Life's Pleasures Quote by Morley Safer

A food joke that lands like a media critique: Morley Safer’s garlic line is doing two things at once. On the surface, it’s a comic exaggeration about taste - garlic as the great equalizer, the ingredient that can rescue anything. But the punchline isn’t culinary; it’s institutional. The New York Times stands in for the intimidating, self-serious authority of “the paper of record,” the kind of prestige object you’re supposed to consume with reverence, not appetite. Safer’s trick is to reduce that reverence to something bodily, even slightly vulgar: if you season it hard enough, you can literally eat it.

That’s the subtext: media power is real, but it’s also made of paper and posture. Garlic becomes a metaphor for the everyday tools that let ordinary people metabolize elite culture on their own terms - humor, skepticism, taste, impatience with sanctimony. It’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-awe. Safer, a journalist who spent decades narrating the world to mass audiences, understood that credibility isn’t just accuracy; it’s tone. The line flatters the listener’s independence: you don’t have to be overpowered by the Times’ seriousness. You can overwhelm it with your own flavor.

There’s a sly newsroom politics embedded here, too. Journalists admire the Times and resent it. Safer’s quip punctures the brand without pretending it doesn’t matter. The joke works because it treats prestige as something you can chew up - and because it implies that a strong enough palate can turn even the most authoritative text into mere roughage.