Food Olive Oil Quotes & Sayings

The Roman Empire invented snacks, right after the aqueducts. Irrigation flowed, food plentiful, people munching between meals in the city-states. They ate these little, sun-dried meaty things, highly distasteful and falling out of favor until olive oil. I just made all that up. The key to life is making shit up. Everyone does it or society would unravel, like, Gee, your hair looks great! Or: God told me you're wrong — Tim Dorsey

Did you know the English wouldn't dream of putting olive oil on food? They use it for ear infections. Freddie told me."
"Yes, I've heard their cuisine hasn't evolved since the Middle Ages. — Glenn Haybittle

As we gather around the rough-hewn farm table made by my grandfather, I am reminded that my family has come together for generations in this same way. Summers were always our favorite times; we would eat outdoors under the shade of a tree - hand-rolled pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden, cheese from my Aunt Carmella, olive oil sent by our cousin in Santa Margherita, and wine from our own jugs. After having our fill of food and laughter, we'd pluck ripe figs right off the trees, peel and eat them until the sun disappeared into the blue. I can still taste those summer days, and will always do everything in my power to re-create them. — Adriana Trigiani

Butter has the same improbable myth of origin as cheese, that it accidentally got churned in the animal skins of central Asian nomads. Easily spoiled in sunlight, it was a northern food. The Celts and the Vikings, and their descendants, the Normans, are credited with popularizing butter in northern Europe. Southerners remained suspicious and for centuries maintained that the reason more cases of leprosy were found in the north was that northerners ate butter. Health-conscious southern clergy and noblemen, when they had to travel to northern Europe, would guard against the dreaded disease by bringing their own olive oil with them. — Mark Kurlansky

Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer ... and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

I cook a lot of Italian food. Bucatini Pomodoro is my best: it's a fat spaghetti with tomato, olive oil, and reminds me of getting married in Italy. — Bill Rancic

When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away from their food. — Isabella Rossellini

Once someone tries a real extra virgin
an adult or a child, anybody with taste buds
they'll never go back to the fake kind. It's distinctive, complex, the freshest thing you've ever eaten. It makes you realize how rotten the other stuff is, literally rotten. But there has to be a first time. Somehow we have to get those first drops of real extra virgin oil into their mouths, to break them free from the habituation to bad oil, and from the brainwashing of advertising. There has to be some good oil left in the world for people to taste. — Tom Mueller

Good olive oil, good butter, milk - they give food taste and depth and a richness that you cant reproduce with low-fat ingredients. — Nigella Lawson

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach. — Luigi Barzini

Integrate at least three of these items into your daily diet to be sure you are eating plenty of whole food. 1. Beans - all kinds: black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, black-eyed peas, lentils 2. Greens - spinach, kale, chards, beet tops, fennel tops 3. Sweet potatoes - don't confuse with yams. 4. Nuts - all kinds: almonds, peanuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts, cashews 5. Olive oil - green, extra-virgin is usually the best. Note that olive oil decomposes quickly, so buy no more than a month's supply at a time. 6. Oats - slow-cook or Irish steel-cut are best. 7. Barley - either in soups, as a hot cereal, or — Dan Buettner