Mark Schatzker Quotes & Sayings

They drive our behaviors and control our moods. If music is emotion expressed in the medium of sound, flavor is emotion expressed in the medium of food. — Mark Schatzker

Flavor-wise, chicken started moving in the wrong direction when the high-energy diet appeared, so much so that Julia Child sounded the alarm in 1961. — Mark Schatzker

Can these foods [low-fat, vitamin-enriched, etc] even be called "healthy"? Perhaps we should think about it this way: If you cut a batch of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine with chai, you could say with some degree of honesty that it is "healthier," "less addictive," and "now with chai!" But would you say it's "good for you"? — Mark Schatzker

The food problem is a flavor problem. For half a century, we've been making the stuff people should eat--fruits, vegetables, whole grains, unprocessed meats--incrementally less delicious. Meanwhile, we've been making the food people shouldn't eat--chips, fast food, soft drinks, crackers--taste ever more exciting. The result is exactly what you'd expect. — Mark Schatzker

It tasted good going down, but the megaload of carbs and fat induced negative post-ingestive feedback — Mark Schatzker

Once upon a time, we ate to sustain ourselves. Now food itself is toxic. — Mark Schatzker

Humans look just like livestock now. We achieve a state of buttery plumpness before we've even reached sexual maturity. We experience powerful cravings for food that is slowly making us sick. We are...programmed to eat the wrong food. We aren't born calorie zombies, but that's what we have become. — Mark Schatzker

The Dorito Effect, very simply, is what happens when food gets blander and flavor technology gets better. — Mark Schatzker

...the question of portion size. When I ate Doritos or a Big Mac, I dept on eating and eating, and later experienced McRegret. So why when I ate a fourteen-week-old barred rock [heirloom breed chicken] or a grapefruit did I find it tremendously delicious and yet tremendously satisfying? If these foods tasted better, shouldn't I have just kept on gorging?

Fred Provenza believes the difference comes down to what he calls "deep satiety." "Fundamentally," he told me, "eating too much is an inability to satiate." Wen food meets needs at "multiple levels," it provides a feeling of "completeness" and offers a satisfaction that's altogether different from being stuffed. — Mark Schatzker

The rise in obesity is the predictable result of the rise in manufactured deliciousness. Everything we add to food just makes us want it more. And no matter how hard we try, we can't make our outsized desires go away. If anything, we're lucky, inexplicably so, that only 8.3 percent of women and 4.4 percent of men have a BMI consistent with total food addiction. But remember the children...The percentage of slender Americans will gradually work its way down to zero. (82) — Mark Schatzker

Yes, part of the problem is junk food. There's more of it, and it's more alluring than ever. But nonjunk food is a bigger problem. It isn't as flavorful as it used to be, which has the inverse effect of making junk food yet more enticing. Even worse, we're turning real food into junk food.Thanks to its off-putting insipidness, we coat it in calories, drench it in dressing, and dust it in synthetic flavor. The more bland it becomes, the harder we try to make it seem real. — Mark Schatzker

Hedonism, as any puritan can tell you, never leads to virtue. If we could all set pleasure aside and eat what's good for us, our problems would all go away. (Good luck with that.) — Mark Schatzker

We eat for one reason: because we love the way food tastes. Flavor is the original craving. — Mark Schatzker

Flavor factories churn out chemical desire. We spray, squirt, and inject hundreds of millions of pounds of those chemicals on food every year, and then we find ourselves surprised and alarmed that people keep eating. We have become so talented at soaking our food in fakeness that the leading cause of preventable death - smoking - bears a troubling resemblance to the second leading cause of preventable death - obesity. — Mark Schatzker

Their [plant secondary compounds] healthful effects in humans, however, are not well understood, in part because things in nature like coriander and basil can't be patented so there isn't a lot of money being thrown at them, and in part because long-term studies that measure small effects of low doses are expensive and don't yield the kind of unambiguous, major effects you get with pharmaceuticals, but mainly because preventions are never as exciting as cures. — Mark Schatzker

Modern food may be the most compelling lie humans have ever told. — Mark Schatzker

Are humans nutritional idiots? Our palates aren't just out of tune with our bodily needs. Our palates are out to kill us. — Mark Schatzker