I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.
Everything I eat has been proved by some writer or other to be a deadly poison. Everything I don’t eat has been proved indispensable to life. . . . But I go marching on.
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.
I hated my mother’s lunches. I was horrified by them. She would never buy Ding Dongs or Twinkies. She also used to make spanakopita and eggplant parmesan from ethnic cookbooks — and my favorite restaurant in the world was Denny’s. I used to say, “When I grow up, my kids are going to eat whatever they want to eat, and my refrigerator is going to be full of everything they would want.” And you know what? It just didn’t happen.
Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.
Nutrition is a young subject; it has been kicked around like a puppy that cannot take care of itself. Food faddists and crackpots have kicked it pretty cruelly. . . . They seem to believe that unless food tastes like Socratic hemlock, it cannot build health. Frankly, I often wonder what such persons plan to do with good health in case they acquire it.
To safeguard one’s health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.
Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body?
Those who think they have no time for healthy eating will sooner or later have to find time for illness.
As a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety. Somehow this most elemental of activities — figuring out what to eat — has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?
She did not so much cook as assassinate food.
When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony.
Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.
I do not know of a flowering plant that tastes good and is poisonous. Nature is not out to get you.
Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. Remedies from chemicals will never stand in favorable comparison with the products of nature, the living cell of the plant, the final result of the rays of the sun, the mother of all life.
Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.
Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and be silent.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
