3,214 Quotes About Food

Food is central to travelling and is a vivid entryway into another culture, but we do not have to literally leave home to “travel”. Movies, books, postcards, memories all take us, emotionally if not physically, to other places.

I define culinary tourism as the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an other - participation including the consumption, preparation, and presentation of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style considered to belong to a culinary system not one’s own.

A foodie is somebody who thinks about food not just as biological sustenance, but also a key part of their identity, and a kind of lifestyle.

A culinary cosmopolitan perspective resides in a context of tremendous inequality, but it may simultaneously facilitate meaningful cultural exchange, and attempt to link food choices to global risks like climate change.

Food is packed with meaning, as well as vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. It satisfies needs beyond those of the body and the pocketbook. Food is a medium to build families, religious communities, ethnic boundaries and a consciousness of history.

The idea that foods and diets will “just mix” when they come into contact is clearly a vast oversimplification.

People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.

There is no culture where everyone cooks in the same way.

But instead of being frozen in time, I want to show that “local” and “authentic” food are as much creations of modernity as survivors from before it. Authenticity is therefore a problem, not something we can ever depend on as some kind of naturally occurring category. Tradition is crafted, just as much as modernity is manufactured.