What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in, and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all—in the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, and preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade.
—Sterling Hayden
Never eat more than you can lift.
—Miss Piggy
Our noses too, and our eyes and ears, are political instruments, protesters. An aesthetic response is a political action.… We know instinctively, aesthetically, when a fish stinks, when the sense of beauty is offended. Standing for these moments—and these moments occur each day, within every airless office building, seated in each crippling chair, inundated by senseless noise and fattened on industrial food—standing for our responses, these aesthetic reverberations of truth in the soul, may be the primary civic act of the citizen, the origin of caution and of the precautionary principle itself, with its warnings to stop, look, and listen.
—James Hillman
This was the dawn of plastic eating in America.… We doted on Velveeta. Spam. Canned ravioli. Instant puddings. Instant anything. The farther a thing was from the texture, flavor, and terrifying unpredictability of real food, the better.
—Shirley Abbott
Fake food—I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut—is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking.
—Julia Child
I want nothing to do with natural foods. At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.
—George Burns
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
—George Orwell
If you're condemned to death they have to give you one last meal of your choice. What is that all about? A group of people plans to kill you, so they want you to eat something you like? Do they think the food part will take your mind off the dying part? Or do they prefer to kill you when you're just coming off a peak experience and full of positive energy?
—George Carlin
I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.
—Erma Bombeck
When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.
—Dom H. Camara
Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.
—Luis Bunuel
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
—Joyce Carol Oates in Faithless
And what, for instance, would have happened had Romeo and Juliet lived to middle age, their silhouettes broadened by pasta?
—Anita Loos
I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.
—Calvin Trillin
Your words are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me.
—Sarah Bernhardt