c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I can think of no sadder example of our food paradigm than two posters taped to the window of a California IHOP. One is a colorful photo of pancakes heaped with bananas, strawberries, nuts, syrups and whipped cream with the caption, 'Welcome to Paradise.' Lower down, an 8x10 photocopy states: 'Chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm may be present in food or beverages sold here.' Such signs are posted on many fast-food outlets. Heaven isn't a place on earth, at least not at these drive-throughs.
— Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession
Remember, too, that at a time when people are very concerned with their health and its relationship to what they eat, we have handed over the responsibility for our nourishment to faceless corporations.
— Lynne Rossetto Kasper
Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.
— Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
Out of trillions of organisms that were alive at the beginning of time, are alive now and will be alive at the end of time, only one tampers with its food. You do not want to bet against those kinds of odds.
— David Wolfe, The Sunfood Diet Success System
Some 1.2 billion people in the world still have too little to eat
—  the same number today suffer from being overweight…..For the first time in 100 years medical experts are predicting that life expectancy in developed countries will fall. Thanks to obesity our children face the prospect of dying younger than us.
Those dripping crumpets, I can see them now. Tiny crisp wedges of toast, and piping-hot, flaky scones. Sandwiches of unknown nature, mysteriously flavoured and quite delectable, and that very special gingerbread. Angel cake, that melted in the mouth, and his rather stodgier companion, bursting with peel and raisins. There was enough food there to keep a starving family for a week.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else's responsibility until I'm ready to eat it.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home.The lawn has become the curse of modern town landscapes as sugar cane is the curse of the lowland coastal tropics, and cattle the curse of the semi-arid and arid rangelands.It is past time to tax lawns (or any wasteful consumption), and to devote that tax to third world relief. I would suggest a tax of $5 per square metre for both public and private lawns, updated annually, until all but useful lawns are eliminated.
— Bill Mollison
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;Custards for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,And other such ladylike luxuries.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems
Sanabalis never seemed to eat, and he deflected most of her questions about Dragon cuisine. Then again, he deflected most of her questions about Dragons, period. Which was annoying because he was one, and could in theory be authorative.
— Michelle Sagara West, Cast in Silence
Eating – overeating – saved me. It comforted me when I was at the mercy of grown-ups who didn't know how to give what I needed. Food was something to which I had ready access, and with it I cleverly fashioned a survival mechanism that pulled me back from the edge of insanity. – a young MacGuyver of angst and junk food.
— Kim Brittingham, Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting, and Live Large
Stephanie, I'm begging you. Eat some doughnuts. I can't keep going like this." - Morelli
— Janet Evanovich
foodstuffs absolved of the obligation to provide vitamins and minerals cavorted with reckless abandon.
— Michael   Lewis
Thinking about lunch. Smoked salmon with pedigreed lettuce and razor-sharp slices of onion that have been soaked in ice water, brushed with horseradish and mustard, served on French butter rolls baked in the hot ovens of Kinokuniya. A sandwich made in heaven
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
To speak only of food inspections: the United States currently imports 80% of its seafood, 32% of its fruits and nuts, 13% of its vegetables, and 10% of its meats. In 2007, these foods arrived in 25,000 shipments a day from about 100 countries. The FDA was able to inspect about 1% of these shipments, down from 8% in 1992. In contrast, the USDA is able to inspect 16% of the foods under its purview. By one assessment, the FDA has become so short-staffed that it would take the agency 1,900 years to inspect every foreign plant that exports food to the United States.
— Marion Nestle, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine
I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey.
— Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt
Food safety oversight is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two agencies, the FDA and the USDA. The USDA mostly oversees meat and poultry; the FDA mostly handles everything else, including pet food and animal feed. Although this division of responsibility means that the FDA is responsible for 80% of the food supply, it only gets 20% of the federal budget for this purpose. In contrast, the USDA gets 80% of the budget for 20% of the foods. This uneven distribution is the result of a little history and a lot of politics.
