Paul Roberts > Quotes

“There are other, more subtle downsides to this new model of global produce. Because consumers have come to expect their produce to be as uniform and blemish free as packaged foods, retailers insist that fruits and vegetables meet exacting criteria for quality, visual attractiveness, size and weight.”
― Paul Roberts, The End of Food

“In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles.”
― Paul Roberts, The End of Food

“We fine-tune our moods with pharmaceuticals and classic rock. Craft our meals around our allergies and ideologies. Customize our bodies with cross training, with ink and metal, with surgery and wearable technologies. We can choose a vehicle to express our hipness or hostility. We can move to a neighborhood that matches our social values, find a news outlet that mirrors our politics, create a social network that “likes” everything we say or post. With each transaction and upgrade, each choice and click, life moves closer to us, and the world becomes our world.”
― Paul Roberts, The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification

“Food production may follow general economic principles of supply and demand; it may indeed create employment, earn trade revenues and generate profits, sometimes considerable profits; but the underlying product - the thing we eat - has never quite conformed to the rigors of the modern industrial model.”
― Paul Roberts, The End of Food

“As Adam Smith argued more than two centuries ago, when individuals freely pursue their own self-interests—presumably, even their most trivial desires—the aggregate effect is an economy that most efficiently and naturally delivers the most benefits to the greatest majority.”
― Paul Roberts, The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification