Tag Archives: food quotes

“I take my shirt off and hang it over a chair; the sweat-soaked armpits will dry within five minutes, leaving a time of salt along the seams. Hastily I assemble a couple of sandwiches: lettuce, left-over bacon from breakfast, sliced ham, peanut butter, salami, longhorn cheese, cashews, raisins horseradish, anything else that will fit comfortably between two slices of bread – and take the dewy pitcher of juice and hasten outside and through the storm of sunlight over the baking sandstone of the 33,000 acre terrace to the shade and the relative coolness of the ramada.

“The thermometer nailed to a post reads 110 degrees F, but in the shade, with a breeze and almost no humidity, such a temperature is comfortable, even pleasant. I sit down at the table, pull off my boots and socks, dig my toes into the gritty, cleansing sand. Fear no more the heat of the sun. This is comfort. More, this is bliss, pure smug animal satisfaction. I relax beneath the sheltering canopy of juniper boughs and gaze out squinting and blinking at a pink world being sunburned to death.”

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire 1968

I’ve collected a lot of food quotes over the years.   I figured I’d start sharing them here.

This is from a novel I read on vacation:

“He knew a lot of people came to eat here, paid the high prices, because of what was implied by eating in the Paddle Café. Organic, local, farmers’ market. Nose-to-tail. Seasonal. All the hollow pro-words he used to give a fuck about. It was an underground movement when Boyd got into it. At one time he’d cared about it with the same fevered certainty that his minister father had for his faith. Past heresy, his father used to say, was the present orthodoxy: the food revolutionaries now found themselves unwilling high priests of a bland new consensus.”

Demise Mina, Blood Salt Water (An Alex Morrow Novel).