Three quotes this week. They all share a common theme despite their diverse sources.

Marketers know what we want. There is hardly an industrial-grade fast-food burger that is not advertised with images of dewy, plump tomatoes, wholesome bread straight from the oven, some kind of premium beef. The reality of flaccid vegetable matter, a soggy bun and tasteless meat is, of course, rather different. But that’s not really news—jokes about fast food that doesn’t look anything like the commercials aren’t even funny anymore. What is significant is that we are so mesmerized by the promise of fresh, wholesome food that we can be tricked into eating something else. Packages wouldn’t be decorated with images of traditional farms and contented animals, and commercials wouldn’t depict chefs and italian grandmothers carefully tasting this or that “authentic” recipe, if these weren’t the things we all think of as important.

The desire for food grown and prepared with care is not elitist or limited to a band of hippies. It’s what we all want.

Similarly, just as no one says they want tasteless, truck-ripened vegetables or feed-lot beef, no one deliberately plans a rushed meal. And yet, again, that is what we end up eating, wolfing down burgers in our cars or slurping a plastic tray of microwaved pasta as we stand hunched over the kitchen sink. Fast-food companies rarely show lonely people eating in their cublicles at work, or solitary figures heedlessly munching as they watch television at night. As usual, the marketers seem to know what we really want: they show smiling families gathered around the dining-room table. Talking, laughing, spending time together. If marketers know what we want, why don’t we get what we want?

In other words, we’re promised one thing, and we get something else. We end up gulping down food of dubious provenance when what we really want is to linger with friends and family over a meal of fresh, wholesome ingredients, carefully prepared. Fast food is sold to us on the merit of its illusory resemblance to Slow Food.

—Jeff Crump, from the introduction to Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes from an Organic Farm