Skip to main content

Life's Pleasures Quote by Martin Yan

"Because normally with Western cuisine, you'll serve vegetables separate from the meat, so kids will eat the meat and never touch the vegetables"

About this Quote

Martin Yan is smuggling a parenting lesson inside a plating note, and that’s why it lands. He’s not dunking on “Western cuisine” so much as pointing to an everyday design flaw: when you separate the virtuous from the delicious, you train children to treat vegetables like punishment and meat like the prize. The line has the breezy authority of a TV chef who’s watched a thousand dinner tables from the pass: kids don’t “hate vegetables” in the abstract; they respond to cues. What’s optional gets ignored.

The subtext is about integration as strategy. In many Chinese home-cooking traditions Yan represents on camera, vegetables aren’t a side quest. They’re stirred through the center of the meal, sharing sauce, aromatics, and timing with the protein. That’s less a moral argument for health than a practical argument for desire: flavor is a social system, and vegetables become more appealing when they’re treated as full citizens of the dish.

Context matters, too. Yan built a career translating Asian techniques for American audiences in an era when “ethnic food” was often framed as novelty. Here, the critique flips the usual script. Western habits aren’t the default; they’re one cultural choice with consequences. Under the joke is a quiet rebuke of the segmented plate mentality that still shapes school lunches, diet culture, and “clean eating” rhetoric. Yan’s insight is disarmingly simple: if you want kids (or anyone) to eat better, don’t lecture them. Change the architecture of the meal.

Quote Details

TopicCooking
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Yan, Martin. (2026, January 18). Because normally with Western cuisine, you'll serve vegetables separate from the meat, so kids will eat the meat and never touch the vegetables. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/because-normally-with-western-cuisine-youll-serve-4603/

Chicago Style
Yan, Martin. "Because normally with Western cuisine, you'll serve vegetables separate from the meat, so kids will eat the meat and never touch the vegetables." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/because-normally-with-western-cuisine-youll-serve-4603/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Because normally with Western cuisine, you'll serve vegetables separate from the meat, so kids will eat the meat and never touch the vegetables." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/because-normally-with-western-cuisine-youll-serve-4603/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Martin Add to List
Plating and Appetite: Martin Yan on Vegetables with Meat
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Martin Yan

Martin Yan (born December 22, 1948) is a Celebrity from China.

33 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes