You know we fixate on the food so much itself: “Oh, the ultimate brownie or the ultimate this or that” -- well, let me tell you something: It’s all poop in about 12 hours, okay? The real power that food has is its ability to connect human beings to each other -- that’s the stuff right there and, to me, everything else is secondary to that.
Interpretation
Food is not just nourishment; it serves as a means to bring people together.
Alton Brown emphasizes that while we often focus on the culinary aspects and the perfection of food, the true value lies in its power to unite people. The enjoyment of food becomes secondary to the connections it fosters among individuals, highlighting the importance of shared experiences over the mere act of eating.
In practice
During a family gathering, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of togetherness over the meal itself.
The kitchen's a laboratory, and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology, chemistry, physics. Yes, there's history. Yes, there's artistry. Yes, to all of that. But what happened there, what actually happens to the food is all science.
Although I don't take myself very seriously, I do take my work extraordinarily seriously.
A home cook who relies too much on a recipe is sort of like a pilot who reads the plane's instruction manual while flying.
Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.
Everything in food is science. The only subjective part is when you eat it.
Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.
I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews!
And one thing that I always believed and that I knew for certain was that I could never have sustained a personal relationship while I worked this hard, or while I was that driven this intensely by the story.
I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.
One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.
I don't dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it's gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin' White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It's connected to where you are today.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.