American meat

"I have never eaten hamburgers like them. Even cold, there was the intense sweetness of the bun and the juicy meat of the patty and the punch of the pickles. This was what America meant to me: food with a certain shamelessness, lunch with its knickers around its ankles."

Jay Rayner in "Age of Innocence" in "Best Food Writing 2014"

"Cooked"

"So maybe the reason we like to watch cooking on television and read about cooking in books is that there are things about cooking we really miss. We might not feel we have the time or energy (or the knowledge) to do it ourselves every day, but we're not prepared to see it disappear from our lives altogether. 

"If cooking is, as the anthropologists tell us, a defining human activity - the act with which culture begins, according to Claude Levi-Strauss - then maybe we shouldn't be surprised that watching its processes unfold would strike deep emotional chords."

Michael Pollan in "Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation"