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I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food
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Erma Bombeck
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There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.”
~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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True friends don't come with conditions.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Without struggle, success has no value.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.”
~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive
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Aaron Lauritsen
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Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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At some point, you just gotta forgive the past, your happiness hinges on it.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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All worries are less with wine.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Explore, Experience, Then Push Beyond.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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If you didn't earn something, it's not worth flaunting.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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It’s the ‘everyday’ experiences we encounter along the journey to who we wanna be that will define who we are when we get there.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Hunger gives flavour to the food.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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Why would these English explorers search for these spices, yet never use them in their food? --7/14/09 interview with Peter Mancall, author of Fatal Journey
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Jon Stewart
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Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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We love our partners for who they are, not for who they are not.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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The volume of your impacts is measured by the direction of your movements, the passion with which you inspire and the attitudes by which you make an influence!
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Israelmore Ayivor
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He who has the audacity to stop you from dreaming is he who had given you the imaginations to think, but not those who watch you as you explore the dreams!
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Israelmore Ayivor
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The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment. But the present now is different from the present then.
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Geneen Roth (When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy)
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Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a "decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.
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Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
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Travel is costly yes, but it pays dividends too.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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The Ache That Would Not Leave
Behind the hum and routine of daily living, there lay a persistent and wild longing for something she could not easily put into words. It felt like impulsive adventures and watching the sun rise over unfamiliar mountains, or coffee in a street café, set to the background music of a foreign language. It was the smell of the ocean, with dizzying seagulls whirling in a cobalt sky; exotic foods and strange faces, in a city where no one knew her name. She wanted secrets whispered at midnight, and road trips without a map, but most of all, she ached for someone who desired to explore the mysteries that lay sleeping within her. The truly heartbreaking part was that she could feel the remaining days of her life falling away, like leaves from an autumn tree, but still this mysterious person who held the key to unlock her secrets did not arrive; they were missing, and she knew not where to find them.
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John Mark Green
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The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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Growing up spoiled a lot of things. It spoiled the nice game they had when there was nothing to eat in the house. When money gave out and food ran low, Katie and the children pretended they were explorers discovering the North Pole and had been trapped by a blizzard in a cave with just a little food. They had to make it last till help came. Mama divided up what food there was in the cupboard and called it rations and when the children were still hungry after a meal, she'd say, 'Courage, my men, help will come soon.' When some money came in and Mama bought a lot of groceries, she bought a little cake as celebration, and she'd stick a penny flag in it and say, 'We made it, men. We got to the North Pole.'
One day after one of the 'rescues' Francie asked Mama:
'When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it's for a reason . Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big things comes out of us being hungry like that?'
Katie looked tired all of a sudden. She said something Francie didn't understand at the time. She said, 'You found the catch in it.
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Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
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Be a team player, not a bandwagon jumper.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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I actually think that the food our mothers made may not be what we are nostalgic for. It’s more an emotional picture of a mother who was always there, knew what we needed, loved us, let us run free when we wanted to explore.
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Ina Garten (The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook)
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While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off. This city is on the brink of bankruptcy, and yet hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on this trial. I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.
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Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
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Stand up; Grow up and Climb up. The reason why you can’t see farther and further is because you didn’t climb higher. Be willing to explore and be informed!
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Israelmore Ayivor (Daily Drive 365)
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Taste is the most unexplored sense
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Matteo Ferrara
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There is no such thing as loving a child too much.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Boy, there are people who conquered half the world, slaughtered whole populations, wiped cultures off the face of the planet, and you know what history calls them? Heroes! Kings, presidents, champions, explorers. You think America was settled by white men because the Indians invited us her? No, we took this land because we were stronger, and that's how every page of human history is written. It's just our nature. We're a predator species, top of the food chain. Survival of the fittest is written in our blood, it's stenciled on every gene of our DNA. The strong take and the strong make, and the weak are there only to help them do it. End of story.
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Jonathan Maberry (Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1))
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I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only “want” toys or food the way a plant “wants” the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot
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Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness)
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You are strong, self-reliant, entirely able to take care of yourself and of me... You are fearless, courageous; you saved my life, nursed me back to health, hunted for my food, provided for my comfort. You don't need me. Yet you make me want to protect you, watch over you, make sure no harm comes to you. I could live with you all my life and never really know you; you have depths it would take many lifetimes to explore. You are wise and ancient... and as fresh and young as a woman as... And you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I love you more than life itself.
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Jean M. Auel (The Valley of Horses (Earth's Children, #2))
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He used to say, ‘Never be satisfied with what you know, only with what more you can find out.
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Daniel Stone (The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats)
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The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual, even redemptive, but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we're told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it's a precious mote and, for the moment, it's the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave, an indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry)
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Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food -- plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi -- and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively.
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Sandor Ellix Katz (The Art of Fermentation: An in-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World)
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The highway of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.
