Food Industry Quotes

“A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers---those things are built into the operating systems and machines. Jobs that have been "deskilled" can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.”
― Eric Schlosser

“There has ling been a happy symbiotic relationship between kitchen and bar. Simply put, the kitchen wants booze, and the bartender wants food.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore...Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn't, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns.”
― Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

“To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (...), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongi-form bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run over them? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“If she [Mrs. Homemaker] didn't know how much she needed convenience, it was up to inventors like Clausi to show her the way.”
― Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

“The parallel between these animals sick from surplus value and humans sick from industrial concentration is illuminating. (...) Against the industrial organization of death, animals have no other recourse, no other possible defiance, except suicide.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Big food companies make hot dogs with mechanically separated meat (msm) that, as described matter-of-factly by the [USDA], is "a paste-like and batter-like meat product produced by forcing bones with attached edible meat under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue.". I read that and wanted to unread it.”
― Jennifer Reese, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch - Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods

“...we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling...The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear.”
― Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

“A night spent scraping off the evidence of other people's fun is a wearisome thing.”
― Alex Marwood, The Wicked Girls

“The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Patients are being crushed by the devil’s bargain. Between the 6 trillion dollar food industry which wants to make food cheap and addictive and the 4 trillion dollar health care industry which profits off interventions on sick patients and stays silent about the reasons they are getting sick.”
― Casey Means, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

“It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage them with new products.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven’t the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Supermarkets in Denmark have experimented with adding a second bar code to packages of meat that when scanned at a kiosk in the store brings up on a monitor images of the farm where the meat was raised, as well as detailed information on the particular animal’s genetics, feed, medications, slaughter date, etc. Most of the meat in our supermarkets simply couldn’t withstand that degree of transparency; if the bar code on the typical package of pork chops summoned images of the CAFO it came from, and information on the pig’s diet and drug regimen, who could bring themselves to buy it? Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Greed and our food supply. It is greed that compels dairymen to skim every bit of goodness from milk to make other products and then to fill the swill left with chalk and sell it at profit. Greed tempts butchers to grind up the meat of sick cows with well ones and mix it into sausage along with offal and dung to extend the amount of 'meat' that they can sell. Greed motivates bakers to use flour devoid of the wheat germ and the nutritious outer husk and to add alum and chlorine to make bread look whiter and to cook faster. Americans are being poisoned, all in the name of profit, producing a weak-minded race of people who are given to lust and desire.”
― Lynn Cullen, Mrs. Poe

“Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“The final payment for America's cheap food of the last century is still outstanding.”
― Dan O'Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch

“As you will come to see, much is governed by the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. There are powerful, influential, and enormously wealthy industries that stand to lose a vast amount of money if Americans start shifting to a plant-based diet. Their financial health depends on controlling what the public knows about nutrition and health. Like any good business enterprise, these industries do everything in their power to protect their profits and their shareholders.
[...]
The entire system— government, science, medicine, industry, media, and academia— promotes profits over health, technology over food, and confusion over clarity. Most, but not all, of the confusion about nutrition is created in legal, fully disclosed ways and is disseminated by unsuspecting, well-intentioned people, whether they are researchers, politicians, or journalists. The most damaging aspect of the system is not sensational, nor is it likely to create much of a stir upon its discovery. It is a silent enemy that few people see and understand.”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health

“Laws in industrialized nations tend to protect profits over life. Just a glimpse of anymals in our food industries (please see the appendix) can help readers to understand why religious teachings focus on respect for and protection of anymals. A hen is fated, from the day she hatches, to a pubescent death on a dismemberment belt. Calves are purposefully kept anemic and perpetually restrained to create veal. Turkeys are genetically manipulated to be too large to walk or breed naturally. Female anymals are perpetually impregnated, and their young taken from them, until they are “spent” and trucked to slaughter. Routine treatment of anymals through industrialized agriculture is, quite frankly, a moral and religious outrage.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions

“Forget about nuclear war; the real weapons of mass destruction are fast food, highly processed carbs, and high-fructose corn syrup!”
― Brian Quebbemann, M.D.

“Your doctor, and the entire system they work within, directly and unequivocably benefits from your continued suffering, symptoms, and sickness. Your doctor also likely doesn’t understand the role they play in this medical billing industrial complex. Or the economic and political puppet strings controlling their educational curriculum, the research literature around nutrition, and their decision-making.”
― Casey Means, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

“The incentives of our medical and food systems pressure patients to not ask questions. These incentives also lead to the biggest lie in healthcare. That the reasons we are getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, and more infertile are complicated. The reasons are not complicated. They all tie to good energy habits.”
― Casey Means, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health

“Inflammatory foods can be high-calorie and nutritionally skewed, and are often the by-products of food engineering that preys on your need for quick fixes.”
― Thomas Lu, The Personal Sustainability Handbook: 60+ Practices to Sustainabilize Your Health, Finances, Relationships and Beyond

“Anyone who’s worked in this industry knows it’s blood, sweat, tears, high-functioning anxiety, and questionable decisions held together by resilience like no other.”
― C.R.., To Those Who Make the Tea: A Memoir of Burnout, Burgers & Behind the Scenes in F&B Life

“In this business, one missing lid can teach you more about operations than any leadership course ever could.”
― C.R.., To Those Who Make the Tea: A Memoir of Burnout, Burgers & Behind the Scenes in F&B Life