smaller.9 U.S.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“Virtually all the insulin now taken by diabetics is produced by genetically altered bacteria in a lab.6 Before that it had to be extracted from the pancreases of cows and pigs—a process that was both expensive and lacking in quality control. As”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“That a company that proactively invested millions in food safety measures found itself embroiled in controversy involving perceived (but unfounded) safety concerns is deeply ironic. What tarnished BPI’s reputation was no actual sickness or recall or outbreak; it was a series of TV shows and news stories. But,”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“You see, the genetics of the corn used in those fritters are nothing like what Mother Nature originally created.”
― Jayson Lusk, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate

“Given that Chipotle has removed from its menu most ingredients from genetically engineered plants, the reason Pinker gives for this optimism is a bit ironic: “Problems that look hopeless may not be; human ingenuity can chip away at them. We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work toward a better one.”12”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“Herbicide use has remained steady since 1980, and use of insecticides has fallen 77 percent since 1970, all while average pesticide toxicity has fallen dramatically.5 Agriculture is using half as much labor and 16 percent less land than in 1970 even though farmers are producing much more food.6”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“there is broad scientific consensus that the technology is at least as safe as all techniques we have been using. . . . There is not a single documented case of harm from the technology—I doubt that there is any technology ever with such an unprecedented safety track record.” Most”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“have striking memories of the first microbiology class I took. The instructor asked me and my classmates to place our hands on the agar gel in petri dishes that had been placed on our lab benches. A week later we returned to the lab to find our petri dishes contained gnarly black, yellow, white, and green furry monstrosities growing in the precise shape of our hands. That petri dish was easily the most vivid demonstration of the importance of hand washing I’ve ever seen. We”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World

“However, other than the miraculous modifications achieved in nature millennia ago, not a single acre of genetically modified wheat is grown for commercial purposes anywhere in the world.”
― Jayson Lusk, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology Are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World