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Aaron Lauritsen
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Fast food, fast money, shallow thinking, shallow interpretations. This is now what I deal with everyday. Art was meant to be about freedom, about having the courage to explore what it means to be human.
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Emma Raveling (Breaking Measures)
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Successes are those highlights of life we look back on with a smile. But it's the day to day grind of getting them that defines the laugh lines etched until the end of time. Enjoy each moment along the way
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips:
1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy.
2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously!
3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside!
4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live!
5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom!
6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true!
7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn.
8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours!
9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative!
10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.
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Brooke Hampton
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At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball but later was surprised to find that not only had the octopus opened the ball, it had screwed it back together when it was done.
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Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness)
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Curiosity is therefore a force that encourages us to explore. From this perspective, it resembles the drive for food or sexual partners, except that it is motivated by an intangible value: the acquisition of information.
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Stanislas Dehaene (How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now)
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Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band’s own territory and to shifting alliances with neighboring bands. With the rise of dense, sedentary, food-producing populations came the rise of chiefs, kings, and bureaucrats. Such bureaucracies were essential not only to governing large and populous domains but also to maintaining standing armies, sending out fleets of exploration, and organizing wars of conquest.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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Sadly, even when we think we’ve finally broken free from the pack and are thinking independently—questioning, exploring, examining—we often find ourselves sinking back into a new ideology that demands a prompt re-closing of an otherwise open mind.
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Denise Minger (Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health)
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A man is allowed to visit Heaven and Hell. In Hell, he sees a large gathering of people sitting around a long table set with rich and delectable food. And yet these people are miserable and starving. He soon discovers that the reason for their dreadful state is that the spoons and forks provided for them are longer than their arms. As a result, they are unable to bring the food to their mouths and feed themselves. Then the man is shown Heaven. He finds the same table set out there, with the same extra-long eating utensils. But, in Heaven, instead of just trying to feed their own selves, each person uses his or her spoon and fork to feed one another. They are all well-fed and happy.
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Howard Sasportas (The Twelve Houses: Exploring the Houses of the Horoscope)
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Good teaching is an act of hospitality toward the young, and hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when this reciprocity was easier to see: in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend—thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host. It is that way in teaching as well: the teacher’s hospitality to the student results in a world more hospitable to the teacher.
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Parker J. Palmer (The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life)
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You look like you’ve been on a month-long bender. Have you?”
“No, Ken, I have not. I’ve just had a long week.”
Walked the streets of a city bathed in blood and stood amid a hundred thousand corpses. Negotiated a three-way peace treaty among opposing factions of a warring alien species who’d previously held me captive. Bullied the Metigen leadership into doing my bidding. Found out we’re not the real humans, and the real humans are currently enslaving the real universe. Oh, and I think I’m addicted to my ship. How was your week?
“Nothing a shower and some food won’t fix.
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G.S. Jennsen (Abysm (Aurora Renegades, #3))
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She had so many things to be grateful for: two eyes to see the splendors of this wonderful world, two legs to explore it all, food on her table each night at a time when billions have empty bellies. And a roof over her head for ample shelter. She had wise books to read in her library, work that fed her creativity and, as the billionaire said so often, an opportunity to achieve outright mastery not only to benefit herself but also in service of society. And
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Robin S. Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
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Children have an elemental hunger for knowledge and understanding, for mental food and stimulation. They do not need to be told or “motivated” to explore or play, for play, like all creative or proto-creative activities, is deeply pleasurable in itself. Both the innovative and the imitative impulses come together in pretend play, often using toys or dolls or miniature replicas of real-world objects to act out new scenarios or rehearse and replay old ones. Children are drawn to narrative, not only soliciting and enjoying stories from others, but creating them themselves. Storytelling and mythmaking are primary human activities, a fundamental way of making sense of our world. Intelligence, imagination, talent, and creativity will get nowhere without a basis of knowledge and skills, and for this education must be sufficiently structured and focused. But an education too rigid, too formulaic, too lacking in narrative, may kill the once-active, inquisitive mind of a child. Education has to achieve a balance between structure and freedom, and each child’s needs may be extremely variable.
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Oliver Sacks (The River of Consciousness)
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At a time when so many people are just checking things off a bucket list, other travelers are finding that they want more. Going Local explores the whys and how to’s of really experiencing an area and its culture through the people who live there. Includes a plethora of real life travel stories from experts and everyday people alike.
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Nicholas Kontis (Going Local: Experiences and Encounters on the Road)
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studies of “crispness” have shown that the sound created by certain foods is as important to our enjoyment of them as their taste. This has inspired some chefs to create dishes with added sound effects. Some potato chip manufacturers, meanwhile, have increased not just the crunchiness of their chips but the noisiness of the chip bag itself.
