Margaret Visser

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community.

— Margaret Visser

Our perception that we have 'no time' is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.

— Margaret Visser

Food is "everyday"-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It…

— Margaret Visser

This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells…

— Margaret Visser

Food-what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much…

— Margaret Visser

food is never just something to eat.

— Margaret Visser

A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled,…

— Margaret Visser

Animals are murdered to produce meat; vegetables are torn up, peeled, and chopped; most of what we eat is treated with fire;…

— Margaret Visser

The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives.

— Margaret Visser

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. It has…

— Margaret Visser

Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system…

— Margaret Visser

“Fast-food outlets are cultural institutions dedicated not only to dealing with mankind's compulsion to eat and drink regularly, but also to doing…

— Margaret Visser

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. ... It…

— Margaret Visser

Salt is the policeman of taste: it keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing…

— Margaret Visser

Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions…

— Margaret Visser

It is the nature of human beings not to be able to leave nature alone.

— Margaret Visser

Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need…

— Margaret Visser

The ancient Greeks did not have to wrestle with the philosophical problem of the existence of evil. They did not claim their…

— Margaret Visser

One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and…

— Margaret Visser

Believing in fate has probably always arisen in part because of the delights and terrors of storytelling. We have to realize--to learn--that…

— Margaret Visser