“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
    “What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
    “I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
    Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
    “It’s the same thing,” he said.

A. A. Milne

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“Modern restaurant cooking is first and foremost a boat that, as in a Saul Steinberg drawing, steams its way downriver from the thousand dreamy islands of alcohol to the wide beckoning current of caffeine, from the stress-busting drink to the reawakening demitasse. A modern French meal not including both…is impossible to imagine. Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners.”

Adam Gopnik

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“Japanese food—that is some seriously gay food. I’ve been to restaurants in Japan where they bring out a watermelon in its entirety and they open it up and inside it’s full of ice and one little pink piece of sushi in the middle. Basically, you’re taking sloppy bits of fish and making them into these exquisite little bonbons, and that seems inordinately gay to me.”

Simon Doonan

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“I like to be in New York. Le Corbusier described it in the 1930s as a ‘wonderful catastrophe.’ It is still a wonderful catastrophe, but inspiring. One thing I am crazy about is the seafood—the littleneck clams. I like them very much, at that place in Grand Central Station.”

Dieter Rams

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“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

Ernest Hemingway

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“I love how you can snap a pea’s stem and pull the string and how it leaves a perfect seam that opens easily under your thumbnail. And then you find those sweet, starchy peas in their own canoe of crisp, watery, and almost sugary pod.”

Gabrielle Hamilton

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“Now I am going to tell you the secret to a lasting marriage: Choose a spouse who needs to eat as often as you do. Bruce and I are like toddlers on a big day out. We need a snack, no matter where we are going or how long we are going to be gone. If we are headed out for dinner, we bring a Baggie of cut-up cheese for the car ride to the restaurant.”

Claire Dederer

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“The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”

Michael Pollan

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“You know, it’s funny. By the time we develop real taste in food, and begin to learn how to prepare it, digestive disorders set in and weight piles up. When I think what I could have done in my youth, when I ate like a horse with no bad results at all, with the knowledge I’m getting now, I could cry.”

Avis DeVoto

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“I have always thought it was insane to expect a great big enormous turkey to take all those long extra hours. At some point there is a point of no return, if you know what I mean which I do not myself, but there must be some law that covers it. It has been my experience that all given cooking times for turkey are too long—the best is always done before you plan it.”

Avis DeVoto

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“My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.”

Ruth Reichl

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“I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person.”

Mark Twain

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“Does Palin really think the average housewife in Ohio who can’t pay her bills is going to load up on ammo, board two different planes, camp out for two nights with a film crew and shoot a caribou so she can feed her family organic food?”

Maureen Dowd

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“We attended the school with more or less regularity once or twice a week, in summer, walking to it in the cool of the mornings by the forest paths, and back in the gloaming at the end of the day. All the pupils brought their dinners in baskets—corn dodger, buttermilk and other good things—and sat in the shade of the trees at noon and ate them. It is the part of my education which I look back upon with the most satisfaction.”

Mark Twain

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“At the right there was an old House—the window was open. We could see a table with a greenish oil cloth, on it a long bread, a bottle of wine, heavy white plates. We could only see the old hands of the people who were eating. A hand passed a basket with 2 peaches on it. It was all the paintings of the world, quiet, resisting time, everlasting. It is the only image of duration and eternity I have seen in a long time.”

Anaïs Nin

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