Food Writing Quotes

“I’ve sat in restaurants and viewed the food on the plate as I would a half-blooded mongrel. I may feel sorry for it and given time even get to like it a little, but it’s never going to really gain my affections. The plate in front of you should tantalize, seduce and enchant you. It should be a cheeky devil, a minx, a hussy even, but never a desperado”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, ad about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“No one is too busy to cook.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“As my library of podcast interviews was growing, I realized I had more to say about the common threads and insights I had gained into how chefs think, their methodologies, and their inspirations. Combined with my own experiences in the food industry, it was clear I had a story to tell. The result is my book, Conversations Behind the Kitchen Door. Whether you’re a professional in the industry or just a dedicated food enthusiast, I’m confident you’ll enjoy reading it.”
― Emmanuel Laroche, Conversations Behind the Kitchen Door: 50 American Chefs Chart Today’s Food Culture

“Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.”
― James Thurber

“If we consistently eat less sugar, it actually changes our sense of sweetness.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It is possible to educate children in the pleasures of food; and that doing so will set the children up for a lifetime of healthy eating. Feeding is learning.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It is not about learning to like this or that vegetable; but developing an overall attitude to eating that is more open to variety and less governed by the simple sugar-salt-fat palate of junk food.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“We are stuck in habits and attitudes that seem impossible to break. We are stuck thinking food is love. We are stuck with guilt about food because we are female; or stuck not liking vegetables because we are male. We are stuck feeding hungers that often exist more in our brain than our stomach. We are stuck in our happy childhood memories of unhealthy foods. But the biggest way we are stuck is in our belief that our eating habits are something we can do very little about. In fact, we can do plenty. The first step is seeing that eating is a skill that each of us learns and that we retain the capacity for learning it, no matter how old we are.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“The orange tree took time to create this masterpiece.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Scatter the herbs across the table, sit together, and pick off the tender stems and leaves. There is a meditative rhythm and ritual to it all. It's one of those rare times we are asked to slow down, and we are able to converse, to commiserate, to gossip, to air out grievances, to share secrets and dreams. Life happens in these spaces, amid a field of greens.”
― Naz Deravian, Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories

“Torture Cuisine by Stewart Stafford

Kitchen death growls,
Whipping that cream,
Beating those eggs,
Burning all the toast.

Knifing diced cheese,
Drawn, quartered ham,
Straining tomato sauce,
Crushed-down walnuts.

Peeling potatoes naked,
Then smashing them up,
You say purée, I say mash,
Turkey and chicken skewers.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Student life is tough anywhere, and more so, away from the support systems one is used to at home. Even for the most adaptable among us, in alien surroundings, eating food that is familiar is comforting.”
― Rukmini Srinivas, Tiffin: Memories and Recipes of Indian Vegetarian Food

“Documenting what I do in the kitchen can feel like the task of recording almost nothing. But it is the nothing I am doing, and do almost every day, and have been doing every day for over a decade. It is the nothing that has been part of almost every social interaction of my life as an adult and through which I have come to know almost all the people I love. It is the nothing through which I have been sustained and transformed.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“This cook shows that liberation must give dreams earthly form. Her food demonstrates that the purpose of political struggle is to make life materially vibrant and gorgeous for each person.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“What I want for the people I cook for is for them to enjoy their own perversions at the table, to feel free to exhibit a lack of constraint.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“Having other people try to fix you is one of the things that paradoxically holds you back from reaching that magical place called “After”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“You are unlikely to eat something if you don’t know what it is.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“When our preferences are in order, nutrition should take care of itself.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Feeding is learning.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our wellbeing - including dieting - it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“You were a child once, too. When you arrived in the world, your only food preferences were milk and buried memories from your mother’s diet. Those early weeks were dominated by meals - the stab of hunger, the sweet contentment of being sated - but you could not yet tell dinner from breakfast. You didn’t yet know - lucky you! - what a trans fat was; or a frappuccino. No one had taught you to worry whether you were getting enough protein, or to feel guilt when your stomach was full. You had never watched a fast-food commercial, and on the relative merits of quinoa and macarons you had no opinion. Food was a wide open for you. The great garden of ingredients - from bitter greens to sweet dates - was all equally unknown: all new, all strange, all waiting to be discovered.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It is genuinely possible to reach the point where you desire broccoli more than fries and wholemeal sourdough more than sliced white bread.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Only the rougher folks are out at night, and Blue Jean's is the one place they'll go for a meal. With a reputation of serving anybody, no matter who they are or what they're involved in, the diner attracts all sorts of characters.”
― Maisy Heart, Midnight at the Diner: A Young Adult Romantic Suspense Thriller

“Be open to the belief that your food consumption should never bring you guilt and should only bring you the natural pleasure it was designed for. If it’s not, you’re doing it wrong.”
― Heather Mathes, Paid to Be Perfect: The Secret to Finding Your Perfect

“I was beginning to believe that it is foolish and perhaps pretentious and often boring, as well as damnably expensive, to make a meal of four or six courses just because the guests who are to eat it have always been used to that many. Let them try eating two or three things, I said, so plentiful and so interesting and so well cooked that they will be satisfied. And if they are not satisfied, let them stay away from our table, and our leisurely comfortable friendship at that table.

I talked like that, and it worried Al a little, because he had been raised in a minister's family and had been taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes. I, to his well-controlled embarrassment, was beginning to feel quite sure that one of the best things I could do for nine-tenths of the people I knew was to give them something that would make them forget Home and all it stood for, for a few blessed moments at least.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon

“Mrs Beeton writes in anticipation of her absence.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“Are you hungry?' I say, slightly mischievously.
'Very, he says, unfurling his napkin.

This is a shame, because we're sitting down for a tasting menu that will not be a meal, but more a random collection of the chef's ambitions, presented with seventeen verses of Vogon poetry from the staff as they dole out tiny plates of his life story. These tomatoes remind chef of his grandmother's allotment. This eel is a tribute to his uncle's fishing prowess. I will pull the requisite faces to cope with all of this. The lunch will be purposefully challenging, at times confusing and served ritualistically in a manner that requires the diner to behave like a congregation member of a really obscure sect who knows specifically when to bow her head and when to pass the plate and what lines to utter when.”
― Grace Dent, Hungry

“...and it just pisses me off more. Like yeah, I cry when I watch those sad puppy videos too, but Gabriel's not actually a puppy abandoned by his owner. He's an upper middle-class Vermont kid who's parents business beats ours like ten months out of twelve. It's not my fault that emotionally, his about as stable as a cheap styrofoam cup.”
― Emery Lee

“Being a restaurateur means being a self-starter and being independent. It is synonymous with being an entertainer. You have to perform to market your idea to ensure other people will also like it as much as you do.”
― Jack Rasmussen, Fine Dining: The Secrets Behind the Restaurant Industry