16 Quotes by Mark Schatzker

Eat Dark Chocolate and Drink Wine And craft beer, too. These foods don’t prevent or cure disease all on their own, but they are the mark of palates in tune with good food. Think of them as gateway foods to a healthier palate.

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.

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.

In nature, flavor never appears without nutrition. No morsel of food should pass your lips before you have asked the following question: Where did the flavor come from? If it came from the plant or animal you’re eating, keep eating. If it was applied by a human with a PhD in chemistry, put it down.

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

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

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.