People have been writing about food for almost 4,000 years, about as long as there’s been a written language (cuneiform, etched onto tablets in Mesopotamia). Comments about it are found in Greek and Roman texts (including some full-scale cooking manuals) and the Bible. Shakespeare’s works are full of food, and every culture has idioms and proverbs built around it.
Many of the things that have been written about food are celebratory, praising the skills of cooks and the pleasures of the table. On the other hand, some are critical — proscriptions against consuming certain things (think of the strictures of kosher-eating in Judaism and the halal dietary laws of Islam) or warnings not to eat too much of anything.
Food is also good fodder for humor. Stand-up comic Steven Wright once quipped, “I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time.’ So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.” According to Bill Murray, “Unless you are a pizza, the answer is yes, I can live without you.” (If you agree with Murray, you’ll want to read this list of the best pizza places in every state.)
Even serious cooks get into the humorous act. Culinary icon Julia Child once proposed, “The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”
Countless thousands of salient words have been written about cooking, eating, and dieting over the years. In order to assemble our own list of 50 great quotes about food, 24/7 consulted sources that include FoodReference.com, Goodreads, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Special Dictionary, as well as our editorial files.
Among these quotes, you’ll find a variety of observations, pronouncements, and wisecracks, dating back to Ancient Rome and Biblical times and extending up to Lily Tomlin and Monty Python’s John Cleese. Most of them come from books, but there are a few from movies, one from a song, and several proverbs.
Included are giants of literature like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Honoré de Balzac, and the aforementioned Mr. Shakespeare. But you’ll also find two of the silver screen’s most glamorous women — Sophia Loren and Miss Piggy. And, of course, Julia Child is here, leading off the list.
“Learn how to cook!”
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- Julia Child, “Julia Child’s Kitchen”
“A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.”
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- Elsa Schiaparelli, “Shocking Life”
“Heaven sends us good meat, but the devil sends us cooks.”
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- David Garrick, “Epigram on Goldsmith’s Retaliation”
“Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.”
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- William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” Act 4, Scene 2
“Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.”
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- Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard’s Almanac”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
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- Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”
“After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
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- Oscar Wilde, “A Woman of No Importance”
“No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal.”
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- Honoré de Balzac, “The Human Comedy”
“Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.”
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- Lord Byron, “The Island,” Canto XIII, Stanza 99
“Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well.”
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- James Joyce, “Dubliners”
“At the table, no one gets old.”
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- Italian proverb
“There is no lover sincerer than the love of food.”
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- George Bernard Shaw, “Man and Superman”
“A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.”
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- Ecclesiastes 8:15
“Laughter is brightest where food is best.”
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- Irish proverb
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.”
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- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, “The Physiology of Taste, Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy”
“You are what you eat eats.”
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- Michael Pollen, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”
“You are what you think you eat.”
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- Tom Robbins, quoted in Esquire, Dec. 1993
“Gar-licks, though used by the French, are better adapted to medicine than cookery.”
Source: Public domain / MSU Libraries Digital Collections
- Lucy Emerson, “New England Cookery” (1808)
“Garlic is divine.”
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- Anthony Bourdain, “Kitchen Confidential”
“Lettuce is divine, although I’m not sure it’s really food.”
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- Diana Vreeland, “D.V.”
“[A] cucumber should be well-sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”
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- James Boswell, “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson”
“Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”
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- Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson”
“The first zucchini I ever saw, I killed it with a hoe.”
Source: Public domain / Maine State Library
- John Gould, “Monstrous Depravity: A Jeremiad and a Lamentation [about Things to Eat]”
“Parsley is gharsley.”
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- Ogden Nash, “Food”
“Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke.”
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- Bette Davis in “All About Eve” (1950)
“Onions are excellent company.”
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- Robert Farrar Capon, “The Supper of the Lamb”
“Only two things money can’t buy / That’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.”
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Guy Clark
- Guy Clark, “Homegrown Tomatoes”
“Mayonnaise, n. One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.”
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- Ambrose Bierce, “The Devil’s Dictionary”:
“Cheese is milk’s leap toward immortality.”
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- John Updike, “Rabbit, Run”
“I mean, if God didn’t want us to eat cheese, would he have let man invent it?”
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- Lisa Samson, “Hollywood Nobody”
“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight….”
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- M.F.K. Fisher, “The Art of Eating”
“Stale bread is better than none.”
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- Spanish proverb
“Everything you see I owe to pasta.”
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- Sophia Loren (attributed)
“I have long held the notion that you can’t name a food that I can’t improve by adding either bacon or chocolate.”
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- Aaron Blaylock, “It’s Called Helping…You’re Welcome”
“If you can’t eat chocolate cake for breakfast, what is the point of being alive?”
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- Alice Hoffman, “The Book of Magic”
“If breakfast is such an important meal, why don’t people dress up for it?”
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- Lily Tomlin on “Omnibus,” July 19, 1981
“[M]y advice to any budding restaurateur is, ‘Give them carbohydrates and pecan pie. Don’t try to be smart.'”
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- Patrick O’Neal, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 11, 1983
“He was a bold Man, that first ate an Oyster.”
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- Jonathan Swift, “A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation”
“[S]hellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adaptation of an extravagant lifestyle.”
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- Pliny the Elder, “Natural History,” Book IX, Chapter 53
“Fish and guests in three days are stale.”
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- John Lyly, “Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit” (1580)
“If God did not intend for us to eat animals, then why did he make them out of meat?”
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- John Cleese, quoted in “W.T.F.? (What is Wrong with Tom Faerie)” by H. M. Leathern
“You know people, they don’t want to see the cow killed, they just want their steak on a plate.”
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- Michael Jai White in “Black Dynamite” (2009)
“If you eat too much bleeding beef, you become eventually ashamed of yourself.”
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- Ford Madox Ford, “Provence”
“Grilling is like sunbathing. Everyone knows it is bad for you but no one ever stops doing it.”
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- Laurie Colwin, “Home Cooking”
“More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.”
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- John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Affluent Society”
“Never eat more than you can lift.”
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- Miss Piggy (attributed)
“Flour never killed anybody. Sugar does not hurt. A chef is not a doctor.”
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- Paul Bocuse, quoted in Wine Spectator, Aug. 31, 1991
“Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.”
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- Robert Redford, quoted in “The Junk Food Companion: The Complete Guide to Eating Badly” by Eric Spitznagel
“The most dangerous food is wedding cake.”
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- Proverb (variously attributed)