— Marion Nestle, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine
As a leftover sixties liberal, I believe that the long arm and beady eyes of the government have no place in our bedrooms, our kitchens, or the backseats of our parked cars. But I also feel that the immediate appointment of a Special Pastry Prosecutor would do much more good than harm. We know the free market has totally failed when 89 percent of all the tart pastry, chocolate-chip cookies, and tuiles in America are far less delicious than they would be if bakers simply followed a few readily available recipes. What we need is a system of graduated fines and perhaps short jail sentences to discourage the production of totally depressing baked goods. Maybe a period of unpleasant and tedious community service could be substituted for jail time.
— Jeffrey Steingarten, It Must've Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything
It appears your son was 85 percent curry!
— Danny Wallace, Friends Like These
Don't eat till you're full, eat till you're tired.
— Andrew Zimmern
I've never seen Salisbury steak on a restaurant menu. It's only in frozen dinners. Is there something we should know about that? What IS Salisbury steak anyway? And where do they hunt or harvest the salisburies?
— Kelli Jae Baeli, Bettered by a Dead Crustacean
Sunny did not eat the wood, of course, but she chewed on it and pretended it was a carrot, or an apple, or a beef and cheese enchilada, all of which she loved.
— Lemony Snicket, The Miserable Mill
Don't do it. Please. I know this book looks delicious with its light-weight pages sliced thin a prosciutto and swiss stacked in a way that would make Dagwood salivate. The scent of freshly baked words wafting up with every turn of the page. Mmmm page. But don't do it. Not yet. Don't eat this book.
— Morgan Spurlock, Don't Eat This Book
Any food that requires enhancing by the use of chemical substances should in no way be considered a food.
— John H. Tobe
Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence...To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.
— Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. 
— Saki
You live among this ridiculous wealth and you get lost. You worry about nonsense like spirituality and inner health and satisfaction and relationships.You have no idea what it is like to starve, to watch yourself turn to bones.
— Harlan Coben, The Woods
There are few chemicals that we as a people are exposed to that have as many far reaching physiological affects on living beings as Monosodium Glutamate does. MSG directly causes obesity, diabetes, triggers epilepsy, destroys eye tissues, is genotoxic in many organs and is the probable cause of ADHD and Autism. Considering that MSG’s only reported role in food is that of ‘flavour enhancer’ is that use worth the risk of the myriad of physical ailments associated with it? Does the public really want to be tricked into eating more food and faster by a food additive?
— John E. Erb, The Slow Poisoning of Mankind: A Report on the Toxic Effects of the Food Additive Monosodium Glutamate
If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you're willing to wait long enough.
— Catherine Friend, Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old Macdonald's Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat
Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.
— M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
Good kitchens are not about size
—  they are about ergonomics and light.
The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced. 
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Morgan was looking at the food in front of her suspiciously, as if it intended to merely reside for a bit inside her, then liberate itself at a most inconvenient time.
— Lynn Kurland, Princess of the Sword
Without pushing an agenda (okay, maybe I've pushed a bit), I've spread a little veganism wherever I've gone. I've become friends with chefs at the meatiest restaurants you can imagine, and shown them a few things that opened their minds (and their menus) to vegan options. It's easy to be convincing when the food is delicious. It doesn't feel like a sacrifice--it feels like a step up.
— Tal Ronnen, The Conscious Cook: Delicious Meatless Recipes That Will Change the Way You Eat
Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality.
— Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater
It's brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.
— Michael Pollan
We instinctively feel an overwhelming desire to take sides: organic or conventional, fair or free trade, "pure" or genetically engineered food, wild or farm-raised fish. Like most things in life, though, the sensible answer lies somewhere between the extremes, somewhere in that dull but respectable placed called the pragmatic center. To be a centrist when it comes to food is, unfortunately, to be a radical.
— James McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly
There is great value in being able to say "yes" when people ask if there is anything they can do. By letting people pick herbs or slice bread instead of bringing a salad, you make your kitchen a universe in which you can give completely and ask for help. The more environments with that atmospheric makeup we can find or create, the better.
— Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace
On need of supplement & vitamins- "If you eat a balanced diet you get all the vitamins and minerals you need and you don’t need any supplement and overdosing can actually be more harmful.