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Mark Miodownik (Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World)
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All of the likely or possible independent inventions of writing (in Sumer, Mexico, China, and Egypt), and all of the early adaptations of those invented systems (for example, those in Crete, Iran, Turkey, the Indus Valley, and the Maya area), involved socially stratified societies with complex and centralized political institutions, whose necessary relation to food production we shall explore in a later chapter. Early writing served the needs of those political institutions (such as record keeping and royal propaganda), and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants. Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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Be free and unencumbered in your cooking style. Break the rules like a rock star! My point is that there is no right or wrong—only infinite possibilities to embrace and explore. If you attempt something that doesn’t quite work, it’s still a valuable experience—congratulations for trying! Don’t sweat the details. Choose to fail and learn something new.
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Julie Piatt (The Plantpower Way: Whole Food Plant-Based Recipes and Guidance for The Whole Family: A Cookbook)
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I gave in and explored her mouth. She tasted like strawberries, a faint touch of breakfast taco and every other savory food I wanted as my last meal.
—John, Baseball Lover
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Rose Croft (Baseball Lover)
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I adore good food as I adore all the other pleasant things of life, and because I have that gift I am able to look upon the future with equanimity.”
“Why?” asked Alec.
“Because a love for good food is the only thing that remains with man when he grows old. Love? What is love when you are five and fifty and can no longer hide the disgraceful baldness of your pate. Ambition? What is ambition when you have discovered that honours are to the pushing and glory to the vulgar. Finally we must all reach an age when every passion seems vain, every desire not worth the trouble of achieving it; but then there still remain to the man with a good appetite three pleasures each day, his breakfast, his luncheon, and his dinner.
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W. Somerset Maugham (The Explorer)
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Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.
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Frans de Waal (Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?)
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As long as one strives to become a gourmet or a connoisseur of wines because it is the “in” thing to do, striving to master an externally imposed challenge, then taste may easily turn sour. But a cultivated palate provides many opportunities for flow if one approaches eating—and cooking—in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, exploring the potentials of food for the sake of the experience rather than as a showcase for one’s expertise.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
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Anyone who has ever canoed on the upper Missouri River knows what a welcome sight a grove of cottonoods can be. They provide shade, shelter, and fuel. For Indian ponies, they provide food. For the Corps of Discovery, they provided wheels, wagons, and canoes.
Pioneering Lewis and Clark scholar Paul Russell Cutright pays the cottonwoods an appropriate tribute: 'Of all the wetern trees it contributed more to the success of the Expedition than any other. Lewis and Clark were men of great talent and resourcefulness, masters of ingenuity and improvisation. Though we think it probable that they would hae successfully crossed the continent without the cottonwood, don't as us how!
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Stephen E. Ambrose (Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America's Wild Frontier)
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But Wilson was ahead of the curve. Long before the first octopus-enrichment handbook was published, many octopuses ago, he set out to create a safe toy worthy of an octopus’s intellect. Working at his lab at Arthur D. Little Corp., Wilson devised a series of three clear Plexiglas cubes with different locks. The smallest of the three has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse’s stall. You can put a live crab—a favorite food—inside and leave the lid unlocked. The octopus will lift the lid. When you lock the lid, invariably the octopus will figure out how to open it. Then it’s time to deploy the second cube. This one has a latch that slides counterclockwise to catch on a bracket. You put the crab in the first box and then lock it inside the second box. The octopus will figure it out. And finally, there’s a third cube. This one has two different latches: a bolt that slides into position to lock down, and a second one with a lever arm, sealing the lid much like an old-fashioned canning jar closes. Bill told me that once the octopus “gets it,” the animal can open all four locks in three or four minutes.
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Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness)
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The tacit assumption of the advanced welfare state is correct when human beings face starvation or death by exposure. Then, food and shelter are all that count. But in an advanced society, the needs for food and shelter can be met in a variety of ways, and at that point human needs can no longer be disaggregated. The ways in which food and shelter are obtained affects whether the other human needs are met. People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned—it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned—and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing. People need intimate relationships with others, but intimate relationships that are rich and fulfilling need content, and that content is supplied only when humans are engaged in interactions that have consequences. People need self-actualization, but self-actualization is not a straight road, visible in advance, running from point A to point B. Self-actualization intrinsically requires an exploration of possibilities for life beyond the obvious and convenient. All of these good things in life—self-respect, intimate relationships, and self-actualization—require freedom in the only way that freedom is meaningful: freedom to act in all arenas of life coupled with responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The underlying meaning of that coupling—freedom and responsibility—is crucial. Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards. Knowing that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a major part of what makes life worth living.
