Margaret Visser - Much depends on dinner (1986)

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Eating olives, in our society (as opposed to that of the Mediterranean, where children are taught to like olives at an early age) is 'sophisticated' behaviour.... Eating olives, one is grown up, broad-minded, and a person, as we say, 'of taste.'

Margaret Visser
Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need it.

Margaret Visser
The extent to which we take everyday objects for granted is the precise extent to which they govern and inform our lives.

Margaret Visser
Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water.... It preserves things from corruption — even as it corrodes other things with its bite. A little of it fertilizes the land; a lot sterilizes it.

Margaret Visser
Food-what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cooking and eating it-is one of the means by which a society creates itself and acts out its aims and fantasies.

Margaret Visser
One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: 'light' food. In buying 'light' food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place...

Margaret Visser