— Subodh Gupta, 7 habits of skinny woman
...it was one of the best meals we ever ate.Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that happens at least once to every human. I hope so.Now the hills are cut through with superhighways, and I can't say whether we sat that night in Mint Canyon or Bouquet, and the three of us are in some ways even more than twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts' palates, succulent, secret, delicious.
— M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
Diet food is for lazy people.
— Ice-T
I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.
— Nigel Slater, Real Cooking
Shukhov ate his supper without bread--a double portion and bread on top of it would be too rich. So he'd save the bread. You get no thanks from your belly--it always forgets what you've just done for it and comes begging again the next day.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.
— Lorrie Moore
We’re all just ingredients. What matters is the grace with which you cook the meal.
— Erica Bauermeister, The Lost Art of Mixing
I had a dream about you. The sky was green and the ground was blue. You spoke a song and I sang my thoughts. We ate lemonade and drank cookies. It all made perfect sense.
— Melody Sohayegh, Dreaming is for lovers
To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope. 
— Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession
It has long been my motto that if you cannot get your act together... then the very least you can do is try to make your act entertaining.
— Becky  Johnson, We Laugh, We Cry, We Cook: A Mom and Daughter Dish about the Food That Delights Them and the Love That Binds Them
Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?
— Calvin Trillin, Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco
Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges.
— Jane Smiley, Moo
Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape.
— Nigel Slater, Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger
Feast or famine. My plate is suddenly full.
— David Wong Louie, The Barbarians are Coming
Now that we know about his indigestion, we can torture him with cake.
— Kristin Cashore, Fire
In the newspapers the row about the prospect of genetically modified food raged on, and yet here were consumers effectively demanding lambs with four back legs.
— Rose Prince
It's frustrating to witness how popular Fairtrade bananas, coffee and tea have become with shoppers and supermarkets while plenty of unfair trade goes on, largely unnoticed, in our own back yard.
— Rose Prince
The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.
— Ann Wigmore
It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.
— Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle
For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.
— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.
— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
I don't drink coffee I take tea my dearI like my toast done on one sid
— Sting, Nothing Like the Sun
he who feeds you, controls you
— Thomas Sankara
There ain't no point in making soup unless others eat it. Soup needs another mouth to taste it, another heart to be warmed by it.
— Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux
Food is a product of supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.
— Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
Life is too short not to eat raw and it's even shorter if you don't.
— Marie Sarantakis
It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden
So much about life in a global economy feels as though it has passed beyond the individual's control--what happens to our jobs, to the prices at the gas station, to the vote in the legislature. But somehow food still feels a little different. We can still decide, every day, what we're going to put into our bodies, what sort of food chain we want to participate in. We can, in other words, reject the industrial omelet on offer and decide to eat another.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
We have to remember that not every action taken to solve a problem will be free of unforeseen consequences. No matter how good our intentions.
— Rachel Fischer
The lesson about food is that the most predictable and the most orderly outcomes are always not the best. They are just easier to describe. Fads are orderly. Food carts and fires aren't. Feeding the world could be a delicious mess, full of diverse flavors and sometimes good old-fashioned smoke.
— Tyler Cowen, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
Dog's just want to sniff an ass and eat some food.
— Ice-T
[If you hear a] story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious.
— David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.
— Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Benton had a strong interest in helping to ensure that Warren's home life wasn't greatly disturbed: his wife was Cornish, and that morning Warren had arrived with six Cornish pasties of remarkable flavour and succulence.
— P.D. James, The Private Patient
That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea-destructive not just the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.
— Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Food security is not in the supermarket. It's not in the government. It's not at the emergency services division. True food security is the historical normalcy of packing it in during the abundant times, building that in-house larder, and resting easy knowing that our little ones are not dependent on next week's farmers' market or the electronic cashiers at the supermarket.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
That many if not most people...who want fresh leafy greens in January buy them at the supermarket after they've been bleached and plastic-bag shipped from California or beyond is not a tribute to modern technology
—  it's an unprecedented abdication of personal responsibility and a ubiquitous benchmark of abnormality.
If I had to narrow my choice of meats down to one for the rest of my life, I am quite certain that meat would be pork.
— James Beard
Birthday Soup is good to eat, but not as good as Birthday Cake.
— Else Holmelund Minarik, Little Bear
After I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I said yes to food, with great enthusiasm. . . . I vowed to taste everything I could eat, rather than focusing on what I could not.
— Shauna James Ahern
…food is capable of feeding far more than a rumbling stomach. Food is life; our well-being demands it. Food is art and magic; it evokes emotion and colors memory, and in skilled hands, meals become greater than the sum of their ingredients. Food is self-evident; plucked right from the ground or vine or sea, its power to delight is immediate. Food is discovery; finding an untried spice or cuisine is for me like uncovering a new element. Food is evolution; how we interpret it remains ever fluid. Food is humanitarian: sharing it bridges cultures, making friends of strangers pleasantly surprised to learn how much common ground they ultimately share.
— Anthony Beal
I was so mad, I reached into the drawer for her fake sushi eraser and put it in my pocket. Serves her right for being such a big, fat, Eggo-scarfing liar.
— Sarah Darer Littman, Want to Go Private?
TV cookery is very like internet porn - the overwhelming majority of its audience will never ever get to act out what's happening on screen.
— skint foodie
In my opinion, if there is one extremely legitimate use for petroleum besides running wood chippers and front-end loaders to handle compost, it's making plastic for season extension. It parks many of the trucks [for cross-country produce transportation]. With the trucks parked, greenhouses, tall tunnels, and more seasonal, localized eating, can we feed ourselves? We still have to answer that burning question.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
If God had created celery, it would only have two stalks, because that's the most that almost any recipe ever calls for.
— skint foodie
How many of us lobby for green energy or protected lands, but don't engage with the local bounty to lay by for tomorrow's unseasonal reality? That we tend to not even think about this as a foundation for solutions in our food systems shows how quickly we want other people to solve these issues.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it.
— Eliot Coleman, The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener
The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.
— Thomas M. Disch, The Brave Little Toaster
Raw ingredients trump recipes every time
—  farmers and ranchers who coax the best from the earth can make any of us appear to be a great cook.
Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now think of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basest desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.
— Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love
When a couple came to class together, it meant something else entirely - food as a solution, a diversion, or, occasionally, a playground.
— Erica Bauermeister, The School of Essential Ingredients
Despite a few exceptions, I have found that Americans are now far more willing to learn new names, just as they're far more willing to try new ethnic foods... It's like adding a few new spices to the kitchen pantry.
— Firoozeh Dumas, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
shrimp and green peppers are shriveling in my refrigerator
— Megan Boyle, Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee
Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians -- we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians ever wanted -- to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn't care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can't bear an opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Big Horn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.
— Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
When we eat together, when we set out to do so deliberately, life is better, no matter what your circumstances.
— Thomas Keller, Ad Hoc at Home
In any case I just cannot imagine attaching so much importance to any food or treat that I would grow irate or bitter at the mention of the suffering of animals. A pig to me will always seem more important than a pork rind. There is the risk here of confusing realism with cynicism, moral stoicism with moral sloth, of letting oneself become jaded and lazy and self-satisfied--what used to be called an 'appetitive' person.
— Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because someewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.
— James  Jones, From Here to Eternity
Nearly everyone wants as least one outstanding meal a day.
— Duncan Hines
This is the crepe. This is the cider. This is how we live and eat.
— Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Eaters of Wonder BreadMust be underbred.So little to eat.Where's the wheat?
— Roy Blount Jr., Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory
Decadent cooks go one step further and make sculptures of the food itself. If life is to be spent in pursuit of the extravagant, the extreme, the grotesque, the bizarre, then one's diet should reflect the fact. Life, meals, everything must be as artificial as possible - in fact works of art. So why not begin by eating a few statues?
— Medlar Lucan, The Decadent Cookbook
The word indulgent has become a popular catchphrase for dishes we should not eat for health's sake. I never use it to describe food, only poor parenting.
— Martha Hall Foose, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook
I’ve supped on potatoes and groats and am waiting to be sick. How about you?I supped like the Lord in Heaven.’and what does the Lord in Heaven have for supper?’Nothing.
— Jan Neruda, Prague Tales
If only the know-how could be equalled by the will-to-serve, by compassion for human suffering cause by hunger and deficiency diseases, there is no reason why fully balanced diets consisting largely of plant-foods should not be made available for hundreds of millions of undernourished people in the West as well as in the Third World.