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Charles Murray (Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010)
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They arrived in a trickle, and then in clumps, and then in crowds. They marveled at the steady lights in the hallways and explored the offices. None of these people had ever seen the inside of IT. Few of them had spent much time in the Up Top, except on pilgrimages after a cleaning. Families wandered from room to room; kids clutched reams of paper; many came to Juliette or the others with the notes Raph had folded and dropped, asking about the food. In just a few days, they looked different. Coveralls were stained and torn, faces stubbled and gaunt, eyes ringed with dark circles. In just a few days. Juliette saw that they had only a few days more before things grew desperate. Everyone saw that.
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Hugh Howey (Dust (Silo, #3))
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The term given to the way babies are brought up in elephant herds is allomothering, a fancy word for “It takes a village.” Like everything else, there is a biological reason to allow your sisters and aunts to help you parent: When you have to feed on 150 kilograms of food a day and you have a baby that loves to explore, you can’t run after him and get all the nutrition you need to make milk for him. Allomothering also allows young cows to learn how to take care of a baby, how to protect a baby, how to give a baby the time and space it needs to explore without putting it in danger. So theoretically you could say an elephant has many mothers. And yet there is a special and inviolable bond between the calf and its birth mother. In the wild, a calf under the age of two will not survive without its mother. In the wild, a mother’s job is to teach her daughter everything she will need to know to become a mother herself. In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies.
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Jodi Picoult (Leaving Time)
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But a cultivated palate provides many opportunities for flow if one approaches eating—and cooking—in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, exploring the potentials of food for the sake of the experience rather than as a showcase for one’s expertise. The
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
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Dr. Rush made patients ingest the solution until they drooled, and often people’s teeth and hair fell out after weeks or months of continuous treatment. His “cure” no doubt poisoned or outright killed swaths of people whom yellow fever might have spared. Even so, having perfected his treatment in Philadelphia, ten years later he sent Meriwether and William off with some prepackaged samples. As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush’s pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers. With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places where the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush’s “Thunderclappers” had worked a little too well.
”
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Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon...and other true tales from the Periodic Table)
“
Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can’t reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too—oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money—these three—were the real, the only stuff of life.
And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.
I don’t remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity—power and money—were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society’s evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.
Sex, though—sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing—nothing consensual—that could repel or alienate such enlightened folks as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite—for food, say, or alcohol or material goods—our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man—so my theories went—threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.
”
”
Andrew Klavan (Empire of Lies)
“
At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.)
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”
Anna Reid (Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944)
“
The human farmers take care of everything the sow needs in order to survive and reproduce. She is given enough food, vaccinated against diseases, protected against the elements and artificially inseminated. From an objective perspective, the sow no longer needs to explore her surroundings, socialise with other pigs, bond with her piglets or even walk. But from a subjective perspective, the sow still feels very strong urges to do all of these things, and if these urges are not fulfilled she suffers greatly. Sows locked in gestation crates typically display acute frustration alternating with extreme despair.15
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
We’re forever blaming the airline industry for turning us into monsters: it’s the fault of the ticket agents, the baggage handlers, the slowpokes at the newsstands and the fast food restaurants. But what if this is who we truly are, and the airport’s just a forum that allows us to be our real selves, not just hateful but gloriously so?
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”
David Sedaris (Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.)
“
The source of modern malaise, he believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get "back to the land,
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”
Robert Moor (On Trails: An Exploration)
“
declared you could see buds unsheath themselves. Also you could make the acquaintance of strange busy insect things running about on various unknown but evidently serious errands, sometimes carrying tiny scraps of straw or feather or food or climbing blades of grass as if they were trees from whose tops one could look out to explore the country.
”
”
Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
“
As we evolve spiritually and awaken our potential, we can be food for others every day, sharing our love and understanding, our time and energy, nourishing others and ourselves in the process. It is not just our personal love, energy, or time that we share, for, like the apple, when we give of ourselves we are giving of the gifts we’ve received from our families, teachers, and friends, from the earth and her creatures, from the sun, moon, and stars, and from all our experiences. Ultimately, we are life itself giving to itself—feeding itself, exploring, satisfying, and rejuvenating itself. If we live well, we feed many with the most nourishing food: the fruits of compassion and wisdom. In the end, more than needing food for the journey, we can discover that we are the food for each other’s journey, and that our deepest need and joy is not merely to consume but to be this nourishing food for others. We are all born in a symbolic manger, to be spiritual food for others, and we are called to discover our unique way of contributing.
”
”
Will Tuttle (The World Peace Diet)
“
His maternal deprivation had caused what John Bowlby, a famous British psychiatrist, called an “attachment disorder.” Maternal attachment is more important than anything else to a baby—even more important than food. A baby will give up anything to have it. Without it, the child is anxious and unable to explore or deal with the world in any normal way. And attachment disorder doesn’t just affect the relationship with the mother; it affects all social, emotional, and cognitive development. If the child doesn’t experience attachment, that child can’t move forward to step two—trusting and emotionally attaching to others and, eventually, sexually attaching to others. In other words, you can’t grow emotionally if you didn’t have infant attachment.
