Daily Inspiration Quote by Don DeLillo

Eating, in DeLillo's line, isn’t comfort or culture so much as a grim credential: the one ritual most people learn to perform with disciplined regularity, on time, in public, and without asking too many questions. The joke lands because it’s barbed. “Professionalism” usually implies training, vocation, purpose, maybe even mastery. DeLillo yanks the word into the cafeteria and lets it clang against the banal fact of survival. The result is a dry, corporate-sounding indictment of a world where the only reliable “career ladder” is consumption.

The intent feels less like sneering at ordinary people than at a system that narrows the horizon of what counts as competence. If work has become routinized, precarious, or spiritually empty, then professionalism stops being a noble standard and turns into a set of behaviors: show up, comply, ingest. Eating is perfect here because it’s both intimate and standardized. You can’t opt out, yet modern life packages it into managed breaks, fast-food logistics, workplace lunches, branded “fuel.” Even appetite gets professionalized.

Subtext: consumer capitalism doesn’t just sell you products; it sells you the sense that participation is achievement. If you can navigate menus, diets, office snacks, and the constant low-grade performance of “having it together,” you’ve met the era’s baseline demand. DeLillo’s larger context has always been America’s noise - media, markets, crowds - and this line compresses that obsession into one small action that looks harmless until you notice how much of life it replaces.