— Robert G. Hart, Forest Gardening with Robert Hart
Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas, terrapins, catfish--anything that didn't bite you first.
— Shirley Abbott, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South
always serve too much hot fudge sause on the hot fudge sundaes.It makes people overjoyed,and puts them in your debt
— Judith Olney
I have never seen a food writer mention this, but all shrimp imported into the United States must first be washed in chlorine bleach to kill bugs. What this does for the taste, I do not know, but I think we should be told.
— Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat
The three of us ate a fine supper of grilled trout with sorrel cream sauce, and red potatoes out of Britney's old garden behind the ruins of the Watling place, and watercress sautéed in butter for hardly a moment with a dash of vinegar, and cream custard with wild blackberries for dessert.
— James Howard Kunstler
It seems like women are always in the kitchen around food and they're serving and they're giving and they're enjoying and it's part of the plentitude of life and the enrichment of life.
— Kathy Bates
Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.
— Joe Roman, Listed: Dispatches from America's Endangered Species Act
I thought we were going to take a 20-mule team out to the Grand Canyon and get a Bunsen burner and a bow and arrow, and whatever you can catch you cook. And it’s gotta be gourmet and it better look good.
— The Creators of Top Chef
You and I may look at a banana and see a banana. If forced to come up with something more inventive to do with it, perhaps we'd mash it up, or maybe we'd dip it in chocolate, and say 'What a good boy am I.
— Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things
The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.
— Clifton Fadiman
America, it has been observed, is not really a melting pot. It is actually a huge potluck dinner, in which platters of roasted chicken beckon beside casseroles of pasta, mounds of tortillas, stew pots of gumbo, and skillets filled with pilafs of every imaginable color.
— Andrea Chesman, Mom's Best One-Dish Suppers: 101 Easy Homemade Favorites, as Comforting Now as They Were Then
After a while I got hungry and went to the kitchen. There was nothing to eat. I drank another beer and looked again, and found half a loaf of whole wheat bread behind the beer in the back of the refrigerator...
— Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes
Having commodified nature, we're eating the shrapnel of a worldwide homogeneity bomb.
— Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession
Nettie set out a loaf of sourdough bread from Baker's Way Bakers, a wodge of runny Camembert, and a container of leftover lamb, rich with garlic and rosemary, nestled on a bed of spicy arugula from the home garden. She'd plucked two sharp green apples from one of the trees in their tiny orchard, and she placed a waxed bag of caramel shortbread beside them.
— Ellen Herrick, The Forbidden Garden
It was a rich place: as rich as plumcake.
— C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew
It is difficult to ascertain what role these articles play in marginalizing the vegetarian experience when there are so many more pressing issues that confront individuals who might otherwise choose to try to become vegetarian or vegan, such as the lack of healthy affordable food in low-income neighborhoods, often largely inhabited by people of color, and a government that subsidizes and promotes animal and sugar-heavy diets over ones with vegetables and fruits. yet rather than focus on these series structural barriers, many articles on vegetarianism and veganism often present the challenge of avoiding meat and animal products as challenge to one's very own normalcy and acceptability.
— Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation
SWEET POTATO BISQUE WITH CRABMEATGRAPEFRUIT ICE IN A SWEET TORTILLA CRISPLAMB SEARED IN ANCHO CHILI PASTE ON POLENTA TWO CHUTNEYS: PEAR & MINTASPARAGUS FLANAMERICAN GOAT CHEESE, EAST & WEST, WITH RED-WINE BISCUITSAVOCADO KEY LIME PIEPINON TORTA DE CIELO & CHOCOLATE MOCHA SHERBETShe'd invented the cake just for tonight; the sherbet came from Julia Child, a remarkably simple confection made with sour cream. Torta de cielo was a traditional wedding cake from the Yucatan, slim and sublime, light but chewy, where pulverized almonds stood in for flour. This time, instead of almonds, Greenie used the fat, velvety pignoli she ordered from an importer on Grand Street, mincing them by hand to keep them from turning to paste. She did not know whether you could tell the best Italian pine nuts from those grown in New Mexico, but, she caught herself thinking, and not without a touch of spite, she might soon find out.