”
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Catherine Gildiner (Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery)
“
How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment.
Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked down the other side of the street, sorry and amused at their loss of cool. We avoided newspapers and television. They were full of lies, and we knew all the stuff we needed. We spent our government grants on books, dope, acid, jug wine, and cheap food from the supermarket--variegated cheese scraps bundled roughly together, white cabbage and bacon ends, dented tins of tomatoes from the bargain bin. Everything was beautiful, the stars and the sunsets, the mold that someone discovered at the back of the fridge, the cows in the fields that kicked their giddy heels up in the air and fled as we ranged through the Yorkshire woods decked in daisy chains, necklaces made of melon seeds and tie-dye T-shirts whose colors stained the bath tub forever--an eternal reminder of the rainbow generation. [81-82]
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Claire Robson (Love in Good Time: A Memoir)
“
I saw it myself. An endless succession of mongrels and malingerers, the laziest dropouts who fancied themselves explorers. He made his policy clear: he was not responsible for their food, their shelter, their safety, or their health. He didn't waste his time discouraging them because frankly there was no discouragement they could not withstand. All of the energy they could have put into their intelligence they had used to develop their tenacity. But what I quickly learned was that their tenacity was for going, not for staying. Once they were out on the trail they fell like flies. Some took a day, two days, others were gone in a matter of hours, and Dr. Rapp never stopped for them. He remained beautifully consistent: he was to work and he would continue to work. He would not ferry back the weak and the lame. They had chosen to get themselves in and they would simply have to figure the means to get themselves out. People were quick to accept these terms until they themselves were weak. Then they changed their tune entirely, then they said Dr. Rapp was heartless. They couldn't slander him as a scientist but they said no end of scurrilous things about him as a man. He hadn't rescued them! He hadn't been their father and mother! I will tell you, none of that troubled his sleep. If he had made them his responsibility, either by dissuading them from their ambitions or by bailing them out of their folly, the greatest botanist of our time would have been reduced to a babysitter. It would have been an incalculable blow to science, all in the name of saving the stupid.
”
”
Ann Patchett (State of Wonder)
“
Break out to go out
___________________
The birds dare to break the egg shell
It does so in order to get out of that Hell
When it finally succeeds, it’ll then fly
To its comfort zone it’ll say bye
Are you being confined in a small space
How long will you remain at that place?
Before you can explore more territories,
Break away from the former glories.
Yesterday’s excellence is today’s average
You must strive to be better age after age
Never accept the available mediocrity
As the only preferable opportunity
Decide to grow from below to hero
And make it a point to vacate level zero
Reach out and arise with power
God’s blessings on you, will shower
Agree to grow, never attempt to be slow
Be not afraid. Never doubt. You’ll flow
The grace of God will be your guide
Taking you along, side by side.
”
”
Israelmore Ayivor (Become a Better You)
“
He ordered oxtail soup and enjoyed it heartily. Then he glanced at the menu for the fish, ordered a haddock and, seized with a sudden pang of hunger at the sight of so many people relishing their food, he ate some roast beef and drank two pints of ale, stimulated by the flavor of a cow-shed which this fine, pale beer exhaled.
His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue Stilton cheese, made quick work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking, quenched his thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanish licorice but which does not have its sugary taste.
He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. This change of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food had awakened his stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and prepared to sip his coffee into which gin had been poured.
”
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Joris-Karl Huysmans (A rebours: Exploration de l'esthétisme et de la marginalité dans la France décadente du XIXe siècle (French Edition))
“
There is no chef without a homeland. To be a chef today is to center yourself in the traditions of your roots and use them to define your art and speak to any human being about who you are; your plate is your flag. Many of our most pungent memories are carried through food, just as connections to our ancestors are reaffirmed by cooking the dishes handed down to us. For some chefs, this bond is as easy as pointing to a Tuscan village or a Korean neighborhood, while others adopt the foods of culinary kinfolk outside their own background and use them to express their personal identity. Many take for granted their fast and easy connections to a food narrative that grounds them in a tradition, gives them a broad palette to explore, and affords them a genuine taste of eudaemonia, all of which is the holistic feeling of flourishing in life; and of course it is often blissfully apolitical.
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Michael W. Twitty
“
But fear best thrives in the present tense. That is why experts rely on it; in a world that is increasingly impatient with long-term processes, fear is a potent short-term play. Imagine that you are a government official charged with procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart disease. Which cause do you think the members of Congress will open up the coffers for? The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack is far smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up his arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease. But a terrorist attack happens now; death by heart disease is some distant, quiet catastrophe. Terrorist acts lie beyond our control; french fries do not. Just as important as the control factor is what Peter Sandman calls the dread factor. Death by terrorist attack (or mad-cow disease) is considered wholly dreadful; death by heart disease is, for some reason, not.
