Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart.
Secretly in my heart, I believe food is a doorway to almost every dimension of our existence. . . . From the time a cave person first came out from under a rock, food has been a little bit of everything: who we are spiritually as well as what keeps us alive. It’s a gathering place, and in the best of all worlds it’s possible that when people of one country sit down to eat another culture’s food it will open their minds to the culture itself.
When we eat / we are like / everyone else.
Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.
There are two large categories of eaters: those who do not worry about what they eat but should, and those who do worry about what they eat but should not.
The American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day.
Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don’t tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It’s fairly sexy. Of course I don’t know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. . . . I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch.
When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.
Food is neither your enemy nor your best friend. It won’t mend your broken heart and it won’t send you to hell.
Every now and again, I’ll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate or other sweets, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say for the record that I don’t trust these people, that I think something is wrong with them, and that they’re probably — this must be said — total duds in bed.
Food is a resolution to controversy; food is rescue. We ate and talked and cried and laughed in the kitchen and ate again.
When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.
Black bottom pie . . . [is] so delicate, so luscious, that I hope to be propped up on my dying bed and fed a generous portion. Then I think that I should refuse outright to die, for life would be too good to relinquish.
Birth is beastly — and death — and digestion, if it comes to that. Sometimes when I think of what’s happening inside me to a beautiful suprème de sole, with the caviar in boats, and the croûtons and the jolly little twists of potato and all the gadgets — I could cry.
I doubt whether the world holds for any [child] one more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream.
When there is very little else left to believe in, one can still believe in an honest loaf of fragrant, home-baked bread.
Food is never just something to eat.
