Life's Pleasures Quote by Levi Strauss

That line flips the usual, utilitarian story we tell about “nature” and human choice. Instead of picturing people scanning the landscape like calorie accountants, it insists that selection is symbolic before it is practical: we latch onto certain animals and plants because they help us sort the world. “Good to eat” is the language of need; “good to think” is the language of meaning-making. The quote’s little pivot - not X but Y - is doing big work, arguing that culture isn’t a decorative layer on top of survival. It’s part of the machinery.

The subtext is a critique of crude materialism: if you assume customs are just camouflage for economics, you miss how humans use species as mental filing systems. Some creatures become taboo not because they’re scarce, but because they’re cognitively useful as boundary markers (pure/impure, wild/domestic, sacred/profane). A pig or a cow isn’t only meat; it’s an argument in animal form.

Context matters because “Levi Strauss” here points less to the denim magnate than to Claude Levi-Strauss, the 20th-century anthropologist who made this idea famous. If it really is a businessman speaking, the misattribution becomes revealing: the sentence sounds like structural anthropology smuggled into a boardroom, a reminder that markets don’t just move goods - they move symbols. Either way, the intent lands: what we “choose” in nature is often a choice about how we want the world to make sense, not just how we want it to feed us.