I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.
There are many ways of eating, for some eating is living for some eating is dying, for some thinking about ways of eating gives to them the feeling that they have it in them to be alive and to be going on living, to some to think about eating makes them know that death is always waiting that dying is in them.
Society is composed of two great classes — those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
A hungry man is not a free man.
Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat cheese . . . get up at dawn to run, break for a midmorning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.
One can be conscious of the body with head consciousness, and this is true of so many people who engage in physical culture. . . . The body is seen then as the instrument of the ego.
Nobody, but nobody, is as fat as she thinks she is.
A few of his disciples had decided to do a “grape cure” and eat nothing but grapes and grape juice for a while. Paramahansa Yogananda smiled when he heard about this and remarked, “Devotion is the greatest purifier.” His disciple Donald Walters asked, “Is it your wish then, Sir, that we break this fast?” “Well, I don’t want you to break your wills,” said Yogananda, “now that you have set them in this way. But your time would be better spent if you worked on developing devotion. A pure heart is the way to God, not a pure stomach.”
Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet-bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.
My mother made me eat broccoli. I hate broccoli. I am the president of the United States. I will not eat any more broccoli.
My grandmother would sometimes choke on her food, and have to go out on the side porch in Shillington, where one or another member of the family would follow and hammer on her back while she clung, gagging, to the porch rail. . . . I also would choke now and then. My album of sore moments includes a memory of crouching above my tray in the Lowell House dining hall at Harvard, miserably retching at something in my throat that would not go up or down, while half-swallowed milk dribbled from my mouth and the other students at the table silently took up their trays and moved away. On the edge of asphyxia, I sympathized with them and wished that I, too, could shun me.
We never repent having eaten too little.
There’s something I’ve noticed about food: whenever there’s a crisis, if you can get people to eating normally, things get better.
Then the cook enters and approaches our table. He bows low before me. He is grateful to me, he explains, because since his years as a cook in a Buddhist monastery, he has had little opportunity to cook vegetarian food for anyone who appreciates it. The wild mushrooms, he tells me, were picked in a nearby forest. The greens are from gardens known for the quality of their vegetables. . . . He bows slowly, and thanks me once again. I stumble over my own words of gratitude as he quietly disappears into the kitchen. I never see him again. I didn’t sleep that night. The cook’s reverence and humility sliced through years of protective hardness and caught me without warning. His food was saturated with love, and its nurturance was almost too much to bear.
