"Before long it will be the animals who do the dieting so that the ultimate consumer does not have to"
About this Quote
A knife twist of a joke, Sheraton's line lands because it treats "dieting" not as a personal virtue quest but as an industry problem to be solved upstream. The punch is in the role reversal: the animals do the self-denial, the humans keep their appetites and still get to feel "healthy". It's funny in the way good food writing can be funny: observational, unsentimental, and slightly accusatory.
Sheraton came up as one of America's most influential restaurant critics, which matters here. A critic's eye is trained on what gets erased from the plate: labor, cost-cutting, and the compromises that make indulgence feel effortless. Her quip anticipates the late-20th-century explosion of "lean" meats and low-fat everything, when flavor got engineered around nutritional anxieties. Feed becomes formulation, animals become biological factories, and "diet" stops meaning a human relationship to desire and starts meaning a supply chain specification.
The subtext is not just about animal welfare, though it's there; it's about moral outsourcing. Consumers want the halo of restraint without the lived experience of restraint, so the restraint is imposed on something else: livestock diets, breeding, antibiotics, confinement. Even the phrase "ultimate consumer" has a cold, corporate ring, as if people are the last link in a system designed to keep them wanting more while believing they want less.
It's a compact critique of modern food culture: we don't reduce consumption so much as redesign consumption to feel like reduction.
Sheraton came up as one of America's most influential restaurant critics, which matters here. A critic's eye is trained on what gets erased from the plate: labor, cost-cutting, and the compromises that make indulgence feel effortless. Her quip anticipates the late-20th-century explosion of "lean" meats and low-fat everything, when flavor got engineered around nutritional anxieties. Feed becomes formulation, animals become biological factories, and "diet" stops meaning a human relationship to desire and starts meaning a supply chain specification.
The subtext is not just about animal welfare, though it's there; it's about moral outsourcing. Consumers want the halo of restraint without the lived experience of restraint, so the restraint is imposed on something else: livestock diets, breeding, antibiotics, confinement. Even the phrase "ultimate consumer" has a cold, corporate ring, as if people are the last link in a system designed to keep them wanting more while believing they want less.
It's a compact critique of modern food culture: we don't reduce consumption so much as redesign consumption to feel like reduction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
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