The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.
You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.
A McDonald’s “Breakfast for Under a Dollar” actually costs much more than that. You have to factor in the cost of coronary- bypass surgery.
Don’t dig your grave with your own knife and fork.
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Sir J.M. Barrie was sitting next to George Bernard Shaw at a dinner party. The vegetarian Shaw had been provided with a special dish of salad greens and dressing. Eyeing the unpleasant-looking concoction, Barrie whispered to Shaw, “Tell me, have you eaten that, or are you going to?”
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialistic, otherworldly, New Age spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
The basic premise of vegetarianism is that humans have no business killing sentient beings for food. The person who argues, “What if I were stranded on a desert island?” or “What if I were an Eskimo?” is invariably nowhere near an abandoned isle or an Arctic igloo.
The time will come when men . . . will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.
Q: Should we avoid eating meat, since it entails killing?
A: Nonsense! . . . You may talk of not killing, but can you possibly avoid killing? What would you eat? Potatoes? . . . Has the potato no life? . . . You want to drink water? Examine a drop of water under a microscope and see how many millions of lives there are. You must breathe to live, yet with every breath you kill millions of creatures. Do you see any harm in that? You think you will lose your religion if you take a little fish. Such arguments are foolish. The ancient Hindus held no such ideas.
If you would be happy for a week, take a wife; if you would be happy for a month, kill your pig; but if you would be happy all your life, plant a garden.
Once a man had thrust his hands into the soil and knew the grit of it between his teeth, he felt something rise within him that was not of his day or generation, but had persisted through birth and death from a time beyond recall.
One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
I don’t even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.
When I was four years old, my mother used to bring me a cookie every time she came home from the market. I always went to the front yard and took my time eating it, sometimes half an hour or forty-five minutes for one cookie. I would take a small bite and look up at the sky. Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. . . . I was entirely in the present moment, with my cookie, the dog, the bamboo thickets, the cat, and everything. . . . It is possible to eat our meals as slowly and joyfully as I ate the cookie of my childhood.
Life itself is the proper binge.
