Food Items Quotes

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Karma Repair Kit Items 1-4. 1.Get enough food to eat, and eat it. 2.Find a place to sleep where it is quiet, and sleep there. 3.Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself, and listen to it. 4.
Richard Brautigan
The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
A burrito is a delicious food item that breaks down all social barriers and leads to temporary spiritual enlightenment.
Lisi Harrison (Monster High (Monster High, #1))
Her voice is so soft. If it were a food item, it’d be a marshmallow.
Tim Tharp (The Spectacular Now)
Janey was planning a short engagement, she'd simpered, and so, of course, the inevitable collection for the wedding present would soon follow. Of all the compulsory financial contributions, that is the one that irks me most. Two people wander around John Lewis picking out lovely items for themselves, and then they make other people pay for them. It's bare-faced effrontery. They choose things like plates, bowls and cutlery—I mean, what are they doing at the moment: shoveling food from packets into their mouths with their bare hands? I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.
Aimee Bender
A group of winged monkeys threw it at me.” Ariella crossed her arms and glared, and I had an odd moment of déjà vu. “On my last watch, we passed an orchard on the banks, and there were at least a dozen monkeys living there, staring down at us. I threw a rock at them and they...threw things back. And not just food items, either.” She blushed with embarrassment and glowered, daring me to laugh. “So you'd better eat that before I stuff something else down your throat, and it won't be a banana.
Julie Kagawa (The Iron Knight (The Iron Fey, #4))
Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles....If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
I'm sorry. I can't serve him that item," the waitress said, only somewhat surprising her since she had a pretty good idea why. "Why not?" she found herself asking anyway out of curiosity to see if she was right. *** "Because he's a Bradford," the woman explained with a shrug.
R.L. Mathewson (Perfection (Neighbor from Hell, #2))
They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle -- or a can or a box or a cellophane bag -- then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature....An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with only three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable.
Michael Moore (Here Comes Trouble)
What was once a home she had taken apart one piece at a time, one day...She sold her belongings for money to buy food.  First the luxuries: a small statue, a picture.  Then the items with more utility: a lamp, a kettle.  Clothes left the closet at a rate of a garment a day…she burned everything in the basement first; then everything in the attic.  It lasted weeks, not months.  Though tempted, she left the roof alone.  She stripped the second floor, and the stairs.  She extracted every possible calorie from the kitchen.  she wasn’t working alone, because neighbourhood pirates simultaneously stole anything of value outside: door and window frames, fencing, stucco.  They pillaged her yard.  Breaking in was a boundary her neigbours had not yet crossed.  But the animals had.  Rats and mice and other vermin found the cracks without much effort.  Like her, they sought warmth and scraps of food.  With great reluctance, she roasted the ones she could catch.  She spent her nights fighting off the ones that escaped.
John Payton Foden (Magenta)
The greatest gift you can give is your time.  Not money, not items, not food, not pretty cards with handwritten sentiment, but time.  People need your presence.  The way you can help a soul the most is to simply be there.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year)
Popeyes is coming to town, and with it The Spicy Chicken Sandwich. As a duck farmer I'm jealous. I wish I had a food item that customers were willing to stab each other over. What great marketing: We offer something that's worth getting knifed in line for the chance to buy.
Jarod Kintz (Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world (A BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Production))
This caveman just made your panties wet with a kiss, and you’re the only item on the menu that I want to dine on.” A delicious shiver crept down my spine. “I'm not food.” “You’re right, Syn. You are so much more…and I wouldn’t want word getting out that I like to play with my food.” I pulled away. “It's not funny, and I'm not a fucking Fairy happy meal, Ryder!
Amelia Hutchins (Taunting Destiny (The Fae Chronicles, #2))
The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
Since supper was three kinds of casserole with two kinds of fruit salad, with cake and pie for dessert, I gathered that my flock, who lambaste life’s problems with food items of just this kind, had heard an alarm. There was even a bean salad, which to me looked distinctly Presbyterian, so anxiety had overspilled its denominational vessel. You’d have thought I’d died. We saved it for lunch.
Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)
Clothing was magic. Casey believed this. She would never admit this to her classmates in any of her women's studies courses, but she felt that an article of clothing could change a person... Each skirt, blouse, necklace, or humble shoe said something - certain pieces screamed, and others whispered seductively, but no matter, she experienced each item's expression keenly, and she loved this world. every article suggested an image, a life, a kind of woman, and Casey felt drawn to them." (Free Food For Millionaires, p.41).
Min Jin Lee (Free Food for Millionaires)
You understand that Mauve and turquois are not food items, but that they're colors.
Chad Eastham
As I move along the line, other food items are plunked onto my tray: a small salad of iceberg lettuce and bacos, a slice of white bread with a pat of Hotel Holiday butter and blob of red Jell-O with fruit cocktail trapped inside. Instantly, I feel compassion for the trapped fruit.
Augusten Burroughs (Dry)
I remembered seeing a media channel where they showed picture after picture of food items I had never seen before in my life. When I asked my father what it was, he said they called it the “Two Minutes’ Hate.
Project Itoh
Megan was able to get me the single most important item in this entire house." "She got you that new vibrator?" "Jesus..." "Oh, the cookbook, right," he said, remembering. Megan used to work for the Food Network, and was able to secure me a signed copy of the original Barefoot Contessa cookbook.
Alice Clayton (Last Call (Cocktail, #4.5))
He hates chain stores and fast-food restaurants, mass-produced items and fashionable clothes - any instance of something that is repeated across the world regardless of local context. These things deny the uniqueness of each moment and each person. They function as if we were all printed out of plastic like egg boxes, and they try to make us function the same way. They are the intrusion of perfection into our grubby, smelly, sweaty living place.
Nick Harkaway (The Gone-Away World)
We recently graduated from school, and the mayor gave us one last little school assignment. We had to write about our chosen profession. Twenty pages, too. Now, I love my village and all, and have absolutely zero regrets about becoming a warrior, but dude, c'mon. Who wants to write twenty pages about anything? Luckily, Runt thought of a way for us to avoid writing so much without breaking the rules, and every other student copied Runt's idea. Needless to say, the mayor wasn't too thrilled about that. Guess that's why Runt is back to crafting potato-based food items." Resisting the urge to ask 'What's a potato?', I nodded. "Hmm. Do you think I'll be able to speak with him?" "Probably,
Cube Kid (Nether Kitten: Book 5)
They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.
Marlena de Blasi (A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure)
Of course, eating these food items is not what I might describe as pleasant, since they’re tough and scorched and moistureless from their all-day cooking on high-temperature rollers. Sometimes biting through a burrito’s thick tortilla casing can feel like chewing through your own toe calluses.” “That’s an image that’s going to linger.
Nathan Hill (The Nix)
Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
Oh, a new food item! Tater tits!
Jackie Walker (Love & Other Lies (Love and Laughs, #3))
Sharif gave instructions to his staff regarding snacks he wanted served to all of us—Sharif often asked for specific food items during meetings, as if it helped him concentrate his mind.
Husain Haqqani (Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding)
Most peasants did not miss the school. "What's the point?" they would say. "You pay fees and read for years, and in the end you are still a peasant, earning your food with your sweat. You don't get a grain of rice more for being able to read books. Why waste time and money? Might as well start earning your work points right away." The virtual absence of any chance of a better future and the near total immobility for anyone born a peasant took the incentive out of the pursuit of knowledge. Children of school age would stay at home to help their families with their work or look after younger brothers and sisters. They would be out in the fields when they were barely in their teens. As for girls, the peasants considered it a complete waste of time for them to go to school. "They get married and belong to other people. It's like pouring water on the ground." The Cultural Revolution was trumpeted as having brought education to the peasants through 'evening classes." One day my production team announced it was starting evening classes and asked Nana and me to be the teachers. I was delighted. However, as soon as the first 'class' began, I realized that this was no education. The classes invariably started with Nana and me being asked by the production team leader to read out articles by Mao or other items from the People's Daily. Then he would make an hour-long speech consisting of all the latest political jargon strung together in undigested and largely unintelligible hunks. Now and then he would give special orders, all solemnly delivered in the name of Mao.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
Cambridge, through a long series of studies, have shown that birds can store food of different kinds in hundreds of distinct places to retrieve later, and can remember not only where they have put food but what was put in each place, so the more perishable items can be retrieved before the longer-lasting ones.
Peter Godfrey-Smith (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness)
So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an American supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, after I realized that the straightforward question 'What should I eat?' could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: 'What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?' Not very long ago an eater didn't need a journalist to answer these questions. The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
5. Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace, well-being, and joy in my body, in my consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family and society. I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicant or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films, and conversations. I am aware that to damage my body or my consciousness with these poisons is to betray my ancestors, my parents, my society, and future generations. I will work to transform violence, fear, anger, and confusion in myself and in society by practicing a diet for myself and for society. I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self-transformation and for the transformation of society.
Thich Nhat Hanh (Living Buddha, Living Christ)
It’s like returning to a familiar room and noticing objects had been moved while you were gone—a chair here, a picture frame there. Items that were once brand new were suddenly broken in and worn from age. It was all very subtle, but enough to suspect paranormal activity or a cruel practical joke. When no one else saw what you saw, the freak factor really kicked in, because you were singled out and left questioning reality." ~Ellia
Jaime Reed (Keep Me In Mind)
A tremendous amount of my brain was fitted with noticing new things out where nothing was familiar: buildings, types of cars, types of people, accents, plants, packaged-food items. Before I left my brain never had to register my bedroom, my husband, mailbox, apple core, alarm clock, walls. My brain just said "—, —, —, —, —, —, —, —," to these things, because a brain lets you keep going, keep not seeing the same walls, underwear, husband, doorknobs, ceiling, husband, husband. A brain can be merciful in this way: sparing you the monotony of those monotonies, their pitiful cozy. A brain lets all the borefilled days shrink like drying sponges until they're hard and ungiving
Catherine Lacey (Nobody Is Ever Missing)
Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food. Most of the 12 million Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to pay the rent or gas bill, buy food, or meet other regular expenses. Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques—from overdraft fees to student loans for for-profit colleges—specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor.46 If the poor pay more for their housing, food, durable goods, and credit, and if they get smaller returns on their educations and mortgages (if they get returns at all), then their incomes are even smaller than they appear. This is fundamentally unfair.
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings—fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef—the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.
Mark Kurlansky (Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World)
Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
Catherynne M. Valente
Boiling, the technique, should almost never be used, with the exception of green vegetables and pasta. Very few food items benefit from the agitation of boiling. Boiling will fray tender food, and in stocks, soups, and sauces it will emulsify impurities into the liquid.
Michael Ruhlman (The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen)
The only acceptable hobby, throughout all stages of life, is cookery. As a child: adorable baked items. Twenties: much appreciated spag bol and fry-ups. Thirties and forties: lovely stuff with butternut squash and chorizo from the Guardian food section. Fifties and sixties: beef wellington from the Sunday Telegraph magazine. Seventies and eighties: back to the adorable baked items. Perfect. The only teeny tiny downside of this hobby is that I HATE COOKING. Don't get me wrong; I absolutely adore the eating of the food. It's just the awful boring, frightening putting together of it that makes me want to shove my own fists in my mouth. It's a lovely idea: follow the recipe and you'll end up with something exactly like the pretty picture in the book, only even more delicious. But the reality's rather different. Within fifteen minutes of embarking on a dish I generally find myself in tears in the middle of what appears to be a bombsite, looking like a mentally unstable art teacher in a butter-splattered apron, wondering a) just how I am supposed to get hold of a thimble and a half of FairTrade hazelnut oil (why is there always the one impossible-to-find recipe ingredient? Sesame paste, anyone?) and b) just how I managed to get flour through two closed doors onto the living-room curtains, when I don't recall having used any flour and oh-this-is-terrible-let's-just-go-out-and-get-a-Wagamama's-and-to-hell-with-the-cost, dammit.
Miranda Hart (Is It Just Me?)
I’ve read the theory that our bodies don’t recognize these artificially grown and developed items as “food.”  (Doritos, though delicious, are not picked from a Dorito bush.)  Because of that, our bodies are always in search of nutrients, which makes us hungrier.  We eat and eat, yet never feel satisfied.  So:  our portions are bigger, we eat out more, we reach for convenience foods, and our food supply has changed.  Our hunger hormones are on overdrive because we have tried (unsuccessfully) to restrict what we are eating and we are eating processed junk.
Gin Stephens (Delay, Don't Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle)
Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina states that of the six hundred thousand food items for sale in the United States, 80 percent are laced with added sugar. Ninety percent of the food produced in the United States is sold to you by a total of ten conglomerates—Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Dole, General Mills, Hormel, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsico, Procter and Gamble, and Unilever.
Robert H. Lustig (Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease)
At Hamilton Brothers, not much is self-serve, and I was forced to interact with the guys at the counter. These were all middle-aged men who evidently knew a lot about everything. They would ask me questions about my order that I often couldn't answer. “What size chickenwire?" or “Ardox nails or regular?" or the one that always struck me with fear, “What you doing with all this stuff?" It seemed they were running my order through a vast mental database and determining that there was nothing known to humanity that could be built properly with the list of items I wanted.
Brent Preston (The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution)
I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing. Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode. I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same? Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
We need to not forget that there was a time in our history when all that we needed was some food and a pretty pebble that we had found in the river.  These items were enough, they genuinely felt like more than enough.
George Tsakraklides (The Unhappiness Machine: and other stories about Systemic Collapse)
Locavore" may have been the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year, but there's already been a word for those whose diets are restricted to seasonal items grown in their immediate area: That word is "peasant.
Brett Martin
For now, the Simple Daily Practice means doing ONE thing every day. Try any one of these things each day: A) Sleep eight hours. B) Eat two meals instead of three. C) No TV. D) No junk food. E) No complaining for one whole day. F) No gossip. G) Return an e-mail from five years ago. H) Express thanks to a friend. I) Watch a funny movie or a stand-up comic. J) Write down a list of ideas. The ideas can be about anything. K) Read a spiritual text. Any one that is inspirational to you. The Bible, The Tao te Ching, anything you want. L) Say to yourself when you wake up, “I’m going to save a life today.” Keep an eye out for that life you can save. M) Take up a hobby. Don’t say you don’t have time. Learn the piano. Take chess lessons. Do stand-up comedy. Write a novel. Do something that takes you out of your current rhythm. N) Write down your entire schedule. The schedule you do every day. Cross out one item and don’t do that anymore. O) Surprise someone. P) Think of ten people you are grateful for. Q) Forgive someone. You don’t have to tell them. Just write it down on a piece of paper and burn the paper. It turns out this has the same effect in terms of releasing oxytocin in the brain as actually forgiving them in person. R) Take the stairs instead of the elevator. S) I’m going to steal this next one from the 1970s pop psychology book Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: when you find yourself thinking of that special someone who is causing you grief, think very quietly, “No.” If you think of him and (or?) her again, think loudly, “No!” Again? Whisper, “No!” Again, say it. Louder. Yell it. Louder. And so on. T) Tell someone every day that you love them. U) Don’t have sex with someone you don’t love. V) Shower. Scrub. Clean the toxins off your body. W) Read a chapter in a biography about someone who is an inspiration to you. X) Make plans to spend time with a friend. Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about. Z) Deep breathing. When the vagus nerve is inflamed, your breathing becomes shallower. Your breath becomes quick. It’s fight-or-flight time! You are panicking. Stop it! Breathe deep. Let me tell you something: most people think “yoga” is all those exercises where people are standing upside down and doing weird things. In the Yoga Sutras, written in 300 B.C., there are 196 lines divided into four chapters. In all those lines, ONLY THREE OF THEM refer to physical exercise. It basically reads, “Be able to sit up straight.” That’s it. That’s the only reference in the Yoga Sutras to physical exercise. Claudia always tells me that yogis measure their lives in breaths, not years. Deep breathing is what keeps those breaths going.
James Altucher (Choose Yourself)
If you've ever taken a sub, you'll know they have available every luxury item the weary traveller could ever wish to purchase. Drinks, food, perfumes, clothes, blankets, anything. These compartments weren't empty, but I doubt the weary traveller was really in the market for a selection of low and high powered pistols, assault rifles, armour piercing rounds and the variety of explosive devices on offer. Unless they were on the way to a Christmas family get-together.
G.R. Matthews (Nothing Is Ever Simple (Corin Hayes, #2))
If I care about the people I work with, why tempt them to make a lousy choice? So I dumped the entire bucket of sweets into a garbage can in my office. Many foods are better off in the trash than in your stomach. The next time you receive unhealthy food as a gift, subtly dispose of it later. When you get a free dessert or candy with a meal, leave it behind. If the item is clearly bad for your health, don’t feel guilty. You are not wasting food. You may be saving lives.
Tom Rath (Eat Move Sleep: How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes)
The most price elastic food item is eggs, at 0.32. This means if the price of eggs goes up 1 percent, consumption goes down 0.68 percent. Eggs are the highest-quality protein there is. Eggs have all the nutrients you need. They are literally the world’s most perfect food. And people won’t buy them if the price increases. Why? Because there’s nothing in an egg that has hedonic properties. Tryptophan (the precursor of serotonin) sure, but can it drive dopamine? Conversely, the most price inelastic consumable is fast food, at 0.81. This means if the price of fast food goes up 1 percent, consumption only goes down 0.19 percent. And the second most? Soft drinks, at 0.79. These two food items exert the most hedonic effects (due to sugar and caffeine) and happen to be the ones that people will consume no matter what. And of course they are the most addictive. So how can society turn an addicted, depressed, drug-addled, corpulent, and metabolically ill populace around?
Robert H. Lustig (The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains)
We must realize that we don’t live in a vacuum; the consequences of our actions ripple throughout the world. Would you still run the water while you brush your teeth, if it meant someone else would suffer from thirst? Would you still drive a gas guzzler, if you knew a world oil shortage would bring poverty and chaos? Would you still build an oversized house, if you witnessed first-hand the effects of deforestation? If we understood how our lifestyles impact other people, perhaps we would live a little more lightly. Our choices as consumers have an environmental toll. Every item we buy, from food to books to televisions to cars, uses up some of the earth’s bounty. Not only does its production and distribution require energy and natural resources; its disposal is also cause for concern. Do we really want our grandchildren to live among giant landfills? The less we need to get by, the better off everyone (and our planet) will be. Therefore, we should reduce our consumption as much as possible, and favor products and packaging made from minimal, biodegradable, or recyclable materials.
Francine Jay (The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life)
Think about ethanol again. The benefits of that $7 billion tax subsidy are bestowed on a small group of farmers, making it quite lucrative for each one of them. Meanwhile, the costs are spread over the remaining 98 percent of us, putting ethanol somewhere below good oral hygiene on our list of everyday concerns. The opposite would be true with my plan to have left-handed voters pay subsidies to right-handed voters. There are roughly nine right-handed Americans for every lefty, so if every right-handed voter were to get some government benefit worth $100, then every left-handed voter would have to pay $900 to finance it. The lefties would be hopping mad about their $900 tax bills, probably to the point that it became their preeminent political concern, while the righties would be only modestly excited about their $100 subsidy. An adept politician would probably improve her career prospects by voting with the lefties. Here is a curious finding that makes more sense in light of what we‘ve just discussed. In countries where farmers make up a small fraction of the population, such as America and Europe, the government provides large subsidies for agriculture. But in countries where the farming population is relatively large, such as China and India, the subsidies go the other way. Farmers are forced to sell their crops at below-market prices so that urban dwellers can get basic food items cheaply. In the one case, farmers get political favors; in the other, they must pay for them. What makes these examples logically consistent is that in both cases the large group subsidizes the smaller group. In politics, the tail can wag the dog. This can have profound effects on the economy.
Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated))
To choose to chew, rather than converse with my fellow dinner guests, was the choice I made when I chose the chewiest item on the menu. I wasn’t being rude. In fact, I was being polite. By ignoring them, I fulfilled and followed the aphorism: “It’s not polite to talk with your mouth full of food.
Jarod Kintz (Seriously delirious, but not at all serious)
Nowadays we live in a world where poor teenagers are willing to maim and murder for a pair of tennis shoes or a designer coat; this is not a consequence of poverty. In dire situations of poverty at earlier times in our nation's history, it would have been unthinkable to the poor to murder someone for a luxury item. While it was common for individuals to steal or attack in the interests of acquiring resources - money, food or something as simple as a winter coat to ward off the cold - there was no value system in place that made a life less important than the material desire for an inessential object.
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
Integrate at least three of these items into your daily diet to be sure you are eating plenty of whole food. 1. Beans—all kinds: black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, black-eyed peas, lentils 2. Greens—spinach, kale, chards, beet tops, fennel tops 3. Sweet potatoes—don’t confuse with yams. 4. Nuts—all kinds: almonds, peanuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts, cashews 5. Olive oil—green, extra-virgin is usually the best. Note that olive oil decomposes quickly, so buy no more than a month’s supply at a time. 6. Oats—slow-cook or Irish steel-cut are best. 7. Barley—either in soups, as a hot cereal, or
Dan Buettner (The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People (Blue Zones, The))
There are a few clear themes that emerge when we synthesize all the findings we’ve looked at so far, and those are jewels you should pluck out of this book, place in your pocket, and carry with you for as long as they serve you. Here are the biggies. Eliminate or drastically reduce your intake of refined grains, refined sugar, and high-omega-6 vegetable oils. No healthy human population has thrived on these items, and the bulk of the evidence points toward their harm. Secure a source of those precious fat-soluble vitamins—whether from shellfish, fish eggs, high-quality dairy, bone marrow, organ meats like liver, or cod liver oil.
Denise Minger (Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health)
some food for thought, if you’re able to digest it. I believe you’re completely out of ammunition and have been for the last few minutes. Am I right?” He waited for an answer he wouldn’t get. “No matter. The only reason I haven’t rushed you, or had one of my men roll a hand grenade your way is because you have something of mine. I wish it back unharmed.” He meant the data disk I’d stolen; he didn’t know I’d already hidden it. “So let’s take a moment to pause in this fracas for some itemization. First, you’re bleeding. I should know; I inflicted your wounds. Plus you’re afraid. And who wouldn’t be in your position? Finally, you and I
Cameron Bane (Pitfall)
Many foods are better off in the trash than in your stomach. The next time you receive unhealthy food as a gift, subtly dispose of it later. When you get a free dessert or candy with a meal, leave it behind. If the item is clearly bad for your health, don’t feel guilty. You are not wasting food. You may be saving lives.
Tom Rath (Eat Move Sleep: How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes)
Resistence takes place on many planes. Occasionally it can be dramatic and public, but most of the decisions we are faced with are mundane and private. What to eat is a choice that we make several times a day, if we are lucky. The cumulative choices we make about food have profound implications. Food offers us many opportunities to resist the culture of mass marketing and commodification. Though consumer action can take many creative and powerful forms, we do not have to be reduced to the role of consumers selecting from seductive convenience items. We can merge appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as cocreators. (Page 27)
Sandor Ellix Katz (Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods)
Sunday night is my personal weekly Halloween. I walk along slowly and drag my fingertips along the bars of chocolate. Goddamn, you sexy little squares. Dark, milk, white, I do not discriminate. I eat it all. Those fluorescent sour candies that only obnoxious little boys like. I suck candy apples clean. If an envelope seal is sweet, I’ll lick it twice. Growing up, I was that kid who would easily get lured into a van with the promise of a lollipop. Sometimes, I let the retail seduction last for twenty minutes, ignoring Marco and feeling up the merchandise, but I’m so tired of male voices. “Five bags of marshmallows,” Marco says in a resigned tone. “Wine. And a can of cat food.” “Cat food is low carb.” He makes no move to scan anything, so I scan each item myself and unroll a few notes from my tips. “Your job involves selling things. Sell them. Change, please.” “I just don’t know why you do this to yourself.” Marco looks at the register with a moral dilemma in his eyes. “Every week you come and do this.” He hesitates and looks over his shoulder where his sugar book sits under a layer of dust. He knows not to try to slip it into my bag with my purchases. “I don’t know why you care, dude. Just serve me. I don’t need your help.” He’s not entirely wrong about my being an addict. I would lick a line of icing sugar off this counter right now if no one were around. I would walk into a cane plantation and bite right in... “Give me my change or I swear to God …” I squeeze my eyes shut and try to tamp down my temper. “Just treat me like any other customer.” He gives me a few coins’ change and bags my sweet, spongy drugs.
Sally Thorne (99 Percent Mine)
I don’t know about your parental units, but mine really have it together when it comes to laundry. They have it together in many other ways, such as having a fully stocked fridge at all times—and not just with the basics, like bread, milk, and eggs. I’m talking about luxury spices that you might only see in a wicker basket on Chopped, vegan food items that Oprah has endorsed, and enough produce to make a fresh summer salad whenever the mood strikes. Just like when Honey Boo Boo said everyone is a little bit gay, it seems like every parent is a little bit Gwyneth Paltrow: the Goop Years after the kids leave the house. And Ma and Pa Robinson are no exception.
Phoebe Robinson (You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain)
If many of your meals are eaten away from home, make the situations meet your needs. Go to restaurants that offer at least one delicious, nutritious item. Ask the waiter to remove the butter and olive oil from the table. Accept invitations to dinner from friends who eat and live healthfully. Bring healthful foods with you whenever possible.
John A. McDougall (The Mcdougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss)
what traveled to these populations in every corner a Western trader could reach were four highly portable and popular items: sugar, molasses, white flour, and white rice. In other words: refined carbohydrates. With these western foods came diseases, and so these illnesses came to be called “Western diseases,” or the “diseases of civilization.
Nina Teicholz (The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet)
There’s also an experiment in which two monkeys were able to obtain a coveted food item by pulling together on a rope, neither one being able to accomplish this task solo. But the food was then available to only one of them. If this one refused to share, the second monkey would in future retaliate by refusing to pull on the rope. He preferred to punish the selfish monkey rather than take a chance at getting some food himself. You know the feeling. Everyone knows it. Could it be that the revenge module is very ancient and thus deeply embedded in us? Some cultures encourage its expression more than others do, but it seems to be omnipresent. Simply telling people they ought not to feel vengeful because it isn’t nice will not usually work.
Margaret Atwood (Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth)
23 January On the way home, a visit - forced - to Dean Street Tesco. What a dump this chain is. Reduced their staff as much possible in favour of shoppers checking their own food out, cabinets missing items, one variety of fruit and a 15 minute wait for one of the few attendants to go get a bottle of vodka. A must to avoid. A sort of shopping equivalent of our shoddy government.
Alan Rickman (Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman)
The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from "creative" banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data and the manufacturing of products designed to be obsolescent almost immediately- and I would argue that a great deal of what we're doing should just stop. Interestingly, people of all sorts are beginning to reconnect to skills and sensibilities that were bulldozed in the frenzy of 'development' that remade our world during the past two generations. Those orchards and fields that once covered the peninsula, the East Bay, and Silicon Valley are haunting us now, as we seek to relocalize our food sources and our economy more generally. People are relearning how to reuse things, how to fix broken items, and even how to make new things from the scraps of industrial waste. The world shaped by capitalist modernization is not good for human life and is certainly rough on the health of the planet. The hollowing out of communities whose lives were once anchored in the old Produce Market area or who shared life along the vibrant Fillmore blues corridor is precisely what people are trying to overcome.
Rebecca Solnit (Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas)
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
While the West was developing a whole food abundance by-product industry ranging from “stay in shape” movements to armies of dietitians, Soviet people stood in lines, or used all kinds of irregular distribution systems, such as “gift sets” (podarochnye nabory) for employees of companies and organizations, to get access to high demand items varying from canned crab meat to even canned green peas and high-end cold cuts.
Andrei Martyanov (Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse)
In addition, tastes had begun to change in Europe. Anxieties about sexuality led to the shunning of dietary items that were thought to overstimulate the body and create propensities for the “solitary vice.”2 The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley denounced spices as well as the spice trade as “harmful to the moral fibre” of the body and the nation.3 Upper-class Europeans, who had once relished spicy food, now began to take pride in the blandness of their cuisine.
Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis)
Dana daydreamed of one day being able to set her agenda at B.Altman with the same courage and tenacity as the woman who was now driving the VW while speaking animatedly about her travel plans for the near future. She would be journeying to India in search of exotic merchandise for the store’s Indian extravaganza, a lavish event planned by Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello to compete with Bloomingdale’s Retailing as Theater movement. The movement was the brainchild of Bloomingdale’s Marvin Traub, who staged elaborate presentations such as China: Heralding the Dawn of a New Era. Typical extravaganzas featured fashion, clothing, food, and art from various regions of the world. “I’ll bring back enough items to make Bloomingdale’s blush!” Nina said confidently. “And I’m not just talking sweaters, hats, and walking sticks. I’ll stop first in the Himalayas and prowl the Landour Bazaar.” Lynn Steward ~ A Very Good Life
Lynn Steward (A Very Good Life (Dana McGarry Novel, #1))
A few minutes later Agnes had reached the market and was battling through the throng. She stepped over rotting offal and cabbage leaves to prod breasts of pheasant and partridge. She sniffed oysters and herrings and asked the prices of oranges, shouting her requirements over strident cries of "New mackerel!" and "White turnips and fine carrots, ho!" and "Fine China oranges and fresh juicy lemons!" She watched a juggler with blackened teeth catching knives in his mouth, then sampled a corner of gingerbread so spicy tears welled in her eyes. The street child had slipped from her thoughts. Within the hour, Agnes had arranged deliveries with half a dozen tradesmen whose goods she could not carry, and jotted every item and its price in her notebook for Mrs Tooley's accounts. In her basket she had carefully stowed sweet oranges, Jordan almonds, two dozen pullet eggs, a pickled salmon, half a pound of angelica, the same of glacee cherries.
Janet Gleeson (The Thief Taker)
Two people wander around John Lewis picking out lovely items for themselves, and then they make other people pay for them. It’s bare-faced effrontery. They choose things like plates, bowls and cutlery—I mean, what are they doing at the moment: shoveling food from packets into their mouths with their bare hands? I simply fail to see how the act of legally formalizing a human relationship necessitates friends, family and coworkers upgrading the contents of their kitchen for them.
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
Sure, there are good things, lots, sure, blow jobs, chocolate mousse, winning streaks, the warm fire in your enemy’s house, good book, hunk of cheese, flagon of ale, office raise, championship ring, the misfortunes of others, sure, good things, beyond count, queens, kings, old clocks, comfy clothes, lots, innumerable items in stock, baseball cards and bingo buttons, pot-au-feu, listen, we could go on and on like a long speech, sure it’s a great world, sights to see, canyons full of canyon, corn on the cob, the eroded great pyramids, contaminated towns, eroded hillsides, deleafed trees, those whitened limbs stark and noble in the evening light, geeeez, what gobs of good things, no shit, service elevators, what would we do without, and all the inventions of man, Krazy Glue and food fights, girls wrestling amid mounds of Jell-O, drafts of dark beer, no end of blue sea, formerly full of fish, eroded hopes, eruptions of joy, because we’re winning, have won, won, won what? the . . . the Title.
William H. Gass (Tests of Time)
According to Sebastian, ideas have run away with the world. He hates chain stores and fast-food restaurants, mass-produced items and fashionable clothes—any instance of something which is repeated across the world regardless of local context. These things deny the uniqueness of each moment and each person. They function as if we were all printed out of plastic, like egg boxes, and they try to make us function the same way. They are the intrusion of perfection into our grubby, smelly, sweaty living place.
Nick Harkaway (The Gone-Away World)
The Fuck It List shines in all its laminated glory. I smile at the twenty items I boldly, yet semi drunkenly, chose. Go skinny-dipping. Buy a vibrator. Try foreplay with ice. Kiss a foreigner. Do karaoke while drinking.  Try new food. Go skydiving. Watch porn. Play strip poker. Get tied up. Be blindfolded. Come from oral sex. Try mirror sex. Have sex in public. Have sex against a wall.  Get high. Have a quickie. Have outdoor sex. Kiss someone in front of the Eiffel Tower. Experience multiple orgasms in one night.
Lauren Asher (Collided (Dirty Air, #2))
There’s a concept in psychology called “decision fatigue” that marketers use to exploit consumers. It appears humans have a limited capacity to make many decisions in one short stretch of time, and the quality of our decisions will deteriorate to the extent that we eventually begin making downright irrational choices. Ever wonder why supermarkets stack the junk food at the checkout counter? After wading through the forty thousand items in the average supermarket,46 we end up with less willpower to resist impulse purchases.
Michael Greger (How Not To Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
If you are like many people, you can see for yourself. Just go to your kitchen and look in your pantry. It is probably full of items bought in the distant past. In this you are not alone. Kitchen cabinets across the United States are full of soups, jams, and canned food that have not been used for ages. So common is this phenomenon that food researchers have a name for it: they call these items cabinet castaways. Some estimates suggest that one in ten items bought in the grocery store is destined to become a cabinet castaway.
Sendhil Mullainathan (Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much)
For Wendy and Sam, the best rule was "everything has a home.” We made a list of their main household items and where they went - for example, pill bottles in the bathroom medicine cabinet, laundry in the hamper, and food in the kitchen cabinets. This may seem like a fundamental rule that everyone learns as a child, but many hoarders didn’t pick that up either because they grew up in hoarding houses themselves, or they grew up in traumatic households where finding a meal and avoiding a beating was a daily reality. Cleaning was the least of their worries.
Matt Paxton (The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter)
This is an item used in Chinese cuisine. It's made from the same beans you use to make Chinese vermicelli, but it's been formed into a thin sheet instead of into noodles. Because it's tasteless and odorless in itself, we're obviously meant to focus on the mouthfeel, enjoying the firmness with our teeth and the silkiness with our tongues. As far as the taste goes, the important thing is the dressing... Hmm... the dashi is perfect, and the balance of flavors is well done too. There's vinegar in it, but the strength of the vinegar has been skillfully toned down.
Tetsu Kariya (Japanese Cuisine)
A primary goal of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers. Nearly every food in a bag, box, or jar has been enhanced in some way, if only with additional flavoring. Companies spend millions of dollars to discover the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato chip or the perfect amount of fizz in a soda. Entire departments are dedicated to optimizing how a product feels in your mouth—a quality known as orosensation. French fries, for example, are a potent combination—golden brown and crunchy on the outside, light and smooth on the inside. Other processed foods enhance dynamic contrast, which refers to items with a combination of sensations, like crunchy and creamy. Imagine the gooeyness of melted cheese on top of a crispy pizza crust, or the crunch of an Oreo cookie combined with its smooth center. With natural, unprocessed foods, you tend to experience the same sensations over and over—how’s that seventeenth bite of kale taste? After a few minutes, your brain loses interest and you begin to feel full. But foods that are high in dynamic contrast keep the experience novel and interesting, encouraging you to eat more. Ultimately, such strategies enable food scientists to find the “bliss point” for each product—the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more. The result, of course, is that you overeat because hyperpalatable foods are more attractive to the human brain. As Stephan Guyenet, a neuroscientist who specializes in eating behavior and obesity, says, “We’ve gotten too good at pushing our own buttons.” The modern food industry, and the overeating habits it has spawned, is just one example of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change: Make it attractive. The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
If only Cousin West were with us,” Pandora said wistfully... “I miss him too,” Cassandra said. “Oh, I don’t miss him,” Pandora told her impishly, “I was just thinking that we could buy more things if he were here to help carry the packages.” “We’ll set aside the items you choose,” Devon said, “and have them sent to Ravenel House tomorrow.” “I want you both to remember,” Kathleen told the twins, “the pleasure of shopping lasts only until it’s time to settle the bill.” “But we won’t have to do that,” Pandora pointed out. “All the bills go to Lord Trenear.” Devon grinned. “I’ll remind you of this conversation when there’s no money left to buy food.
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
Megan was able to get me the single most important item in this entire house.” “She got you that new vibrator?” “Jesus . . .” “Oh, the cookbook, right,” he said, remembering. Megan used to work for the Food Network, and was able to secure me a signed copy of the original Barefoot Contessa cookbook. By Ina Garten. Signed to me by the way; one of those “Best wishes, Ina” deals. It honest-to-God said: To Caroline— Best Wishes, Ina Go ahead and be jealous. I’ll wait. Simon, on the other hand, would not. “Okay, so you remember Megan.” “Remember her? Did you not hear me say single most important—” “I got it, babe. Are you at all curious about hearing what they’re up to, or are you just going to spend some head-space time dreaming of Ina and her kitchen?” “And me in her kitchen. If you’re going to get into my daydream, you have to set the scene correctly. I’m there with Ina, in her kitchen in the Hamptons, and we’re cooking up something wonderful for you and her husband, Jeffrey. Something with roasted chicken, which she’ll teach me how to carve perfectly. And roasted carrots, which she’ll pronounce with that subtle New York accent of hers, where it sounds like she’s saying kerrits.” “I worry about you sometimes,” Simon said, reaching over to feel my forehead. “I’m perfectly fine. Don’t worry about me, I’ll continue my fantasy later.
Alice Clayton (Last Call (Cocktail, #4.5))
Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.
Tony Hsieh (Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose)
The sign over supermarket express checkout lanes, TEN ITEMS OR LESS, is a grammatical error, they say, and as a result of their carping whole-food and other upscale supermarkets have replaced the signs with TEN ITEMS OR FEWER. The director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance has apologized for his organization’s popular T-shirt that reads ONE LESS CAR, conceding that it should read ONE FEWER CAR. By this logic, liquor stores should refuse to sell beer to customers who are fewer than twenty-one years old, law-abiding motorists should drive at fewer than seventy miles an hour, and the poverty line should be defined by those who make fewer than eleven thousand five hundred dollars a year. And once you master this distinction, well, that’s one fewer thing for you to worry about.45
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
Soon after World War II, a tired-looking woman entered a store and asked the owner for enough food to make a Christmas dinner for her children. When he inquired how much she could afford, she answered, “My husband was killed in the war. Truthfully, I have nothing to offer but a little prayer.” The man was not very sentimental, for a grocery store cannot be run like a breadline. So he said, “Write your prayer on a paper.” To his surprise she plucked a little folded note out of her pocket and handed it to him, saying, “I already did that.” As the grocer took the paper, an idea struck him. Without even reading the prayer, he put it on the weight side of his old-fashioned scales, saying, “We shall see how much food this is worth.” To his surprise, the scale would not go down when he put a loaf of bread on the other side. To his even greater astonishment, it would not balance when he added many more items. Finally he blurted out, “Well, that’s all the scales will hold anyway. Here’s a bag. You’ll have to put them in yourself. I’m busy.” With a tearful “thank you,” the lady went happily on her way. The grocer later found that the mechanism of the scales was out of order, but as the years passed, he often wondered if that really was the answer to what had occurred. Why did the woman have the prayer already written to satisfy his unpremeditated demands? Why did she come at exactly the time the mechanism was broken? Frequently he looked at that slip of paper upon which the woman’s prayer was written, for amazingly enough, it read, “Please, dear Lord, give us this day our daily bread!” —Henry Bosch
Our Daily Bread Ministries (Prayer (Strength for the Soul))
know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts,” he says. “The weather, which, as they’re farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat—this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we’re planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in a life but we usually do it while we’re talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It’s the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.
Marlena de Blasi (A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure)
Darcy rolled the quill between his fingers and looked with benign pity upon his cousin. “You should, you know. It’s a wonderful feeling to be the head of your home, with a wife who adores you and whom you adore in return.” Fitzwilliam whipped out his pocket watch. “Oh, look at that. I have to run." Ignoring him, Darcy turned his face to the fire, a besotted look in his eyes and a smile on his lips. “It’s a good feeling to care for your family and their well-being. It makes you finally grow up, I can tell you.” He sighed deeply and began attacking his figures once more, his mind filled with unlimited love and joy, thinking on his upcoming paternal responsibilities. “I myself find women to be unbelievably wonderful creations.” “I suppose you will continue with this treacle even as I beg you to stop.” “Well, think about it…” Darcy continued, looking up from his work. Fitzwilliam groaned. “They give back to you double and triple whatever little you hand them.” “I think I’m going to be ill, Darcy. Please stop.” “You hand them disparate items of food, and they give you back a wonderful meal. You provide them with four walls and a floor, and they give you back a loving home. You give them your seed,” Darcy’s eyes misted, his voice choked with emotion. “You give them your seed, and they give you back the most precious thing of all—a child…” They sat in silence together. “And God help you if you give them shit.” Fitzwilliam was calmly packing tobacco into his pipe, and his eyes met Darcy’s for a moment. Understanding flashed between them. “Amen to that, Cousin.” Darcy crashed down to earth, quickly resuming his work
Karen V. Wasylowski
As much as I wanted to make all of our customers happy, our farm inevitably began to sell out of certain items each week... I had been taught that businesses should constantly grow and expand. Owners should demand annual productivity increases, and resources were to be tapped for maximum potential. Like most things in our melting-pot society, the message was a uniquely American blend -- equal parts Manifest Destiny, Yankee ingenuity, and Protestant work ethic. A dash of Horatio Alger seemed to be thrown in for good luck. Be more! Live more! Consume! Produce! ...What if, at the end of the day, just growing what we could grow was good enough? And what if we genuinely wanted other family farms to succeed as well? These were the ideas I valued most, and the questions I wanted to answer. Everything else began to feel like noise.
Forrest Pritchard (Gaining Ground: A Story Of Farmers' Markets, Local Food, And Saving The Family Farm)
Based on this data, Trichopoulou published a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 2003, in which she concluded that adhering to a “traditional Mediterranean diet,” which includes “a high intake of olive oil” was associated with a “significant and substantial reduction in overall mortality.” It is therefore a shock to find out that in this study, Trichopoulou never actually measured the olive oil consumption of her subjects. It was not an item on the food-frequency questionnaire she used, either as a foodstuff eaten directly or as a fat used in cooking. Instead, she “estimated” its use from the questionnaire’s list of cooked dishes, making assumptions about how Greeks might cook them.XVII This shortcoming is not mentioned in the NEJM paper, however, and “olive oil” is listed in the paper without any explanation of its derivation.XVIII
Nina Teicholz (The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet)
At Booths, over one-quarter of the transport footprint comes from the very small amount of air freight in their supply chains—typically used for expensive items that perish quickly. Conversely, most of their food miles are by ship (partly because the U.K. is an island), but because ships can carry food around the world around 100 times more efficiently than planes, they account for less than 1 percent of Booths’ total footprint. The message here is that it is OK to eat apples, oranges, bananas, or whatever you like from anywhere in the world, as long as it has not been on a plane or thousands of miles by road. Road miles are roughly as carbon intensive as air miles, but in the U.K. the distances involved tend not to be too bad, whereas in North America they can be thousands of miles. Booths is a regional supermarket with just one warehouse, so their own distribution is not a big carbon deal, and they have been working hard on further improvements.
Mike Berners-Lee (How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything)
The simplest, easiest, most beautiful way of cleaning the parasites from your muscle memory is taking haritaki powder. Don't underestimate the power of haritaki, triphala or ashwagandha. These are all not just stomach cleansing items, they cleanse the parasites sitting inside your muscle memory triggering you to get addicted to certain food or behavior or certain habits. Almost all physical disorders and diseases are due to parasites sitting inside your muscle memory. Detoxing your muscle memory literally transforms your life to royal life. If you want to become a king, all you need is take haritaki and triphala churna everyday In mahabharata, bhishma’s enemy drishtadyumna’s sister - shikandi (she is actually napumsaka), takes birth again just to kill bhishma.It means even after death she is not ready to give up her anger.When the parasites sit in your biomemory level, they become part of your very cognition about you. That is the most dangerous.
