22
" Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time. "
― Margaret Atwood , The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
31
" In the evenings the family gathered at Kirkwood Hall. Sometimes Andrew cooked, sometimes Delphine. There was a bounty of vegetables from the kitchen garden: tiny patty-pan squash, radishes both peppery and sweet, beets striped deep magenta and white, golden and green, butter lettuce and spinach and peas, zucchini blossoms stuffed with Graham's mozzarella and salty anchovies. Delphine whipped eggs from the chickens into souffles. Chicken- from the chickens, sadly- were roasted in a Dutch oven or grilled under a brick. Plump strawberries from the fields and minuscule wild ones from the forest were served with a drizzle of balsamic syrup or a billow of whipped cream. Delphine's baking provided custardy tarts, flaky biscuits, and deep, dark chocolate cake. "
― Ellen Herrick , The Forbidden Garden
34
" This level reach of blue is not my sea;
Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,
Whose quiet ripples meet obediently
A marked and measured line, one after one.
This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
So let a love beat over me again,
Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;
Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;
Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide
That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,
Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds. "
― Dorothy Parker , The Portable Dorothy Parker
35
" Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria.Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with " broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, " ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water. "
38
" Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon. "
― Margaret Mahy , The Changeover