Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert M. Parker, Jr.

Parker is skewering a very particular modern priesthood: the killjoy expert whose job is to quantify delight until it looks like a moral failure. The line lands because it takes something we all recognize - the “study” that arrives like a scolding headline - and treats it as a personality type. “I’d just like to meet them!” isn’t curiosity; it’s a dare. He frames nutritional surveillance as so joyless it must be compensatory, then twists the knife with the punchline: what, exactly, do these people do for pleasure?

The subtext is Parker’s broader worldview as a critic, especially a food-and-wine adjacent tastemaker: pleasure isn’t a guilty secret, it’s a skill, a literacy. His irritation isn’t with knowledge per se (critics thrive on discernment and detail) but with technocratic certainty deployed as social control. “Saturated in fat” is the perfect bureaucratic phrase - clinical, flattening, designed to stop the conversation. Parker counters with a human question, not a counter-study: what kind of life produces an impulse to police other people’s takeout?

There’s also a class-and-culture edge. “Carry-out Chinese meals” signals everyday indulgence, not rarefied luxury. By defending that mundane comfort, Parker positions himself against a certain kind of wellness puritanism that treats pleasure as a vice to be managed. The joke works because it’s not anti-health; it’s anti-joylessness, calling out how easily “information” becomes a substitute for living.