— Julia Glass, The Whole World Over
None of this Mad Mario showmanship- orange clogs and Bermuda shorts fit for Babar, sweetbreads garnished with squash blossoms stuffed with cheese from the milk of Angora goats who live in the Pyrenees. Litchi sorbet veined with coconut milk and honey from Crete.
— Julia Glass, The Whole World Over
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
Your body belongs to the earth. In modern life, people tend to think their bodies belong to them, that they can do anything they want to themselves. But your body is not only yours. Your body belongs to your ancestors, your parents, and future generations. It also belongs to society and to all the other living beings. The trees, the clouds, the soil, and every living thing brought about the presence of your body. We can eat with care, knowing we are caretakers of our bodies, rather than their owners.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Eat
Chocolate cured just about everything, but being a crocodile's chew-toy was on a whole other level.
— Desiree Williams, Illusionary
Life cannot be without food; when we destroy the lands that give food, we destroy the foods that give life!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
He who doesn’t regard agriculture will truly value it when food becomes scarce!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Cow, goat, chicken, lamb . . . only slaves eat like this,’ Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. ‘Our stomachs are graveyards.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
A full fridge is like an empty one: What am I going to eat?
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom
It was wonderful how food brought men of different classes and kinds together, from the old to the young, from workers to their superiors.
— Sudha Nair, The Wedding Tamasha
I cooked with so many of the greats: Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz. Rick Bayless taught me not one but two amazing mole sauces, the whole time bemoaning that he never seemed to know what to cook for his teenage daughter. Jose Andres made me a classic Spanish tortilla, shocking me with the sheer volume of viridian olive oil he put into that simple dish of potatoes, onions, and eggs. Graham Elliot Bowles and I made gourmet Jell-O shots together, and ate leftover cheddar risotto with Cheez-Its crumbled on top right out of the pan.Lucky for me, Maria still includes me in special evenings like this, usually giving me the option of joining the guests at table, or helping in the kitchen. I always choose the kitchen, because passing up the opportunity to see these chefs in action is something only an idiot would do. Susan Spicer flew up from New Orleans shortly after the BP oil spill to do an extraordinary menu of all Gulf seafood for a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raising dinner Maria hosted to help the families of Gulf fishermen. Local geniuses Gil Langlois and Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard joined forces with Gale Gand for a seven-course dinner none of us will ever forget, due in no small part to Gil's hoisin oxtail with smoked Gouda mac 'n' cheese, Stephanie's roasted cauliflower with pine nuts and light-as-air chickpea fritters, and Gale's honey panna cotta with rhubarb compote and insane little chocolate cookies. Stephanie and I bonded over hair products, since we have the same thick brown curls with a tendency to frizz, and the general dumbness of boys, and ended up giggling over glasses of bourbon till nearly two in the morning. She is even more awesome, funny, sweet, and genuine in person than she was on her rock-star winning season on Bravo. Plus, her food is spectacular all day. I sort of wish she would go into food television and steal me from Patrick. Allen Sternweiler did a game menu with all local proteins he had hunted himself, including a pheasant breast over caramelized brussels sprouts and mushrooms that melted in your mouth (despite the occasional bit of buckshot). Michelle Bernstein came up from Miami and taught me her white gazpacho, which I have since made a gajillion times, as it is probably one of the world's perfect foods.
— Stacey Ballis, Off the Menu
A chilled pea soup of insane simplicity, garnished with creme fraiche and celery leaves. Roasted beet salad with poached pears and goat cheese. Rack of lamb wrapped in crispy prosciutto, served over a celery root and horseradish puree, with sautéed spicy black kale. A thin-as-paper apple galette with fig glaze. Everything turned out brilliantly, including Patrick, who roused himself as I was pulling the lamb from the oven to rest before carving. He disappeared into the bathroom for ten minutes and came out shiny; green pallor and under-eye bags gone like magic. Pink with health and vitality, polished and ridiculously handsome, he looked as if he could run a marathon, and I was gobsmacked. He came up behind me just as I was finishing his port sauce for the lamb with a sprinkle of honey vinegar and a bit of butter, the only changes I made to any of his recipes, finding the sauce without them a bit one-dimensional and in need of edge smoothing.
— Stacey Ballis, Off the Menu
My father insisted I eat red meat. 'You'll lose your brain without food,' he said. A meal to him without beef was starvation.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
We'd better eat before we raise hell." - Aelin Ashrvyer Galathynius
— Sarah J. Maas, Empire of Storms
And not wretched sausages half full of bread and soya bean either, but real meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt.
— C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
Anything good on the trucks?""Some beautiful lake salmon, fresh asparagus, and new potatoes.""New enough their skin is peeling?""Yes.""I know what we're going to do today!" Lou felt the excitement surge. This was why she loved cooking: getting amazing fresh ingredients and making something extraordinary. Luella's traditional French menu didn't leave much room for creativity, so the daily special had become Lou's canvas, where she was limited only by her imagination and whims."We'll keep it a simple spring dinner. Roast the potatoes in butter, salt, and pepper. Maybe some thyme or tarragon, too. We'll top the salmon fillets with hollandaise and roast the asparagus.
— Amy E. Reichert, The Coincidence of Coconut Cake
Anyone who can fail to rejoice in the enticing squish/crunch of a fast-food French fry, or the delight of a warmed piece of grocery-store donut, is living half a life
— Lucy Knisley, Relish: My Life in the Kitchen
Lou took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of just-cut flowers, fresh tamales from the food stands, and sunshine. She preferred the West Allis farmers' market to all others in the area, with its open sides, wide walkways, and rows of stalls. More recently, small tents serving hot sandwiches and fresh Mexican food had popped up outside the brick walls. It all looked so good, she'd learned long ago to come with limited funds or she would buy more produce than she could possibly use. She relished talking to the farmers, learning about what they grew and where. She liked to search for farmers growing something new and interesting she could use at Luella's.But today's visit was personal, not business. Sue had dragged her out to West Allis for a little lunch and some girl time with fall squash and Honeycrisp apples.
— Amy E. Reichert, The Coincidence of Coconut Cake
Yeah, this place needs a better-quality blueberry muffin." I raised a pointed finger. "And I could provide it.""You sound pretty sure of yourself," Jim said, placing a pat of butter on his baked potato."And there are always blueberry pies," I said, pausing to think of other possibilities. "Turnovers, cakes, croissants..." I popped the fry into my mouth. "I don't think anybody's done blueberry croissants.""No," Jim said slowly. "I don't think they have.""Of course, I'd sell some other things, too. Can't all be blueberries," I mused as I began to envision the bakery- a tray of lemon pound cake, peach cobbler in a fluted casserole, a basket of pomegranate-and-ginger muffins. I could see myself pulling a baking sheet of cookies from the oven, the smell of melted chocolate in the air. There would be white wooden tables and chairs in the front room, and people could order coffee and sandwiches. Maybe even tea sandwiches, like the ones Gran used to make. Cucumber and arugula. Bacon and egg. Curried chicken.
— Mary Simses, The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe
What, everyone you know has been kidnapped by pirates and forced to chop octopus in a kitchen that smells like a whale's stomach?""Quite a lot of them, yes," said Trudi, who appeared to be one of those people who'd heard of sarcasm but thought it was some sort of exotic fruit like a pineapple.
— Claire Fayers, The Voyage to Magical North
I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt's and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter's and Pink's, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver Lake and Rae's charbroiled burgers on Pico and the garlicky hummus at Carousel in Glendale. I ate an enormous range of food, and mood. Many favorites showed up- families who had traveled far and whose dishes were steeped with the trials of passageways. An Iranian cafe near Ohio and Westwood had such a rich grief in the lamb shank that I could eat it all without doing any of my tricks- side of the mouth, ingredient tracking, fast-chew and swallow. Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held. I asked the waiter if I could thank the chef, and he led me to the back, where a very ordinary-looking woman with gray hair in a practical layered cut tossed translucent onions in a fry pan and shook my hand. Her face was steady, faintly sweaty from the warmth of the kitchen.Glad you liked it, she said, as she added a pinch of saffron to the pan. Old family recipe, she said. No trembling in her voice, no tears streaking down her face.
— Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake