#culture

Our culture tries to convince us on just about every front that more is better. More is a sign of wealth, luxury, power. Gone are the days when meals were moments of connection and conversation; now it’s all about consumption and calories. ↗

— Mary DeTurris Poust

#consumption #culture #eating #food #mealtime

Biological evidence indicates that man, evolving with his food plants, developed horticulture and agriculture in both hemispheres at a time which may well have reached far back into the Pleistocene. ↗

— Russell Lord

#archaeology #history #horticulture #food

Charity is one of those remarkable words that helps to identify the fault lines of a culture. ↗

— Janet Poppendieck

#culture #social-inequality #food

In a world of democracies, in a world where the great projects that have set humanity on fire are the projects of the emancipation of individuals from entrenched social division and hierarchy; in such a world individuals must never be puppets or prisoners of the societies or cultures into which they have been born. ↗

— Roberto Unger

#born #cultures #democracies #division #emancipation

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week...That's ridiculous. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#appalachian-trail #cars #hiking #transporation #walking

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon. ↗

— Rachel Cohn

#pop-culture #life

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#farming #soil #age

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it ↗

— Jason Najum

#culture-critique #inspirational #memoir #philosophy #pop-culture

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth. ↗

— Wes Jackson

#storytelling #tradition #intelligence

If you invest all your energy in economics, world commerce, parliamentarianism, military engagements, power and power politics, -if you take the quantum of intelligence, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming that you embody and expend it all in this one direction, there there won't be any left for the other direction. Culture and the state - let us be honest with ourselves - these are adversaries. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#economics #germany #intelligence