Paramahamsa Nithyananda
Say what you will of religion, but draw applicable conclusions and comparisons to reach a consensus. Religion = Reli = Prefix to Relic, or an ancient item. In days of old, items were novel, and they inspired devotion to the divine, and in the divine. Now, items are hypnotizing the masses into submission. Take Christ for example. When he broke bread in the Bible, people actually ate, it was useful to their bodies. Compare that to the politics, governments and corrupt, bumbling bureacrats and lobbyists in the economic recession of today. When they "broke bread", the economy nearly collapsed, and the benefactors thereof were only a select, decadent few. There was no bread to be had, so they asked the people for more! Breaking bread went from meaning sharing food and knowledge and wealth of mind and character, to meaning break the system, being libelous, being unaccountable, and robbing the earth. So they married people's paychecks to the land for high ransoms, rents and mortgages, effectively making any renter or landowner either a slave or a slave master once more. We have higher class toys to play with, and believe we are free. The difference is, the love of profit has the potential, and has nearly already enslaved all, it isn't restriced by culture anymore. Truth is not religion. Governments are religions. Truth does not encourage you to worship things. Governments are for profit. Truth is for progress. Governments are about process. When profit goes before progress, the latter suffers. The truest measurement of the quality of progress, will be its immediate and effective results without the aid of material profit. Quality is meticulous, it leaves no stone unturned, it is thorough and detail oriented. It takes its time, but the results are always worth the investment. Profit is quick, it is ruthless, it is unforgiving, it seeks to be first, but confuses being first with being the best, it is long scale suicidal, it is illusory, it is temporary, it is vastly unfulfilling. It breaks families, and it turns friends. It is single track minded, and small minded as well. Quality, would never do that, my friends. Ironic how dealing and concerning with money, some of those who make the most money, and break other's monies are the most unaccountable. People open bank accounts, over spend, and then expect to be held "unaccountable" for their actions. They even act innocent and unaccountable. But I tell you, everything can and will be counted, and accounted for. Peace can be had, but people must first annhilate the love of items, over their own kind.
Justin Kyle McFarlane Beau
Your first sign something may be amiss comes quickly, the moment you get off the plane at the airport in Baltimore. After months of deprivation, American excess is overwhelming. Crowds of self-important bustling businessmen. Shrill and impatient advertising that saturates your eyes and ears. Five choices of restaurant, with a hundred menu items each, only a half-minute walk away at all times. In the land you just left, dinners are uniformly brown and served on trays when served at all. I was disoriented by the choice, the lights, the infinite variety of gummy candy that filled an entire wall of the convenience store, a gluttonous buffet repeated every four gates. The simple pleasure of a cup of coffee after a good night’s sleep, sleep you haven’t had since you received your deployment orders, seems overly simple when reunited with such a vast volume of overindulgent options. But the shock wears off, more quickly for some, but eventually for most. Fast food and alcohol are seductive, and I didn’t fight too hard. Your old routine is easy to fall back into, preferences and tastes return. It’s not hard to be a fussy, overstuffed American. After a couple of months, home is no longer foreign, and you are free to resume your old life. I thought I did. Resume my old life, that is. I was wrong.
Brian Castner (The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows)
Nartok shows me an example of Arctic “greens”: cutout number 13, Caribou Stomach Contents. Moss and lichen are tough to digest, unless, like caribou, you have a multichambered stomach in which to ferment them. So the Inuit let the caribou have a go at it first. I thought of Pat Moeller and what he’d said about wild dogs and other predators eating the stomachs and stomach contents of their prey first. “And wouldn’t we all,” he’d said, “be better off.” If we could strip away the influences of modern Western culture and media and the high-fructose, high-salt temptations of the junk-food sellers, would we all be eating like Inuit elders, instinctively gravitating to the most healthful, nutrient-diverse foods? Perhaps. It’s hard to say. There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings—fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef—the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow.
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
Mr. Fish told my mother that he would make a “gift” of Sagamore’s body—to my grandmother’s roses. He implied that a dead dog was highly prized, among serious gardeners; my grandmother wished to be brought into the discussion, and it was quickly agreed which rosebushes would be temporarily uprooted, and replanted, and Mr. Fish began with the spade. The digging was much softer in the rose bed than it would have been in Mr. Fish’s yard, and the young couple and their baby from down the street were sufficiently moved to attend the burial, along with a scattering of Front Street’s other children; even my grandmother asked to be called when the hole was ready, and my mother—although the day had turned much colder—wouldn’t even go inside for a coat. She wore dark-gray flannel slacks and a black, V-necked sweater, and stood hugging herself, standing first on one foot, then on the other, while Owen gathered strange items to accompany Sagamore to the underworld. Owen was restrained from putting the football in the burlap sack, because Mr. Fish—while digging the grave—maintained that football was still a game that would give us some pleasure, when we were “a little older.” Owen found a few well-chewed tennis balls, and Sagamore’s food dish, and his dog blanket for trips in the car; these he included in the burlap sack, together with a scattering of the brightest maple leaves—and a leftover lamb chop that Lydia had been saving for Sagamore (from last night’s supper).
John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)
A second element in the creation of commercial value is scarcity, the separation of people from whatever they might want or need. In artificial environments, where humans are separated from the sources of their survival, everything obtains a condition of relative scarcity and therefore value. There is the old story of the native living on a Pacific island, relaxing in a house on the beach, picking fruit from the tree and spearing fish in the water. A businessman arrives on the island, buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. Then he hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice little cinder-block house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it. The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for. You may be living on the exact spot where a fruit tree once fed people. Now the fruit comes from five hundred miles away and costs thirty-five cents apiece. It is in the separation that the opportunity for profit resides. When the basic necessities are not scarce—in those places where food is still wild and abundant, for example—economic value can only be applied to new items. Candy bars, bottled or chemical milk, canned tuna, electrical appliances and CocaCola have all been intensively marketed in countries new to the market system. Because these products hadn’t existed in those places before, they are automatically relatively scarce and potentially valuable.
Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television)
Although there are certainly a number Hair Loss regarding treatments offering great results, experts say that normal thinning hair treatment can easily yield some of the best rewards for anybody concerned with the fitness of their head of hair. Most people choose to handle their hair loss along with medications or even surgical treatment, for example Minoxidil or even head of hair hair transplant. Nevertheless many individuals fail to realize that treatment as well as surgical procedure are costly and may have several dangerous unwanted effects and also risks. The particular safest and a lot cost efficient form of thinning hair treatment therapy is natural hair loss remedy, which includes healthful going on a diet, herbal solutions, exercise as well as good hair care strategies. Natural thinning hair therapy is just about the "Lost Art" associated with locks restore and is frequently ignored as a type of treatment among the extremely expensive options. A simple main within normal hair loss treatment methods are that the identical food items which are great for your health, are good for your hair. Although hair loss may be caused by many other factors, not enough correct diet will cause thinning hair in most people. Foods which are loaded with protein, lower in carbohydrates, and have decreased excess fat articles can help in maintaining healthful hair as well as preventing hair loss. For instance, efa's, seen in spinach, walnuts, soy products, seafood, sardines, sunflower seed products and also canola acrylic, are important eating essentials valuable in maintaining hair wholesome. The omega-3 and also rr Half a dozen efas contain anti-inflammatory properties that are valuable in maintaining healthier hair. Insufficient amounts of these types of efa's may lead to more rapidly hair loss. A deficiency in nutritional B6 and also vitamin B12 can also result in excessive hair thinning. Food items containing B vitamins, like liver organ, poultry, seafood and soybean are important to healthier hair growth and normal thinning hair treatment. Both vitamin B6 and also vitamin B12 are simply within protein rich foods, which are needed to preserve natural hair growth. Vitamin b are incredibly essential to your diet plan to avoid extreme hair thinning. Certain nutritional vitamins as well as supplements are often essential to recover protein amounts which in turn, are helpful in stopping thinning hair. Growing b vitamin consumption in your diet is an effective method to avoid or perhaps treat hair damage naturally. Alongside the thought of eating healthily regarding vitamins, nutrients and also vitamins and minerals are also the utilization of herbal treatments which are good at preventing hair thinning as a organic thinning hair therapy. One of the herbal remedies producing healthcare head lines will be Saw Palmetto. Although most studies regarding Saw palmetto extract happen to be for your management of prostatic disease, more modern numerous studies have been carried out about its effectiveness for hair thinning. The actual plant has been seen as to operate in eliminating benign prostatic disease by lowering degrees of Dihydrotestosterone, the industry known cause of androgenic alopecia, the medical phrase regarding man or woman routine hair loss. While there isn't any clinical trials supporting this herb's usefulness being a normal hair thinning treatment, there is certainly some dependable investigation proving that it could decrease androgen exercise within
Normal Thinning hair Therapy The particular Dropped Art associated with Head of hair Repair
Step 6. Ensure That Your Environment Supports Your Goals Some people subscribe to the philosophy that if the cure doesn’t hurt, it can’t be working. When it comes to permanent changes in diet and lifestyle, the opposite philosophy is the best: The less painful the program, the more likely it is to succeed. Take steps to make your new life easier. Modify your daily behavior so that your surroundings work for you, not against you. Have the right pots, pans, and utensils to cook with; have the right spices, herbs, and seasonings to make your meals delicious; have your cookbooks handy and review them often to make your dishes lively and appealing. Make sure you give yourself the time to shop for food and cook your meals. Change your life to support your health. Don’t sacrifice your health for worthless conveniences. Avoid temptation. Very few people could quit smoking without ridding their house of cigarettes. Alcoholics avoid bars to stop drinking. Protect yourself by protecting your environment. Decrease the time when you are exposed to rich foods to avoid testing your “willpower.” One of the best ways to do this is to throw all the rich foods out of the house. Just as important is to replace harmful foods with those used in the McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss. If many of your meals are eaten away from home, make the situations meet your needs. Go to restaurants that offer at least one delicious, nutritious item. Ask the waiter to remove the butter and olive oil from the table. Accept invitations to dinner from friends who eat and live healthfully. Bring healthful foods with you whenever possible. Keep those people close who support your efforts and do not try to sabotage you. Ask family and friends to stop giving you boxes of candy and cakes as gifts. Instead suggest flowers, a card, or a fruit basket. Tell your mother that if she really loves you she’ll feed you properly, forgoing her traditional beef stroganoff.
John A. McDougall (The Mcdougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss)
Some of these bots are already arriving in 2021 in more primitive forms. Recently, when I was in quarantine at home in Beijing, all of my e-commerce packages and food were delivered by a robot in my apartment complex. The package would be placed on a sturdy, wheeled creature resembling R2-D2. It could wirelessly summon the elevator, navigate autonomously to my door, and then call my phone to announce its arrival, so I could take the package, after which it would return to reception. Fully autonomous door-to-door delivery vans are also being tested in Silicon Valley. By 2041, end-to-end delivery should be pervasive, with autonomous forklifts moving items in the warehouse, drones and autonomous vehicles delivering the boxes to the apartment complex, and the R2-D2 bot delivering the package to each home. Similarly, some restaurants now use robotic waiters to reduce human contact. These are not humanoid robots, but autonomous trays-on-wheels that deliver your order to your table. Robot servers today are both gimmicks and safety measures, but tomorrow they may be a normal part of table service for many restaurants, apart from the highest-end establishments or places that cater to tourists, where the human service is integral to the restaurant’s charm. Robots can be used in hotels (to clean and to deliver laundry, suitcases, and room service), offices (as receptionists, guards, and cleaning staff), stores (to clean floors and organize shelves), and information outlets (to answer questions and give directions at airports, hotels, and offices). In-home robots will go beyond the Roomba. Robots can wash dishes (not like a dishwasher, but as an autonomous machine in which you can pile all the greasy pots, utensils, and plates without removing leftover food, with all of them emerging cleaned, disinfected, dried, and organized). Robots can cook—not like a humanoid chef, but like an automated food processor connected to a self-cooking pot. Ingredients go in and the cooked dish comes out. All of these technology components exist now—and will be fine-tuned and integrated in the decade to come. So be patient. Wait for robotics to be perfected and for costs to go down. The commercial and subsequently personal applications will follow. By 2041, it’s not far-fetched to say that you may be living a lot more like the Jetsons!
Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
Try any one of these things each day: A) Sleep eight hours. B) Eat two meals instead of three. C) No TV. D) No junk food. E) No complaining for one whole day. F) No gossip. G) Return an e-mail from five years ago. H) Express thanks to a friend. I) Watch a funny movie or a stand-up comic. J) Write down a list of ideas. The ideas can be about anything. K) Read a spiritual text. Any one that is inspirational to you. The Bible, The Tao te Ching, anything you want. L) Say to yourself when you wake up, “I’m going to save a life today.” Keep an eye out for that life you can save. M) Take up a hobby. Don’t say you don’t have time. Learn the piano. Take chess lessons. Do stand-up comedy. Write a novel. Do something that takes you out of your current rhythm. N) Write down your entire schedule. The schedule you do every day. Cross out one item and don’t do that anymore. O) Surprise someone. P) Think of ten people you are grateful for. Q) Forgive someone. You don’t have to tell them. Just write it down on a piece of paper and burn the paper. It turns out this has the same effect in terms of releasing oxytocin in the brain as actually forgiving them in person. R) Take the stairs instead of the elevator. S) I’m going to steal this next one from the 1970s pop psychology book Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: when you find yourself thinking of that special someone who is causing you grief, think very quietly, “No.” If you think of him and (or?) her again, think loudly, “No!” Again? Whisper, “No!” Again, say it. Louder. Yell it. Louder. And so on. T) Tell someone every day that you love them. U) Don’t have sex with someone you don’t love. V) Shower. Scrub. Clean the toxins off your body. W) Read a chapter in a biography about someone who is an inspiration to you. X) Make plans to spend time with a friend. Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about. Z) Deep breathing. When the vagus nerve is inflamed, your breathing becomes shallower. Your breath becomes quick. It’s fight-or-flight time! You are panicking. Stop it! Breathe deep. Let me tell you something: most people think “yoga” is all those exercises where people are standing upside down and doing weird things. In the Yoga Sutras, written in 300 B.C., there are 196 lines divided into four chapters. In all those lines, ONLY THREE OF THEM refer to physical exercise. It basically reads, “Be able to sit up straight.” That’s it. That’s the only reference in the Yoga Sutras to physical exercise. Claudia always tells me that yogis measure their lives in breaths, not years. Deep breathing is what keeps those breaths going.
James Altucher (Choose Yourself)