Food Gatherer Quotes & Sayings

I base a deuteragonist on the best friend I never had. A lot of good ideas come from what I never had and cause my imagination to light up. — B.A. Gabrielle

In hunter-gatherer times, [the amount of energy human beings use each day] was about 2,500 calories, all of it food. That is the daily energy intake of a common dolphin. A modern human being uses 31,000 calories a day, most of it in the form of fossil fuel. That is the intake of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times that-as much as a sperm whale. We have become, in other words, different from the people we used to be.... We've ... gotten bigger. We appear to be the same species, with stomachs of the same size, but we aren't.1o — Daniel Bodansky

Civilization transformed man from a food gatherer to a gatherer of pieces of paper: diplomas, employment contracts, money, etc. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

- You don't need to be gay to like someone of the same sex as you.
- What do you need to be then?
- In love. — Pawtal

We smugly assume that we are the tallest humans to ever grace the earth. Quite the contrary. The Cro-Magnon people living thirty thousand years ago were about our size and 10 percent more muscular. Hunting, gathering, when food sources were abundant, was an exquisitely healthy lifestyle. — Arianne Cohen

On 'Stranger Than Fiction,' the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page. — Marc Forster

What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays? Whereas our fathers knew degrees of vengeance we now begin at the end and straightway talk of nothing but killing. What causes that, if not cowardice? — Michel De Montaigne

Cultures the world over consider their staple the incarnation of God: Buffalo for the Cheyenne, Corn for the Hopi, Cattle for the Massai, Wheat (bread) for the Christians. What I've seen about hunting and gathering peoples, they are the only ones who can fully grasp and accept the Holy Communion. (Funny how we think we have to cram our little wafers down their throats.) All life forms are the sacrificial victim - there's absolutely no exception; all are food. — Daniel Suelo

After all, we know that the foraging societies in which human beings evolved were small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared almost everything. There is a remarkable consistency to how immediate return foragers live - wherever they are.* The !Kung San of Botswana have a great deal in common with Aboriginal people living in outback Australia and tribes in remote pockets of the Amazon rainforest. Anthropologists have demonstrated time and again that immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nearly universal in their fierce egalitarianism. Sharing is not just encouraged; it's mandatory. Hoarding or hiding food, for example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behavior in these societies. — Christopher Ryan

A vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten brazenthroated pernicous piggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle crashmecriggle insane ass of a woman is practising howling below-stairs with a brute of a singingmaster so horribly, that my head is nearly off. — Edward Lear

Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term, but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

We struggle and push and plant seeds deep underground, and it doesn't look like much for a while. But then someone comes along and listens to your song or sees your painting or reads your poem, and they feel alive again, like the world is fresh and bursting, just like harvest. Plant something today that will feed someone many months or many years from now. Plant something today, because you've feasted on someone else's carefully planted seeds, seeds that bloomed into nourishment and kept you alive and wide-eyed. — Shauna Niequist

A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That's how much power you need just to lie down. And if you're a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you'll need about 250 watts. That's how much energy it takes to run about and find food. — Geoffrey West

Serving reconnects people to purpose. Serving someone else's dream empowers not just us, but them. — Bill Johnson

I spent my thirties living out of boxes and moving every six months to a year. It was my cloud period: I just wandered like a cloud for ten years, following the food supply. I was a hunter, gatherer, an academic migrant. — Sandra Cisneros

The Law of Love, call it attraction, affinity, cohesion if you like, governs the world. — Mahatma Gandhi

It is also more than likely that women invented that most fundamental of all material technologies, without which civilization could not have evolved: the domestication of plants and animals. In fact, even though this is hardly ever mentioned in the books and classes where we learn history of "ancient man", most scholars today agree that this is probably how it was. They note that in contemporary gatherer-hunter societies, women, not men, are typically in charge of processing food. It would thus have been more likely that it was women who first dropped seeds on the ground of their encampments, and also began to tame young animals by feeding and caring for them as they did for their own young. Anthropologists also point to the fact that in the primarily horticultural economies of "developing" tribes and nations, contrary to Western assumptions, the cultivation of the soil is to this day primarily in the hands of women. — Riane Eisler

It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped. — Peter Gluckman

Fraud in the insurance industry is calculated to be $100 billion to $300 billion a year, a cost that gets passed directly to consumers in the form of higher premiums. All told, combined public- and private-sector fraud costs every household in the United States probably around $5,000 a year - or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' worth of food would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent. Westerners — Sebastian Junger