Politics & Power Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Europe gets reduced to a condiment: pale, emulsified, refined to the point of being spreadable. That is Lawrence at his most provocatively culinary, using food snobbery as cultural critique. Mayonnaise isn’t nothing - it’s technique, tradition, a transformation of eggs and oil into something smooth and consistent. But it’s also secondary. You don’t build a meal around it; you dress a meal with it. By casting Europe as mayonnaise, Lawrence flatters its sophistication while quietly accusing it of living off its own sauces: style, manners, inherited culture, the rituals of “taste” that can feel like a cover for exhaustion.

Then he hands America the lobster: blunt, expensive, alive with bite. Lobster is substance, risk, appetite - a creature you crack open with your hands. The “good old” does a lot of work here, too, signaling the American mythos of freshness and honest plentitude, even when the luxury item is hardly democratic. Lawrence isn’t praising American innocence; he’s praising American force. The subtext is that the New World has the raw vitality Europe has learned to curate into palatability.

Context matters: Lawrence, an Englishman who traveled widely and spent time in the United States, watched old Europe after World War I look both cultured and wrecked. His modernist suspicion of decadence meets his fascination with American scale and energy. The line works because it’s funny and a little cruel: it collapses centuries of philosophy into a sandwich, then dares you to admit which part you actually came for.