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"If you're going to shift camp every few weeks the last thing you want is lots of big pots and a printing press or an iron forge. In addition, because all able bodied adults are involved in the task of gathering or hunting food, hunter-gatherers don't accumulate surpluses of storable food that can be used feed people who will devote all their time to figuring out how to smelt iron and devise bows and arrows and atomic bombs and write the B minor Mass. So, for those two reasons hunter-gatherers have rather simple technology, including no metal tools. Then finally, hunter-gather societies are relatively egalitarian, again because hunter-gatherers don't accumulate storable food surpluses there are not the storable food surpluses to feed people who will not go out and gather their own food but will instead devote themselves full time to being tax collectors and priests and professional soldiers and senators and other parasites upon society." Jared Diamond   "Transgenic crops are being developed with high yields, lifesaving vitamins, tolerance of drought and salinity, resistance to disease, pests, and spoilage, and reduced need for land, fertilizer, and plowing. Hundreds of studies, every major health and science organization, and more than a hundred Nobel laureates have testified to their safety (unsurprisingly, since there is no such thing as a genetically unmodified crop). Yet traditional environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called their 'customary indifference to starvation,' have prosecuted a fanatical crusade to keep transgenic crops from people—not just from whole-food gourmets in rich countries but from poor farmers in developing ones. Their opposition begins with a commitment to the sacred yet meaningless value of 'naturalness,' which leads them to decry 'genetic pollution' and 'playing with nature' and to promote 'real food' based on 'ecological agriculture.' From there they capitalize on primitive intuitions of essentialism and contamination among the scientifically illiterate public. Depressing studies have shown that about half of the populace believes that ordinary tomatoes don't have genes but genetically modified ones do, that a gene inserted into a food might migrate into the genomes of people who eat it, and that a spinach gene inserted into an orange would make it taste like spinach. Eighty percent favored a law that would mandate labels on all foods 'containing DNA.'" Steven Pinker   "It has never had anything to do with quality. What it really does have to do with is people who don't farm telling farmers how to farm. And I minded that. It was a lot of urban people getting together saying, 'Well you can't use this on your cows. You can't do this to your sheep. You have to do this to your soil. And then we will buy what you make.' And what it does make is a two tier food system, so you get food for the poor which is processed, high saturated fat, lots of sugar, lots of salt, and then you get food for the middle class which is expensive and has pictures of fields on it and has lots of writing. You notice how much writing comes with organics?" Adrian Anthony Gill   "A hundred and fifty years ago it took twenty-five men all day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain. With a modern combine harvester, a single person can do it in six minutes. In other words, it contributed to a 2,500-fold productivity increase. It used to take half an hour to milk ten litres. With modern milking machines it takes less than one minute. Expanded trade, better infrastructure, cheap electricity and fuel, food packaging and refrigeration have all made it possible to move food from surplus areas to places with shortfalls. In the USA, it took about 1,700 hours to purchase the annual food supply for a family in the late nineteenth century. Today, it takes no more than 260 hours." Johan Norberg   "When cats are hungry, they make a slight, not unpleasant noise every now and again; while their food is being prepared, they wait with some patience; when their food is given them, they show gratitude as far as this is possible to them with their limited capacity for self-expression. Now, baybays aren't at all like that, are they? No, they aren't. It is the single-minded intensity, even more than the brutish self-interest, of babies' crying that angers me most; it is as if they feared that by omitting to yell filthily for a second or two, they might be deprived of a drop of milk. It should be admitted that human reproduction has nothing to do with love at any point, it is an intolerable scourge, resulting from inadvertence or bad luck or mistaken ideas of what is natural being what is good." Kingsley Amis   "Australian cuisine, rightly described as 'Mediterrasian,' is replete with fusion foods. In this respect, Australia is outstandingly awash with creativity and, like immigrant societies elsewhere, lavish with ingredients. It illustrates perfectly that the introduction of fresh tastes into novel cuisines is possible when peoples and markets merge—more than possible, probable. In an integrated world, food taboos are challenged by the purveyors of the new experiences always sought by people with high disposable incomes. The intermingling of cuisines that globalization has now produced is turning one-time food avoidances into 'foodie' experiences. This reveals how shallow older conventions really were, how little they were based in untrammeled human preferences, and how readily they can be uprooted when choice is no longer confined to customary products." Eric Lionel Jones   "We say that the staple food of the people should be sold in the markets of the country as cheap as the competition of the world can make it, and that no private interests in England or elsewhere shall twist the law of the land so as to raise food prices artificially, and put unnatural profits in their pockets. That is the ground we are going to fight on. We say that every Englishman shall have the right to buy whatever he wants, wherever he chooses, at his own good pleasure, without restriction or discouragement from the state. That is our plan; we have followed it for sixty years, and whatever they say, we are not quite ruined yet." Winston Churchill   "Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world." Robert Sapolsky   "Adults with PhDs sought likes. Members of Parliament sought likes. Successful and seemingly self-secure humans around the globe asked their real friends to be their friend on Facebook, and then asked these friends to like them. On Facebook. Adults posted pictures of their food, and waited for their digital friends to click that they liked the photo of their food. When the picture of their breakfast garnered more likes than the picture of their lunch, they fell into despair. In a few short years the globe had adopted a new neediness that was not just about attention; it was about a sticker-book version of attention that infantilized a billion people. It was akin to what an adult would do at a child's birthday party, when asked to put on a tiny triangular birthday hat and sing the Happy Birthday song. The Like button had that level of dignity, but Facebook wasn't a temporary hat. It was a hat many of us wore all day, every day, for the past fifteen years." Dave Eggers   "Until the start of October, the state forced you to wear a face mask on entering a restaurant and heading to or from your table. But you were allowed to take your face-mask off (as on aeroplanes) when you were actually eating. Then, at the start of October, Newsom's office issued updated guidance, so that diners in California would henceforth be required to keep their mask on at all times other than when they were actually taking bites. The governor's office advised: 'Don't forget to keep your mask on in between bites.' So during a meal you would have your mask on throughout, whip it off to allow yourself a forkful of food, and then as soon as the food was in your mouth you would have to put the mask back on." Douglas Murray   "The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery—in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues—are animal: a consequence of that drive that teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal." Friedrich Nietzsche   "The Norwegian Knut Hamsun waged intermittent war in his novels against tinned food, false teeth and other modern nonsense. T.S. Eliot's typist in The Waste Land 'lays out food in tins.' John Betjeman deplores the appetite of the masses for 'Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans.' Tinned salmon is repeatedly a feature of lower-class cuisine in Graham Greene. Greene records that this had a real-life origin. His Nottingham landlady always gave him tinned salmon at high tea, which he would surreptitiously feed to his dog—though it made the dog sick." John Carey   "Milk allows metabolically greedy mammalian babies to be born small and underdeveloped and to survive their vulnerable infancy by receiving all of their nourishment from their mother while staying warm and expending almost no effort—not even chewing. It allows mammalian babies to thrive in nearly any ecological niche, since they need neither to compete with adults for food nor to find an alternative—and likely inferior—food source. This makes milk a likely reason that so many mammals survived the aftermath of the cataclysmic asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs. Milk also allows mammals to sustain unusual and beneficial growth patterns, like disproportionately rapid growth of the head and brain soon after birth. And finally, milk ultimately transformed the social life of the mammals who consume and produce it as well. Consuming milk is no mere luxury for mammalian babies but a necessity, so milk is the reason that mammalian babies remain dependent on and attached to their mothers for weeks or months or years—and the reason that their mothers remain attached to their offspring as well." Abigail Marsh   "In a world of more ample and more equally distributed food, obesity becomes more heritable, not less. This is because where many go hungry, fortune will largely determine who gets fat. Once everybody has enough food, the ones who get fat will be the ones with a genetic tendency to do so, and fatness will appear to run more in families—to be more heritable. The same with intelligence. Once everybody gets a similarly good education, the high achievers will increasingly be found among the children of high achievers, rather than the children of those with the best resources. It follows that a high correlation between the achievements of parents and their children, far from indicating that the parents are giving their children unfair environmental advantages, indicates instead that opportunity is being gradually levelled." Matt Ridley   "Farming is a sunup-to-sundown occupation, and though foragers hunt and gather just a few hours a day, they spend many more hours processing the food (for example, smashing rock-hard nuts), in addition to gathering firewood, carrying water, and laboring at other chores. The San of the Kalahari, once called 'the original affluent society,' turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone." Steven Pinker   "To say that Americans benefit from farm subsidies because they make food cheaper might make sense if not for the fact that Americans also have to pay for the subsidies." Matthew Yglesias   "If he is in English or drama, he may be able to write novels or plays emphasizing near-future worlds in which famines or plagues are changing the very nature of mankind and his societies. If he is in business school, he can 'hit the road' lecturing to business groups and industrial conferences on 'The Stork as an Enemy of Capitalism.' If he is in the physical sciences, he can write strong letters to his narrow-minded colleagues who are proposing idiotic panaceas to solve the food problem. Any scientist can be urged to write to the Scientific American and similar journals to ask the editors to stop accepting advertisements that imply that a technology for mining or farming the sea can save humanity. The high standards that these journals maintain in their articles should also apply to their advertising. Scientists who serve on government committees can be pressed to exploit their position to awaken our sleeping government. Any professor, lecturing anywhere, can insert into his lecture a 'commercial' on the problem. 'And so I come to the end of my discussion of the literary significance of Darwin's hangnail. In conclusion, I would like to remind you that our Society for the Study of Darwin's Hangnail can only exist in a world in which there is leisure time for intellectual pursuits, and a social system which permits such pursuits. Unless something is done now to bring the runaway human population under control, the SSDH will not long endure.'" Paul Ehrlich   "The critic Dave Hickey once remarked that Warhol had no idea of middle-class life, and that sounds exactly right. We associate Warhol with both the bottom and top of the New York food chain, seldom anywhere between. One ponderous feature of 'the Warhol Sixties' is the phenomenon of the Warhol superstar—Fran Lebowitz called it a private joke that got into the water supply. Some people came to believe that holding his attention for a time meant that his interest ran deeper than their entertainment value. It didn't. As Colacello makes risibly clear in Holy Terror, Warhol's interest in other people consisted chiefly in what they could do for him, not the other way around. ('What is interesting to me,' Paul Valéry wrote, 'is not always what is important to me.')" Gary Indiana   "The reality of having to fight for its existence almost from the moment of its birth prevented the Confederacy from retaining the distinctive features of the Old South. First, to create an effective army through conscription, whose soldiers could march wherever necessary under a unified command, it had to abridge the very same states' rights that had helped motivate secession in the first place. Second, it had to divert agricultural energies into growing more food and less cotton. Third, it had to industrialize as quickly as possible in light of the mechanized character of modern warfare and to intervene in the market to promote economic efficiency. Fourth, the exigencies of war led to the transformation of traditional social roles, relationships, and gender roles; as men went off to fight, women had to take on more roles than ever before. And fifth, before long the Confederacy, like the union, had to suspend habeas corpus and other citizens' civil rights." Patrick Allitt   "There is more power in rock music, videos, blue jeans, fast food, news networks and TV satellites than in the entire Red Army." Regis Debray