“Our special today is mesquite-grilled sushi, Cajun style.”

—‘Max Headroom’ Ronald Reagan Cafe ’80s Menu Robot in Back to the Future II, accurately predicting how people in the 2010s will imagine ’80s food.

Jody examined the deer hide. It was large and handsome, red with spring. The game seemed to him to be two different animals. On the chase, it was the quarry. He wanted only to see it fall. When it lay dead and bleeding, he was sickened and sorry. His heart ached over the mangled death. Then when it was cut into portions, and dried and salted and smoked; or boiled or baked or fried in the savory kitchen or roasted over the camp-fire, it was only meat, like bacon, and his mouth watered at its goodness. He wondered by what alchemy it was changed, so that what sickened him one hour, maddened him with hunger, the next. It seemed as though there were either two different animals or two different boys.

—The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The 19th Century gardener grew 30 kinds of apples in his orchard, ranging in taste from bitter to sweet. Today, “the large red apple” caters to the public love of all that is “sweet, smooth, and outwardly appealing.” Bread, which was once the crusty staff of life, is now “half-masticated … before reaching the mouth,” and caters to the taste which prefers fruit juice to fruit, chopped meat to a cut off the joint, mashed potato, ice cream, and a host of packaged powders which water turns into infinite varieties of pap.

—Time Magazine review of Mechanization Takes Command from 1948

Presented in a glass-topped wooden box containing an edible seascape made up of abalone, razor clams, shrimps and oysters, it is served with an iPod so diners can listen to marine sound effects while they eat.

—Some website re: a dish at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck