Michael Paterniti Quotes

I attended classes and taught classes, in Food Anthropology at Pace University, with an anthropology professor. You can trace history by the architecture and food of a place. Food is one of those things that transcends and stays in the culture.

The podcast by 'The Kitchen Sisters' celebrates the staggering variety of a society of immigrants via its food, from the Sheepherders' Ball in Boise, Idaho, through the favoured cuisine of Emily Dickinson to the unbelievable rituals of the great rural barbecue.

Food is a way to explore culture and ground the story in a specific time and place. I still remember the meals and snacks from my first novel, 'Shug': pork chops and applesauce and Coca-Cola and peanuts, which are very Southern. When a character has roots elsewhere, food is a way to connect with home and another culture.

At home I serve the kind of food I know the story behind.

I love cooking for the sake of understanding how people before me used to feed themselves, used to feed their families.

In time, foods such as hamburgers and ice cream became more than just meals. They became part of American history and culture, touchstones that are almost immediately nostalgic and sentimental no matter how old you are or what part of the country you are from.

Perhaps our Irish friends should not so completely turn their backs on their historical dishes, no matter how many jokes they might have to endure.

We know there is a deep reservoir of food wisdom out there, or else humans would not have survived to the extent we have. Much of this food wisdom is worth preserving and reviving and heeding.

I realized very early the power of food to evoke memory, to bring people together, to transport you to other places, and I wanted to be a part of that.

As artists, our primary function is not to be educators - but we are at a time in history, where for us, our history needs to give context for stories that we hope to tell down the road.

Food is culture. Food is an identity, a footprint of who you are.

Food is the best way to teach history and geography and most everything else.

There's never been anyone like Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and there never will be. She is such an important source of inspiration for me, reluctant recipe writer and follower that I am.

You can tell the history of people on a plate.

To know a community is to know its food.

The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person's culture.

Food is culture, and we need to listen to it.

Food is one of the great organizing tools.

Culture, when it comes to food, is of course a fancy word for your mom.

Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life.

Cookery is the art of preparing food for the nourishment of the body. Prehistoric man may have lived on uncooked foods, but there are no savage races today who do not practice cookery in some way, however crude. Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery.

It's really important in our society to tell stories, and I feel grateful and honoured that I get to do that in this day and age.

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

Feasting is also closely related to memory. We eat certain things in a particular way in order to remember who we are. Why else would you eat grits in Madison, New Jersey?