“I don't understand an age where meanings dissolve and all we're left with are names that last for a minute, where symbols don't symbolize anything but a marketed product, where politics and money create greatness. I'm glad to have been alive during times when this was not as true: when the market was not determining what food we wanted, then giving exactly what we wanted back to us, thus creating a dangerous loop, because in this vicious circle expectations are granted, not questioned or surpassed.January 1999”

“And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?”

“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would rec­ognize today.”

“When the product is right, you don't have to be a great marketer.”

“The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.”

“We just want to be where we're supposed to be. We just want to be with the people we want to be with. I don't think that's asking for too much, ya know what I'm saying?”