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”
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
“
Eating organs, in 1943, could degrade one’s social standing. Americans preferred bland preparations of muscle meat partly because for as long as they could recall, that’s what the upper class ate. So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery. “The British believed that Eskimo food . . . was beneath a British sailor and certainly unthinkable for a British officer,” wrote
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Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
But before I go, I want to tell you a little story. “A certain shopkeeper sent his son to learn about the secret of happiness from the wisest man in the world. The lad wandered through the desert for forty days, and finally came upon a beautiful castle, high atop a mountain. It was there that the wise man lived. “Rather than finding a saintly man, though, our hero, on entering the main room of the castle, saw a hive of activity: tradesmen came and went, people were conversing in the corners, a small orchestra was playing soft music, and there was a table covered with platters of the most delicious food in that part of the world. The wise man conversed with everyone, and the boy had to wait for two hours before it was his turn to be given the man’s attention. “The wise man listened attentively to the boy’s explanation of why he had come, but told him that he didn’t have time just then to explain the secret of happiness. He suggested that the boy look around the palace and return in two hours. “‘Meanwhile, I want to ask you to do something,’ said the wise man, handing the boy a teaspoon that held two drops of oil. ‘As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing the oil to spill.’ “The boy began climbing and descending the many stairways of the palace, keeping his eyes fixed on the spoon. After two hours, he returned to the room where the wise man was. “‘Well,’ asked the wise man, ‘did you see the Persian tapestries that are hanging in my dining hall? Did you see the garden that it took the master gardener ten years to create? Did you notice the beautiful parchments in my library?’ “The boy was embarrassed, and confessed that he had observed nothing. His only concern had been not to spill the oil that the wise man had entrusted to him. “‘Then go back and observe the marvels of my world,’ said the wise man. ‘You cannot trust a man if you don’t know his house.’ “Relieved, the boy picked up the spoon and returned to his exploration of the palace, this time observing all of the works of art on the ceilings and the walls. He saw the gardens, the mountains all around him, the beauty of the flowers, and the taste with which everything had been selected. Upon returning to the wise man, he related in detail everything he had seen. “‘But where are the drops of oil I entrusted to you?’ asked the wise man. “Looking down at the spoon he held, the boy saw that the oil was gone. “‘Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you,’ said the wisest of wise men. ‘The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.
”
”
Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)
“
Since their invention about half a century ago, video games have come to play a vital role in modern human civilization. I think this is because we modern humans were never designed to live like we do now—sitting in traffic, working in offices, shopping in stores. We are, by design, hunter-gatherers. Millions of years of evolution have wired our brains with an inherent need to hunt, gather, explore, solve puzzles, form teams, and conquer challenge after challenge in order to survive as we claw our way to the top of the food chain. For most people, day-to-day life no longer requires many of those experiences or challenges, and so those primal, instinctive needs inside us have no natural outlet. To keep our minds and bodies healthy, we have to simulate those old ways in the midst of our modern, technological lives, where everything on the planet has already been hunted and gathered. Thankfully, the technology that created this problem also gave rise to its solution—a way for us modern city dwellers to exorcise our inner evolutionary demons: video games.
”
”
Ernest Cline (Press Start to Play: Stories)
“
Surely misfortune could scarcely have exceeded this last blow. We arrived within 11 miles of our old One Ton Camp with fuel for one last meal and food for two days. For four days we have been unable to leave the tent - the gale howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships , help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honor of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for.
Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.
”
”
Robert Falcon Scott (Last expedition Volume 2)
“
The green man said, “I’m a fool, I suppose, to put any confidence in you. And yet I do. I am a free man, come from your own future to explore your age.” “That is impossible.” “The green color that puzzles your people so much is only what you call pond scum. We have altered it until it can live in our blood, and by its intervention have at last made our peace in humankind’s long struggle with the sun. In us, the tiny plants live and die, and our bodies feed from them and their dead and require no other nourishment. All the famines, and all the labor of growing food, are ended.” “But you must have sun.” “Yes,” the green man said. “And I have not enough here.
”
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Gene Wolfe (Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2))
“
I liken modern scientists to conquistadors. They have no idea what they're dealing with, but they're going to conquer it, whatever it is --- all in the name of God. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to scientific discovery and exploration. I love this stuff.
What I despise is reckless disregard for how little we know. We create trans fats with nary a question about whether they're good for us or not. We develop a food pyramid with carbohydrates on the bottom and thirty years later we realize it created an obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic. It should give us all pause that we would be a much healthier nation if the government had never told us how to eat.
