Although I did not realise it at the time, it was by way of Norman cookery that I first learned to appreciate French food ... Twice a week at dawn Madame, whose purple face was crowned with a magnificent mass of white hair, went off to do the marketing at Les Halles, the central markets, where she bought all the provisions, including flowers for the flat. I don’t think any shopping at all was done locally, except for things like milk and bread. She would return at about ten o’clock, two bursting black shopping bags in each hand, puffing, panting, mopping her brow, and looking as if she was about to have a stroke. Indeed, poor Madame, after I had been in Paris about a year, her doctor told her that high blood pressure made it imperative for her to diet. Her diet consisted of cutting out meat once a week. With Friday a fish day anyway, this actually meant two days without meat. On Wednesdays, the day chosen, Madame would sit at table, the tears welling up in her eyes as she watched us helping ourselves to our roti de veau or boeuf a la cuillere. It was soon given up, that diet. Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking: Paris and Normandy
Outside, the vegetable stalls are piled high with Breton artichokes perfectly round and tightly closed leaves, long, clean, shining leeks; and fluffy green-white cauliflowers. At the next stall an old country woman is displaying carefully bunched salad herbs, chives, chervil, sorrel, radishes and lettuces. ibid.
Devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most comforting and comfortable room in the house. Elizabeth David, French Country Cooking
How much cheese is a handful? How much more or less is a cupful? What is the capacity of a glass, a tumbler, or soup ladle? What is the difference between a suspicion and a pinch? How much more is a good pinch? How much wine is a little, how may olives a few? When the book says a tin of chopped almonds or pomegranate juice what are your supposed to understand by that? Elizabeth David, Measurements and Temperatures, ‘Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen’
Of all the great dishes which French regional cookery has produced the cassoulet is perhaps the most typical of true country food, the genuine, abundant, earthy, richly flavoured and patiently simmered dish of the ideal farmhouse kitchen. Hidden beneath a layer of creamy, golden-crusted haricot beans in a deep, wide, earthen pot, the cassoulet contains garlicky pork sausages, smoked bacon, salt pork, a wing or leg of preserved goose, perhaps a piece of mutton, or a couple of pig’s feet, or half a duck, and some chunks of pork rind. The beans are tender, juicy moist but not mushy, aromatic smells of garlic and herbs escape from the pot as the cassoulet is brought smoking hot from the oven to the table ... A genuine cassoulet is not, however, a cheap dish. Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterranean Food: Cassoulet Toulousain
Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything. Arnold Wesker, Chips With Everything 1:2
Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody. Samuel Pepys, diary 9th November 1665
f the arable land of our planet was cultivated as efficiently as farms in Holland, the planet would feed 67 billion people, seventeen times as many people as are now alive. Edgar Owens, United States Agency for International Development, address to conference November 1974
Another United Nations organisation calculated that 0.5 per cent of world spending on weapons of destruction, often mass destruction, would be enough to provide the investment in agriculture in the stricken continent of Africa sufficient to produce enough food easily to feed the entire African population. 0.5 per cent! A tiny fragment of the money devoted to killing could save the lives of millions and millions of people! Yet the ‘free market’ keeps it firmly locked up in bombs and bullets. At the same time it has ruthlessly cut production in the fertile farmlands of the United States of America. It has even launched a campaign to cut off funds from the United Nations agencies which have the effrontery to reveal the full horror of free-market priorities.
Everywhere, the discrepancy gapes so wide that even the blindest believer in the free market cannot avoid it. The human race now has at its disposal more than enough technology, raw materials, knowledge and imagination to fulfil everyone’s basic needs without difficulty. As the man from the FAO said, there would be ‘no problem’ in doubling food production, no problem for that matter in providing the people of the world with food, clothing, shelter, heat and light, not to mention education, health, and transport. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch4
The UN has put out dozens of public documents where they are calling for an 80% world population reduction. In fact at the Beijing Woman’s conference, the world conference back in 1997, the head of the UN Food Program said, We will use food as a weapon against the people. Alex Jones
Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people. Henry Kissinger
Well over 500 million people in the world live in conditions of absolute poverty. A fifth of all children are affected by malnutrition, often leading to permanent brain damage. The problem is not one of over population. The earth could sustain a far higher population than already exists, but only if land were cultivated in order to produce food that is needed rather than what is profitable.
Susan George’s excellent book explodes a number of very prevalent myths about world hunger and does so in a highly readable way. The myths she attacks are: that world hunger is caused by food shortage, that more food and economic aid can be one half of the solution, and that population reduction should be the other half of the solution.
The central point is that world hunger is not due to the impossibility of producing more food, but due to the Governments and multinational companies that control food production and distribution. Western governments have largely succeeded in foisting their economic system on underdeveloped countries (UDCs). The multinational food and agribusinesses like Nestles, Unilever, etc. working through various UN and government agencies, have proved very adaptable at sniffing out fast bucks. Howard Miles & Sybil Cock, article International Socialism February 1972, ‘How the Other Half Dies’
Food is a weapon. It is now one of the principle tools in our negotiating kit. Earl Butz, Time magazine
To give food aid to countries just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason. Denny Ellerman, Henry Kissinger’s staff aide
The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
‘Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?’ A A Milne, When We Were Very Young, 1924
I am the main dish of the day. May I interest you in parts of my body? Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvested it. We cooked the food. It wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be eating it if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you Lord just the same for the food we’re about to eat, amen. Jimmy Stewart as Charlie Anderson, Shenandoah, 1965
Scarcity, it would seem, is responsible for a crisis greater than any the world has recorded in its collective memory. Nearly five hundred million persons, most of them children, are close to starvation. Tens of thousands will die this week. Before the crisis resolves itself, countless millions – perhaps as many as one billion persons – will perish.
Yet there is no scarcity. Food is plentiful. Whether it will be shared depends upon how successful we are in penetrating the myths of development strategies that have failed in the recent past – and how effectively we counter the masters of triage. Laurence Simon, article The Christian Century January 1975, ‘The Ethics of Triage, A Perspective on the World Food Conference’
In every major deal Mr Kissinger has done in recent years food has been a decisive factor ... For prolonging the war in Vietnam the generals in Saigon got American food, which they sold for arms ... There is a new more powerful weapon – food. And this one is lethal. John Pilger, Zap! The Weapon is Food for Dictators, ATV 1976
People starve to death for a number of reasons; the least understood reason is the denial of food for motives of politics and profit. ibid.
One of the weapons that brought down the democratically elected Allende government in Chile was food. On Dr Kissinger’s orders most American food aid to Chile was cut off, and hunger and disorder followed, leading to a military take-over which brought Chile back into the American fold. And of course once the generals and admirals were in power, Chile got its food back. ibid.
Up to 1974 the US government had paid American farmers $3 billion not to plant millions of acres of cereal crops. This kept the world price inflated. And as a result the food that was available was beyond the reach of those countries on the Zap List like Chile, and countries like Bangladesh that were considered strategically expendable and had no reserves of hard currency. ‘Hunger,’ said President Harry Truman, ‘is fostered not by scarcity but by greed.’ ibid.
Vegetables are a must on a diet. I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread and pumpkin pie. Jim Davis
Welcome to the Church of the Holy Cabbage. Lettuce Pray. Author unknown