Margaret Visser Quotes & Sayings

Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need it. — Margaret Visser

Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture. — Margaret Visser

Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction. — Margaret Visser

Salt is the policeman of taste: it keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker. — Margaret Visser

Animals are murdered to produce meat; vegetables are torn up, peeled, and chopped; most of what we eat is treated with fire; and chewing is designed remorselessly to finish what killing and cooking began. People naturally prefer that none of this should happen to them. Behind every rule of table etiquette lurks the determination of each person present to be a diner, not a dish. — Margaret Visser

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has fascinated man for thousands of years not only as a substance he prized and was willing to labour to obtain, but also as a generator of poetic and of mythic meaning. The contradictions it embodies only intensify its power and its links with experience of the sacred. — Margaret Visser

The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives. — Margaret Visser

The ancient Greeks did not have to wrestle with the philosophical problem of the existence of evil. They did not claim their gods were good, just magnificent. — Margaret Visser

Believing in fate has probably always arisen in part because of the delights and terrors of storytelling. We have to realize
to learn
that in life we are not the readers but the authors of our own narratives. — Margaret Visser

Food is never just something to eat. — Margaret Visser

Food is "everyday"-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all; for most of human history we have spent a much longer portion of our lives worrying about food, and plotting, working, and fighting to obtain it, than we have in any other pursuit. As soon as we can count on a food supply (and so take food for granted), and not a moment sooner, we start to civilize ourselves. — Margaret Visser

As people grow up, they teach themselves to do what distinguishes adults from children: they will choke and cough until they have mastered the cigarette, or force themselves to down bitter beer until they are ready to join the group that actually likes it. — Margaret Visser

Food-what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cooking and eating it-is one of the means by which a society creates itself and acts out its aims and fantasies. — Margaret Visser

It is the nature of human beings not to be able to leave nature alone. — Margaret Visser

A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled, enticements, variety, patterning and plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form, but also the details matter intensely. — Margaret Visser

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community. — Margaret Visser

This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind - to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen. — Margaret Visser

One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: 'light' food. In buying 'light' food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place ... — Margaret Visser

Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question. — Margaret Visser