”
”
Joel Salatin (The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation)
“
Today's American food culture is a contested landscape in search of values, new direction, and its own indigenous sense of rightness and self-worth. It's a culture looking toward ecology, the regional flow of seasons, and opportunities for new ways to invigorate and color the American palate. Our new foodies are concerned with health, sustainability, environmental integrity, social justice, and the push-pull between global and local economies. Our food world is a charged scene of culinary inquiry continually in search of ancestors, historic precedent, and novel ways to explore tradition while surging forward. The chefs and culinarians of twenty-first-century America have become hungry for an origin story all our own.
”
”
Michael W. Twitty (The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South)
“
Dupont had a long history of analysing Australia’s position in the world. He was also a pioneer in the study of links between climate change and international security, an area that few defence experts had explored. In 2006 he asserted in an article, written with Graeme Pearman, that the security implications of climate change had been largely ignored by public policy experts, academics and journalists. ‘Climate change is fast emerging as the security issue of the 21st century,’ he wrote, ‘overshadowing terrorism and even the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the threat most likely to cause mega-death and contribute to state failure, forced population movements, food and water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases.
”
”
Aaron Patrick (Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself)
“
The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone. The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told. The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another. The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have. The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them. The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate. The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix. The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series))
“
We need a new direction, and we need it soon. Instead of death by food pyramid, we can have life by educated freedom—a freedom in which we’re released from the rules of the federal government, the dogma of the fad diet du jour, the smooth words of a health guru, the marionetting of powerful industries, the misinterpretation of science, and the mass confusion that keeps us incapacitated. As we demolish the walls of the pyramids, plates, and other shapes that ultimately lock us inside a dietary dictatorship, we’re left with a horizon-wide landscape to explore—and with it, the opportunity to pursue what works for us and guiltlessly leave behind what doesn’t. But there’s just one catch. In order to reach that point of liberation, we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing—or else we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.
”
”
Denise Minger
“
committing suicide, both for your own sake and that of your companions. Both sexually and socially the polar explorer must make up his mind to be starved. To what extent can hard work, or what may be called dramatic imagination, provide a substitute? Compare our thoughts on the march; our food dreams at night; the primitive way in which the loss of a crumb of biscuit may give a lasting sense of grievance. Night after night I bought big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Hatfield station, but always woke before I got a mouthful to my lips; some companions who were not so highly strung were more fortunate, and ate their phantom meals. And the darkness, accompanied it may be almost continually by howling blizzards which prevent you seeing your hand before your face. Life in such surroundings is both mentally and physically cramped; open-air exercise is restricted and in blizzards quite impossible, and you realize how much you lose by your inability to see the world about you when you are out-of-doors. I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide, you should take that man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do the rest. To normal people like ourselves living under abnormal circumstances Nature could do much to lift our thoughts out of the rut of everyday affairs, but she loses much of her healing power when she cannot be seen, but only felt, and when that feeling is intensely uncomfortable. Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which
”
”
Apsley Cherry-Garrard (The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910-1913)
“
As a species, humans straddle a line between external and internal intelligence. With big brains and (typically) small clan size, humans have traditionally harnessed individual cleverness to outcompete rivals for food and mates, to hunt and dominate other species, and, eventually, to seize control of the planet. As later chapters will show, we have also externalized our wisdom in the form of trails, oral storytelling, written texts, art, maps, and much more recently, electronic data. Nevertheless, even in the Internet era, we still romanticize the lone genius. Most of us—especially us Americans—like to consider any brilliance we may possess, and the accomplishments that have sprung from it, as being solely our own. In our egotism, we have long remained blind to the communal infrastructure that undergirds our own eureka moments.
”
”
Robert Moor (On Trails: An Exploration)
“
The cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge. But it’s more than about what you know. It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe. And its attributes are clear:
The cosmic perspective comes from the frontiers of science, yet it is not solely the provenance of the scientist. It belongs to everyone.
The cosmic perspective is humble.
The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small.
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.
The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective finds beauty in the images of planets, moons, stars, and nebulae, but also celebrates the laws of physics that shape them.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate.
The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave—an indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix.
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry)
“
Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain.
If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.
”
”
Richard Seymour (The Twittering Machine: How Capitalism Stole Our Social Life)
“
As a child, she was curious about the world beyond the sea, but in a vague, half-sketched way, as she was curious about a lot of things she read in books. London and Treasure Island and horses and dragons were all equally imagined to her. She thought she would probably see them one day, when she was old. In the meantime, the island was hers to explore, and it took up more time than she could ever imagine having. There were books to read, thousands of them in the castle library, and Rowan brought back more all the time. There were trees to climb, caves along the beach to get lost in, traces of the fair folk who had once lived on the island to find and bring home. There was work to be done: Food needed to be grown and harvested; the livable parts of the castle, the parts that weren't a crumbling ruin, needed to be combed for useful things when the tide went out. She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.
”
”
H.G. Parry (The Magician’s Daughter)
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Cornwell’s painting is set at Fort Crawford, in Michigan Territory, during St. Martin’s second stint in Beaumont’s employ, around 1830. At this stage in his digestive explorations, Beaumont had been trying to determine whether the gastric juice would work outside of the stomach, removed from the body’s “vital force.” (It does.) He filled vial after vial with St. Martin’s secretions and dropped in all manner of foods. The cabin became a kind of gastric-juice dairy. Beaumont, in the painting, holds one end of a length of gum elastic tubing in St. Martin’s stomach; the other end drips into a bottle in Beaumont’s lap. I spent a good deal of time staring at this painting, trying to parse the relationship between the two. The gulf between their stations is clear. St. Martin wears dungarees worn through at the knees. Beaumont appears in full military dress—brass-buttoned jacket with gold epaulettes, piping-trimmed breeches tucked into knee-high leather boots. “True,” Cornwell seems to be saying, “it’s an unsavory situation for our man St. Martin, but look, just look, at the splendorous man he has the honor of serving.” (Presumably Cornwell took some liberties with the costuming in order to glorify his subject. Anyone who works with hydrochloric acid knows you don’t wear your dress clothes in the lab.)
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Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
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Owen couldn’t believe his luck. Candice Mayfair was the beautiful white wolf he’d seen that day so long ago. Not that she looked like a wolf right now. He only knew she was the wolf, unequivocally, because he recognized her scent. After the initial shock of seeing an unfamiliar and intriguing Arctic she-wolf, he’d gone after her.
The whole pack had gone on a run that night, but they knew to stay far away from any campsite. He and the other guys had swum across the river to explore a bit. Cameron and his mate had stayed on the other side with the kids. He’d even swum back across the river to find her and discovered her scent had led right to one of the tents. Since she had moved into the tent, he knew she had to be one of their shifter kind. He’d even hung around the next day, waiting to catch a glimpse of her, but there were several women, and he had no idea which one had been her. Two blonds, a couple of brunettes, and a red-haired woman—none of whom looked like the picture he had of Clara Hart, though.
Being a white wolf in summer had made it difficult to blend in, so he’d had to keep well out of sight.
Candice Mayfair was definitely the author of the books on the website, though she didn’t look like the photo her uncle had of her, if she was Clara Hart. She had the same compelling eyes, different color, but they got his attention, grabbed hold, and wouldn’t let go.
He carried her to her couch and set her down, staying close, his hand still on her arm until she seemed to regain her equilibrium.
“The wolf pup was yours,” she accused, jerking her arm away from him.
“Wolf pup?”
“Yeah, wolf pup. Don’t pretend you don’t know about your own wolf pup.”
Then all the pieces began to fall into place. Campers. Campfire. Food. Corey, the wolf pup she had to be referring to, hadn’t just found the food like they’d thought. Candice must not have been a wolf until that night.
“You fed him? Corey? His mom wondered why he smelled of beef jerky that night. We thought he’d found some at the campsite. Don’t tell me…he bit you.
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Terry Spear (Dreaming of a White Wolf Christmas (Heart of the Wolf #23; White Wolf #2))
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How do you build peaks? You create a positive moment with elements of elevation, insight, pride, and/ or connection. We’ll explore those final three elements later, but for now, let’s focus on elevation. To elevate a moment, do three things: First, boost sensory appeal. Second, raise the stakes. Third, break the script. (Breaking the script means to violate expectations about an experience—the next chapter is devoted to the concept.) Moments of elevation need not have all three elements but most have at least two. Boosting sensory appeal is about “turning up the volume” on reality. Things look better or taste better or sound better or feel better than they usually do. Weddings have flowers and food and music and dancing. (And they need not be superexpensive—see the footnote for more.IV) The Popsicle Hotline offers sweet treats delivered on silver trays by white-gloved waiters. The Trial of Human Nature is conducted in a real courtroom. It’s amazing how many times people actually wear different clothes to peak events: graduation robes and wedding dresses and home-team colors. At Hillsdale High, the lawyers wore suits and the witnesses came in costume. A peak means something special is happening; it should look different. To raise the stakes is to add an element of productive pressure: a competition, a game, a performance, a deadline, a public commitment. Consider the pregame jitters at a basketball game, or the sweaty-hands thrill of taking the stage at Signing Day, or the pressure of the oral defense at Hillsdale High’s Senior Exhibition. Remember how the teacher Susan Bedford said that, in designing the Trial, she and Greg Jouriles were deliberately trying to “up the ante” for their students. They made their students conduct the Trial in front of a jury that included the principal and varsity quarterback. That’s pressure. One simple diagnostic to gauge whether you’ve transcended the ordinary is if people feel the need to pull out their cameras. If they take pictures, it must be a special occasion. (Not counting the selfie addict, who thinks his face is a special occasion.) Our instinct to capture a moment says: I want to remember this. That’s a moment of elevation.
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Chip Heath (The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact)