Steinbeck Talks About Food

Travels With Charley: In Search of America.
by John Steinbeck
First Published in 1962

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days.

Page 83.

At the roadsides I never had a really good dinner or a really bad breakfast. The bacon or sausage was good and packaged at the factory, the eggs fresh or kept fresh by refigeration, and refrigeration was universal. I might even say roadside America is the paradise of breakfast except for one thing....A freshly laid egg does not taste remotely like the pale, battery-produced refrigerated egg. The sausage would be sweet and shart and pungent with spices, and my coffee a wine-dark happiness. Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste?

Pages 108-109