Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells in an effort to produce energy, maintain life, and/or stimulate growth.
A
- This much thou hast taught me: that I should learn to take food as medicine. But during that time when I pass from the pinch of emptiness to the contentment of fullness, it is in that very moment that the snare of appetite lies baited for me.
- Augustine, Confessions, as translated by A. Outler, Book 10, Chapter 31, p. 197
- What is sufficient for health is not enough for pleasure. And it is often a matter of doubt whether it is the needful care of the body that still calls for food or whether it is the sensual snare of desire still wanting to be served. In this uncertainty my unhappy soul rejoices, and uses it to prepare an excuse as a defense. It is glad that it is not clear as to what is sufficient for the moderation of health, so that under the pretense of health it may conceal its projects for pleasure.
- Augustine, Confessions, as translated by A. Outler, Book 10, Chapter 31, p. 197
B
- Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.
- Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.
- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Gout (1825); tr. M. F. K. Fisher, The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (1949)
- Variants:
- Der Mensch ist, was er ißt.
- Man is what he eats.
- Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, Die Naturwißensschaft und die Revolution [Natural science and the revolution] (1850), repeated in Das Geheimnis des Opfers, ober der Mensch ist was er ißt [The mystery of sacrifice, or man is what he eats] (1862)
- You are what you eat.
- Victor Lindlahr, You Are What You Eat: how to win and keep health with diet (1942).
- Der Mensch ist, was er ißt.
Bhikkhus, this Kassapa is content with any kind of almsfood, and he speaks in praise of contentment with any kind of almsfood, and he does not engage in a wrong search, in what is improper, for the sake of a almsfood. If he does not get almsfood he is not agitated, and if he gets it he uses it without being tied to it, uninfatuated with it, not blindly absorbed in it, seeing the danger in it, understanding the escape. ...
Therefore, bhikkhus, you should train yourselves thus: 'We will be content with any kind of almsfood, and we will speak in praise of contentment with any kind of almsfood, and we will not engage in a wrong search, in what is improper, for the sake of almsfood. If we do not get almsfood we will not be agitated, and if we get it we will use it without being tied to it, uninfatuated with it, not blindly absorbed in it, seeing the danger in it, understanding the escape.'
- Gautama Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya, as translated by B. Bodhi (2000), p. 662
D
- One of the great successes of the twentieth century was a rate of growth in food output that considerably surpassed the unprecedented rate of population growth. . . . We have the capacity to produce enough food for everyone on the planet to be adequately fed.
- Jacques Diouf, director general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Speaking to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, U.S.A. Awake! magazine, November 22, 2003; Watching the World.
F
- Based on the safety and nutritional assessment you have conducted, it is our understanding that Monsanto has concluded that corn products derived from this new variety are not materially different in composition, safety, and other relevant parameters from corn currently on the market, and that the genetically modified corn does not raise issues that would require premarket review or approval by FDA...."
- Food and Drug Administration as quoted by Jeffrey M. Smith in Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods
G
- There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
- How can I describe it? Good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell. There is excellence all around you. You need only to be aware to stop and savor it.
- Chef Auguste Gusteau, Ratatouille, 2007
H
- The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
- Eric Hoffer (The True Believer)
K
- When we live in a world where the vast majority of Americans are obese and you have 17 or 18 year old kids that are 6’ 4” and 350 pounds, then you definitely have to take a look at what the food supply is doing to people. And anyone that suggests that there aren’t readily available or healthy alternatives to shoving hormone injected meats and hormone injected milk, and all this fucking food with god knows what in it is full of shit. That’s total bullshit. The system is fucking corrupt. We have the resources to not cram this shit down people’s throats...
- Lloyd Kaufman Dork Shelf March 17, 2014
- If you are eating well and your condition is pure and clean, life itself becomes like the dreams or visions that you have when sleeping.
- Michio Kushi with Edward Esko, Spiritual Journey (1994), p. 64
N
- I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem. Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat [[people]. It’s not that we need more food. It’s that we need to manage our food system better. So when corporations seek government funding for genetic modification of food sources, I stroke my chin.
- Bill Nye "Bill Nye Explains Why he is a GMO Skeptic", by Keith Kloor, Discover Magazine, (November 6, 2014).
P
- The simplest of all desires is that which the baby feels for its food. The human body is a wonderful machine, so designed as to compel the infant to comply from within with certain substances in its environment which we call food. The mechanism by which this compliance is brought about we need not consider in the present discussion. Suffice it to say that when hunger pangs are initiated in the infant's stomach, he cannot pay attention to anything in the world but food.
- Walter B. Pitkin and William M. Marston,“The Art of Sound Pictures” D. Appleton and Company, New York London (1930), Chapter VII FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS, p. 151
- Moses … denied to the members of the sacred commonwealth unrestricted liberty to use and partake of the other kinds of food. All the animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, thus titillating and exciting the malignant foe pleasure, he sternly forbade them to eat, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of the senses, the taste, and produce gluttony, an evil very dangerous both to soul and body.
- Philo, On The Special Laws, Part IV, p. 69
- The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.
- Plato, Republic, 586a
R
- Naturalists and egalitarians don’t believe the rosy predictions about how genetically enhanced food will end famine. Starving people are hungry not because of high population density but inequality in food distribution… Similarly geni-modified food is neither the best nor the only way to feed starving people.
- Peter Rosett, in “World Hunger:Tweleve Myths” in Designer Food: Mutant Harvest Or Breadbasket of the World?, (2002), quoted by Gregory E. Pence, p. 149
S
- There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
T
- What you have eaten, what you have eaten -- it was not bread that you have eaten, it was your flesh that you have eaten!
What you have drunk, what you have drunk -- it was not beer that you drank, it was your blood that you drank!- Inanna's singer to the king Gudam who with his army ate the food reserves stored in Uruk. Tale of Gudam, text online at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
W
- Approximately 3.1 million children die from hunger each year.
- World Hunger Education Service, "World Child Hunger Facts," Hunger Notes, (July 1, 2015)