Nature & Animals Quote by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

A writer’s snarl at the invisible religion of “seriousness,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s line takes aim at the status hierarchy that treats domestic knowledge as cute and commerce as concrete. The sentence is built like a small act of civil disobedience: “I refuse to believe” isn’t just opinion, it’s resistance to a cultural script that wants women’s talk to feel disposable. She puts “trading recipes” on trial, anticipates the verdict (“silly”), then overturns it with a deliberately unglamorous exhibit: tuna fish casserole. Not coq au vin, not artisanal anything, but a mid-century, pantry-built staple associated with cafeterias, church basements, and working households. That choice matters. She’s defending the ordinary, and by extension the labor and intimacy that make ordinary life run.

The kicker is the comparison: casserole versus corporate stock. Harrison doesn’t claim the casserole is nobler; she claims it’s at least as real. That’s a devastatingly precise insult to finance culture: stock is the thing everyone agrees to treat as reality, even when its value floats on speculation, mood, and narrative. A recipe, by contrast, is reproducible knowledge, passed hand to hand, tested by hunger, time, and budget. It’s embedded in bodies and schedules, in who feeds whom.

Coming from a late-20th-century feminist-minded essayist, the line reads as critique of a world that monetizes abstraction and devalues care. The wit is that she doesn’t romanticize domesticity; she simply refuses to let the market define what counts as real.