“News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.”
Rose McCaulay, English writer
~~~
“An acquaintance is someone we know well enough to borrow from but not enough to lend to.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) American writer
~~~
“And do as adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
‘The Taming of the Shrew’
~~~
“It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 -)
~~~
“After eating, an epicure gives a thin smile of satisfaction; a gastronome, burping into his napkin, praises the food in a magazine; a gourmet, repressing his burp, criticizes the food in the same magazine; a gourmand belches happily and tells everybody where he ate; a glutton empraces the white porcelain alter, or more plainly, he barfs.”
William Safire
~~~
“Agitator, n. A statesman who shakes the fruit trees of his neighbors — to dislodge the worms.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)
~~~
“Cookery, or the art of preparing good and wholesome food, and of preserving all sorts of alimentary substances in a state fit for human sustenance, or rendering that agreeable to the taste which is essential to the support of life, and of pleasing the palate without injury to the system, is, strictly speaking, a branch of chemistry; but, important as it is both to our enjoyments and our health, it is also one of the latest cultivated branches of the science.”
Frederick Accum (1769-1838)
~~~
“Triptolemus, one of the principal figures in Greek religion, is said to be the inventor of the plow and of agriculture, and therefore the real father of what we call civilization.”
M.F.K. Fisher (1949) in her translation of The Physiology of taste.
~~~
“Air, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)
~~~
“Cantonese will eat anything in the sky but airplanes, anything in the sea but submarines, and anything with four legs but the table.”
Amanda Bennet, ‘Quotable Feast’
by Sarah E. Parvis (2001)
~~~
“The difference between a gourmet and a gourmand we take to be this: a gourmet is he who selects, for his nice and learned delectation, the most choice delicacies, prepared in the most scientific manner; whereas the gourmand bears a closer analogy to that class of great eaters ill-naturedly (we dare say) denominated, or classed with, aldermen.”
Abraham Hayward (1801-1884) ‘The Art of Dining’
~~~
“Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.”
Alice May Brock (of Alice’s Restaurant fame)
~~~
“A person who can get a good table at Chez Panisse at the last minute is a very important person indeed. Royalty begins with Alice Waters.”
Willard Spiegelman, ‘Gastronomica’ magazine
~~~
“Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don’t dine.”
Henry James (1843-1916)
~~~
“The ambition of every good cook must be to make something very good with the fewest possible ingredients.”
Urbain Dubois (1818-1901)
~~~
“Eating at fast food outlets and other restaurants is simply a manifestation of the commodification of time coupled with the relatively low value many Americans have placed on the food they eat.”
Andrew F. Smith
‘Encyclopedia of Junk food and Fast Food’ (2006)
~~~
“In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us. We are ignorant of flavour. We are as a nation taste-blind.”
M.F.K. Fisher
~~~
“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.”
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
~~~
“Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.”
John Cage
~~~
“All in all, I think the British actually hate food, otherwise they couldn’t possibly abuse it so badly. Americans, on the other hand, love food but seldom care what it tastes like.”
Bill Marsano
~~~
“All knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost, in self defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature.”
Charles Dickens (on American meals)
‘Martin Chuzzlewit’
~~~
“Americans, more than any other culture on earth, are cookbook cooks; we learn to make our meals not from any oral tradition, but from a text. The just-wed cook brings to the new household no carefully copied collection of the family’s cherished recipes, but a spanking new edition of ‘Fannie Farmer’ or ‘The Joy of Cooking’.”
John Thorne, American food writer
~~~
“I cannot protest enough against the custom so general in the United States to give to the table only the necessary time and to eat like a locomotive taking water, by doing which you expose yourself to the various stomach diseases which make so rapidly the fortune of the doctors and druggists.”
‘La Cuisine Française: French Cooking for Every Home Adapted to American Requirements’
by François Tanty (1893)
~~~
“A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.”
Mark Twain, aka – Samuel Langhorne Clemens
(1835-1910) ‘A Tramp Abroad’
~~~
“What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table.”
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
~~~
“Another peculiarity of this country is the absence of napkins, even in the homes of the wealthy. Napkins, as a rule, are never used and one has to wipe one’s mouth on the tablecloth, which in consequence suffers in appearance.”
Baron Louis de Closen
(on American eating habits) (1780)
~~~
“Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired; but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say, ‘Where’s your haggis?’ and the Fijan would sigh and say, ‘Where’s your missionary?’”
‘Roughing It’, Mark Twain (1835-1910)
~~~
“I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art.”
Isadora Duncan, America dancer (1878-1927)
~~~
“The Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation known. As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, and indigestible, while it is taken in the least artificial forms that cookery will allow. The predominance of grease in the American kitchen, coupled with the habits of hearty eating, and the constant expectoration, are the causes of the diseases of the stomach which are so common in America.”
James Fenimore Cooper American novelist
[‘The Last of the Mohicans’, etc.] (1789-1851)
~~~
“If you’re going to America, bring your own food.”
Fran Lebowitz, journalist
~~~
“Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before.”
Luigi Barzini, ‘O America’ (1977)
~~~
“Animals feed; man eats; only a man of wit knows how to eat.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
~~~
“I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with each other.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
~~~
“Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they spend on advertising and they wouldn’t have to advertise it.”
Will Rogers (1879-1935)
~~~
“Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
Thomas Jefferson
~~~
“Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it has therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquences sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic. Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English writer, lexicographer, critic & conversationalist
~~~
“The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be exercized in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral question to these masters of the public ear, whether they do not sometimes play too wantonly with our passions.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) ‘The Idler’ (1759)
English writer, lexicographer, critic & conversationalist
~~~
“We all have hometown appetites. Every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown left behind.”
Clementine Paddleford
Charles Wysocki’s ‘Americana Cookbook’
~~~
“Keen appetite And quick digestion wait on you and yours.”
John Dryden (1631-1700)
‘Cleomene’s (act IV, sc. 1)
~~~
“To set but a low value upon toast is to expose one’s deficiencies in right appreciation.”
E.V. Lucas, ‘When Toasters Disagree’ (1906)
~~~
“What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?”
Rev. Sydney Smith
letter to young lady, 22 July 1835
~~~
“Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.”
Evelyn Waugh, ‘When the Going was Good’ (1946)
~~~
“Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill.”
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974)
‘The Unquiet Grave’ (1945)
~~~
“So where did these cravings come from? I concluded it’s the baby ordering in. Prenatal takeout. Even without ever being in a restaurant, fetuses develop remarkably discerning palates, and they are not shy about demanding what they want. If they get a hankering, they just pick up the umbilical cord and call. ‘You know what would taste good right now? A cheeseburger, large fries, and a vanilla shake. And if you could, hurry it up, because I’m supposed to grow a lung in a half hour.’”
Paul Reiser, ‘Babyhood’ (1997)
~~~
“The artichoke above all is the vegetable expression of civilised living, of the long view, of increasing delight by anticipation and crescendo. No wonder it was once regarded as an aphrodisiac. It had no place in the troll’s world of instant gratification. It makes no appeal to the meat-and-two-veg mentality.”
Jane Grigson (1928-1990) ‘Vegetable Book’ (1978)
~~~
“You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It [Great Britain] is the country with the worst food after Finland.”
French President Jacques Chirac in a remark on the eve of the G8 summit in 2005
~~~
“You can tell when you have crossed the frontier into Germany because of the badness of the coffee.”
Edward VII (1841-1910)
~~~
“But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from…the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.”
J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
~~~
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
“Banquet: an affair where you eat a lot of food you don’t want before talking about something you don’t understand to a crowd of people who don’t want to hear you.”
Anonymous
~~~
“The history of government regulation of food safety is one of government watchdogs chasing the horse after it’s out of the barn.”
David A. Kessler, M.D. (FDA Commissioner)
~~~
“It is coarse and ungraceful to throw food into the mouth as you would toss hay into a barn with a pitchfork.”
‘Art of the Table’ (2000) Suzanne Von Drachenfels
~~~
“Some sensible person once remarked that you spend the whole of your life either in your bed or in your shoes. Having done the best you can by shoes and bed, devote all the time and resources at your disposal to the building up of a fine kitchen. It will be, as it should be, the most comforting and comfortable room in the house.”
Elizabeth David (1913-1992)
‘French Country Cooking’
~~~
“For my part, now, I consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in order to go to bed.”
Oliver Edwards, quoted in ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’ by James Boswell (1791)
~~~
“The half-hour before dinner has always been considered as the great ordeal through which the mistress, in giving a dinner-party, will either pass with flying colours, or lose many of her laurels.”
Isabella Beeton (1836-1865)
‘The Book of Household Management’ (1861)
~~~
“I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.”
‘Saki’, pen name of Scottish writer Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916)
~~~
“We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.”
Winston Churchill
~~~
“When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.”
Clarence Darrow
~~~
“I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tunafish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.”
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
~~~
“A Big Mac – the communion wafer of consumption.”
John Ralston Saul (1947–)
~~~
“Biotech companies love to talk about feeding the world, but their products must pay off in a market that measures dollar demand, not human need. By far the greatest effort has gone into the potato that makes fast-food fries, not the yam grown by folks with no cash. The corn that feeds America’s pigs and chickens, not the dryland millet that feeds Africa’s children. The diseases of the rich, not the plagues of the poor. There is some public funding and corporate charity directed toward gene manipulations that might conceivably help feed the world, but the vast majority of minds and bucks are working on caffeine-free coffee beans, designer tomatoes, seedless watermelons. They always will, if the market is the guide.”
Donella Meadows
Are Bioengineered Potatoes Organic?
‘Whole Earth’, Summer 1999
~~~
“The smell of coffee cooking was a reason for growing up, because children were never allowed to have it and nothing haunted the nostrils all the way out to the barn as did the aroma of boiling coffee.”
Edna Lewis
‘The Taste of Country Cooking’
~~~
“O God! that bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!”
Thomas Hood, British poet (1799-1845)
~~~
“Bologna is celebrated for producing popes, painters, and sausage.”
Lord Byron, British poet (1788-1824)
~~~
“Do not put chewed bones back on plates. Instead, throw them on the floor for the dog.”
Desiderius Erasmus (1466? – 1536)
~~~
“When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food.”
Desiderius Erasmus
~~~
“Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.”
Norman Douglas, British novelist (1868-1952)
~~~
“I’m Charley’s aunt from Brazil–Where the nuts come from.”
‘Charley’s Aunt’ (1892) A play by Bradon Thomas.
~~~
“The British cook, for her iniquities, is a foolish woman who should be turned into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use.”
Oscar Wilde, ‘Dinners and Dishes’ (1885)
~~~
“I’ll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal.”
Martha Harrison
~~~
“Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all — they produced an oyster.”
Saullust, Roman historian, referring to the oyster beds in East Anglia.
~~~
“Britain is the only country in the world where the food is more dangerous than the sex.”
Jackie Mason
~~~
“All in all, I think the British actually hate food, otherwise they couldn’t possibly abuse it so badly. Americans, on the other hand, love food but seldom care what it tastes like.”
Bill Marsano
~~~
“The British Empire was created as a by-product of generations of desperate Englishmen roaming the world in search of a decent meal.”
Bill Marsano
~~~
“Village life makes stale bread so common that toasting has become a national habit restricted to the British Isles and those countries which have been colonized by Britain.”
H.D. Renner, ‘The Origin of Food Habits’ (1944)
~~~
“From time immemorial, soups and broths have been the worldwide medium for utilizing what we call the kitchen byproducts or as the French call them, the ‘dessertes de la table’ (leftovers), or ‘les parties interieures de la bete’, such as head, tail, lights, liver, knuckles and feet.”
Louis P. DeGouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
~~~
“In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds . . . for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
~~~
“Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.”
Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)
‘Personal Pleasures’
~~~
“[Breadbaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells…there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.”
M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992)
‘The Art of Eating’
~~~
“Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man is starving.”
O. Henry
‘Heart of the West’
~~~
“Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity, like water and air, it should be available.”
Pearl Buck (1892-1973)
American Nobel Prize winning author