What is this and why does it taste funny? Anonymous

Food shapes us and expresses us even more definitively than our furniture or our houses or our utensil do. Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner

A meal is an artistic social construct, ordering the foodstuffs which comprise it into a complex dramatic whole, as a play organises actions and words into component parts such as acts, scenes, speeches, dialogues, entrances, and exits, all in the sequences designed for them. (Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner)

However humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate, and satisfy. (Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner)

When a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

Whispers and odours and the tantalising noises of banqueting floated swiftly westward. Greece heard and smelled and was fascinated. Gastronomy nourished itself on rumour and from the Spartan black broth was born a refined and decadent philosophy of eating. (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

But if you are in a bad temper you should not be thinking of food at all. (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

There are two questions which can easily be asked about a potato: What is it, and Why is it? (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

For my own meals I like simplicity above all. I like newness in what I serve, perhaps because any interest I may thus stir in my fellow diners is indirectly flattery of myself. I like leisure. (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

I like mutual ease. For this reason I prefer not to have among my guests two people or more, of any sex, who are in the first wild tremours of love. It is better to invite them after their new passion has settled, has solidified into a quieter reciprocity of emotions. (It is also a waste of good food, to serve it to new lovers.) (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

Good food can never come from a bad kitchen. (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

Who determines, and for what strange reasons, the social status of a vegetable? (MFK Fischer, Serve it Forth)

Beauty will be edible or it will no longer be; (Salvador Dali)

The preparation of a simple tomato is more difficult than the solution to the problem of god's infintude. (Artonin Artaud)

In this most extravagant of meals, cuisine exists among the other arts, as the simulacrum of other arts, and as fine art. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

The foundation of gastronomy is an aesthetic of excess; the pleasures of the text can only increase the joys of eating. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

Wine is truly a universal that knows how to make itself singular, but only if it finds a philosopher who knows how to drink. (Bachelard)

Taste (culinary and otherwise) constitutes a sign of individual style, a mode of constituting the self, a mark of social position, an aesthetic gesture. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

While inaugurating the most intimate pleasure, cuisine simultaneously offers an incontrovertible aspect of social facade. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

If every dish is a symbol, then every cuisine implies a metaphysics, all too often doomed to remain implicit. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

The social and aesthetic significance of a dish is most often dissimulated by the vagueries of personal “taste”, buried in the dense dialectic between forgetting and anamnesis that forms and informs our senses, sensitivity, sensibility. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

if there were to be a theorisation of cuisine, it would constitute a theory of exceptions, nuances, refinements. Culinary taste would transform aesthetics by redefining the role of art within the human sensorium, transforming the aestheticisation of the senses and eliminating the previously held limits between the arts. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

The gastronomic must no longer serve as mere metaphor for the arts, but should take its place with the muses. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

Culinary idiosyncrasy is the vanguard of progress; the recipe is not a canon, code or regulation, and the typicality of “authenticity” of a dish is but a range of possibilities, an indeterminate ideal, a pole of transformations. (Allen S; Weiss, Feast and Folly)

Food is so easy and hardly a battle field nowadays: it all goes down with the other “divertissement”. (Guy Van Belle)

We now judge a dish largely by how guilty we feel about eating it. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

Food and sex are a heady combination; a quarter of all people who lose their ability to taste dinner also lose their sex drive. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

The naming of the humble apple as the Fruit of Forbidden Knowledge is the most unlikely bit of propaganda the Christians have ever cooked up. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

The tomato was everything the Forbidden Fruit ought to be a slut-red fruit oozing lugubrious juices and exploding with electric flavours. Clearly an aphrodisiac. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

It is really no surprise that we're constantly muddling together the acts of sex and eating. During both we allow a warm (or at least reheated) creature to enter our bodies. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

The most shamelessly homosexual of dishes is the freshwater fish. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

Most of us think it was the vice of lust that got us thrown out of the garden. Not so. Gluttony was the villain, according to theologians, who say that Eve's sin was simply a love of good food. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

The practice of criminalizing foods that engender laziness first appeared in the legal code of the 7th C BC Spartan civilisation. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

The French may be the most vocal about sex and baking, but the Italians have the most colourful renditions. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

If you deconstruct most religious ceremonies, you wind up with a man dressed suspiciously like a chef serving some kind of snack. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

Eating is imbued with religious meaning, and some anthropologists believe the rituals and symbols of organised religion grew directly from dining etiquette. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

The most refined reaction to the violence of eating came in Europe, which developed a style of cooking intent on removing all angry emotions from the dinner table. The secret was a good sauce. (Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil's Garden)

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community. (Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner)

This Futurist cooking of ours, tuned to high speeds like the motor of a hydroplane, will seem to some trembling traditionalists both mad and dangerous: but its ultimate aim, is to create harmony between man's palate [sic] and his life today and tomorrow. (The Futurist Cookbook)

Now with the Futurists the first human way of eating is born. We mean the art of self-nourishment. Like all the arts, it eschews plagiarism and demands creative originality. (The Futurist Cookbook)

While recognising that badly or crudely nourished men have achieved great things in the past, we affirm this truth: men think, dream , and act according to what they eat and drink. (The Futurist Cookbook)

Since everything in modern civilisation tends towards elimination of weight, and increased speed, the cooking of the future must conform to the ends of evolution. (The Futurist Cookbook)

Futurist Cooking proposes, through the art of harmoniously combining Futurist dishes, to evoke and provoke essential states of mind which cannot otherwise be evoked or provoked. (The Futurist Cookbook)

The food “object” must be the only type of product that calms contemporary society's anxieties of consumption, possession and representation, relegating the useless, inedible object to the ghetto of all objects fated to disappear. (Martü Guixü, 2398 gr)

Food rules and moves the world. Food is necessity, pleasure and power. (Paola Antonelli, 2398 gr)