Foodie quotations for all occasions

As many of you know, I collect songs about food. Less oddly, I also -- like many people who read a lot -- keep a file of quotations that appeal to me. Naturally, many of these are about food.

So I wasn't surprised when a friend called asking for help locating some food-centered poetry. What took me aback a bit was the reason she wanted it: A culinary friend had died, and she'd been asked to find something to be read at the funeral. I hadn't done my collecting with an occasion like that in mind!

It occurs to me that other than the Food in Fiction thead, which isn't quite the same thing, we don't really have a thread for quotations here, so I thought I'd share the passages I found, in case someone else should need something for a similar occasion, and just because they're worth reading.

This is the one the minister decided on:

We may live without poetry, music, and art:
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
He may live without books, -- what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope, -- what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love, -- what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?


-- Owen Meredith, from "Lucile"

---

Their table was a board to tempt even ghosts
To pass the Styx for more substantial feasts.
I will not dwell upon ragouts or roasts,
Albeit all human history attests
That happiness for man -- the hungry sinner! --
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.


-- George Gordon, Lord Byron, from "Don Juan"

---

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on....


-- Joy Harjo, from Perhaps the World Ends Here*

(* Unlike the the excerpts from lengthy poems above, this is a relatively short poem, and entirely about the table -- I'm only quoting a couple of lines because it's under copyright; follow the link to see it all.)

--

What are your favorite food-related poems and quotations for sad and happy occasions?

We do have the thread on fruit poems.

I read Billy Collins' "Litany" in Harper's years ago, but I recently re-discovered it. It's very beautiful and elegiac.

The opening stanza with a nod to poet Jacques Crickillon:

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

"Over the lips and through the gums,
Look out stomach, here it comes!"

happy_stomach wrote:We do have the thread on fruit poems.

Ah, I'd forgotten that, although when I was asked for food poetry, I'd just been re reading Robert Frost's beautiful (and highly seasonal) "Blueberries," which I have now added to the fruit poems.

My favorite:
A buttery, sugary, syrupy waffle
Gee, but I love it somep'n awful.
Gingercakes dripping with chocolate goo,
Oo! How I love 'em! Oo! Oo! Oo!
~Anonymous

And who can forget (forgot this poet too):
I always eat peas with honey
I've done it all my life
It might taste kind of funny
But it keeps them on my knife.
~Anonymous

My children are currently very fond of this poem by Jack Prelutsky, and so am I:

Bleezer's Ice Cream

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,
there are flavors in my freezer
you have never seen before,
twenty-eight divine creations
too delicious to resist,
why not do yourself a favor,
try the flavors on my list:

COCOA MOCHA MACARONI
TAPIOCA SMOKED BALONEY
CHECKERBERRY CHEDDAR CHEW
CHICKEN CHERRY HONEYDEW
TUTTI-FRUTTI STEWED TOMATO
TUNA TACO BAKED POTATO
LOBSTER LITCHI LIMA BEAN
MOZZARELLA MANGOSTEEN
ALMOND HAM MERINGUE SALAMI
YAM ANCHOVY PRUNE PASTRAMI
SASSAFRAS SOUVLAKI HASH
SUKIYAKI SUCCOTASH
BUTTER BRICKLE PEPPER PICKLE
POMEGRANATE PUMPERNICKEL
PEACH PIMENTO PIZZA PLUM
PEANUT PUMPKIN BUBBLEGUM
BROCCOLI BANANA BLUSTER
CHOCOLATE CHOP SUEY CLUSTER
AVOCADO BRUSSELS SPROUT
PERIWINKLE SAUERKRAUT
COTTON CANDY CARROT CUSTARD
CAULIFLOWER COLA MUSTARD
ONION DUMPLING DOUBLE DIP
TURNIP TRUFFLE TRIPLE FLIP
GARLIC GUMBO GRAVY GUAVA
LENTIL LEMON LIVER LAVA
ORANGE OLIVE BAGEL BEET
WATERMELON WAFFLE WHEAT

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,
I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,
taste a flavor from my freezer,
you will surely ask for more.

I regularly go to this website for food quotes. http://www.foodreference.com/html/quotes.html because I like to use fun food quotes as filler space in a catalog I write.
The quotes are listed alphabetically, by subject, so, for example
"zen" turns up - "Zen. . . does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."
Alan W. Watts, 'The Way of Zen', 1957

It has a food poetry section, food trivia, even food crosswords and a food humor section with one liners like "If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out your nose."
Jack Handy

eatchicago wrote:My children are currently very fond of this poem by Jack Prelutsky, and so am I:

Bleezer's Ice Cream

I've put links to a couple of musical versions in Food music.

I came across this passage recently:

There are times (as I suppose) when the most aesthetic of souls will forget the snow of lilies, and the down of a butterfly's wing, to revel in the grosser joys of, say, a beefsteak. One cannot rhapsodize upon the beauties of a sunset, or contemplate the pale witchery of the moon with any real degree of poetic fervor, or any degree of comfort, while hunger gnaws at one's vitals, for comfort is essential to your aesthete, and, after all, soul goes hand in hand with stomach.


--Jeffery Farnol, from "The Broad Highway," 1910.

There are so many delightful lines in A. J. Liebling's Between Meals that I once thought of starting a thread to swap them with any fellow Liebling fans here. The book's beginning is one of the best:

"The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. ... In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shell crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece."

LAZ wrote:I came across this passage recently:

There are times (as I suppose) when the most aesthetic of souls will forget the snow of lilies, and the down of a butterfly's wing, to revel in the grosser joys of, say, a beefsteak. One cannot rhapsodize upon the beauties of a sunset, or contemplate the pale witchery of the moon with any real degree of poetic fervor, or any degree of comfort, while hunger gnaws at one's vitals, for comfort is essential to your aesthete, and, after all, soul goes hand in hand with stomach.


--Jeffery Farnol, from "The Broad Highway," 1910.

I like Bertolt Brecht's more succinct line from "The Threepenny Opera" better: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral (First comes the food, then the morals). Note that in German, "fressen" is what animals do while the verb for when people eat is "essen."

cutting greens
by Lucille Clifton

curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black.
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

LAZ wrote:---

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on....


-- Joy Harjo, from Perhaps the World Ends Here*

Hi,

LAZ was very kind to help find some poems for a friend who had died.

The world ends at the table has one line that left some people gasping, "We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here." Everything was fine until I came upon the burial part. I figured if my test subjects gasped, so would the audience at this memorial service. I handed every idea everyone offered for the minister to choose.

Regards,

The most dangerous food to eat is wedding cake.
Proverb

A couple of lovely, seasonal poems by Marge Piercy:

Attack of the squash people

And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat....

(complete poem)


My mother gives me her recipe

Take some flour. Oh, I don't know,
like two-three cups, and you cut
in the butter. Now some women
they make it with shortening,
but I say butter, even though
that means you had to have fish, see?

You cut up some apples. Not those
stupid sweet ones. Apples for the cake,
they have to have some bite, you know?
A little sour in the sweet, like love....

(complete poem)

LAZ wrote:A couple of lovely, seasonal poems by Marge Piercy:

Thanks for posting these excellent poems!

Hunger
by Emily Dickinson

I had been hungry all the years;
My noon had come, to dine;
I, trembling, drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.

'T was this on tables I had seen,
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.

I did not know the ample bread,
'T was so unlike the crumb
The birds and I had often shared
In Nature's dining-room.

The plenty hurt me, 't was so new,
Myself felt ill and odd,
As berry of a mountain bush
Transplanted to the road.

Nor was I hungry; so I found
That hunger was a way
Of persons outside windows,
The entering takes away.

The current issue (October 11, 2010) of the New Yorker has a poem by Billy Collins, entitled "Table Talk," that's set in a Chicago restaurant. The full text is behind a pay wall, but I can email it to anyone interested.

The storyline isn't about food, but the cover of the same New Yorker issue is by Oak Parker Chris Ware and features a bird's eye view of a family in a kitchen.

Well, since we've veered from quotes to full poems, I'll share one my kids are enjoying these days:

Peanut-Butter Sandwich
by Shel Silverstein

I’ll sing you a story of a silly young king
Who played with the world at the end of a string,
But he only loved one single thing --
And that was just a peanut-butter sandwich.

His scepter and his royal gowns,
His regal throne and golden crowns
Were brown and sticky from the mounds
And drippings from each peanut-butter sandwich.

His subjects all were silly fools
For he had passed a royal rule
That all that they could learn in school
Was how to make a peanut-butter sandwich.

He would not eat his sovereign steak,
He scorned his soup and kingly cake,
And told his courtly cook to bake
An extra-sticky peanut-butter sandwich.

And then one day he took a bite
And started chewing with delight,
But found his mouth was stuck quite tight
From that last bite of peanut-butter sandwich.

His brother pulled, his sister pried,
The wizard pushed, his mother cried,
“My boy’s committed suicide
From eating his last peanut-butter sandwich!”

The dentist came, and the royal doc.
The royal plumber banged and knocked,
But still those jaws stayed tightly locked.
Oh darn that sticky peanut-butter sandwich!

The carpenter, he tried with pliers,
The telephone man tried with wires,
The firemen, they tried with fire,
But couldn’t melt that peanut-butter sandwich.

With ropes and pulleys, drills and coil,
With steam and lubricating oil --
For twenty years of tears and toil --
They fought that awful peanut-butter sandwich.

Then all his royal subjects came.
They hooked his jaws with grapplin’ chains
And pulled both ways with might and main
Against that stubborn peanut-butter sandwich.

Each man and woman, girl and boy
Put down their ploughs and pots and toys
And pulled until kerack! Oh, joy --
They broke right through that peanut-butter sandwich.

A puff of dust, a screech, a squeak --
The king’s jaw opened with a creak.
And then in voice so faint and weak --
The first words that they heard him speak
Were, “How about a peanut-butter sandwich?”

Signs of the Times
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Air a-gittin' cool an' coolah,

Frost a-comin' in de night,

Hicka' nuts an' wa'nuts fallin',

Possum keepin' out o' sight.

Tu'key struttin' in de ba'nya'd,

Nary a step so proud ez his;

Keep on struttin', Mistah Tu'key,

Yo' do' know whut time it is.

Cidah press commence a-squeakin'

Eatin' apples sto'ed away,

Chillun swa'min' 'roun' lak ho'nets,

Huntin' aigs ermung de hay.

Mistah Tu'key keep on gobblin'

At de geese a-flyin' souf,

Oomph! dat bird do' know whut's comin';

Ef he did he'd shet his mouf.

Pumpkin gittin' good an' yallah

Mek me open up my eyes;

Seems lak it's a-lookin' at me

Jes' a-la'in' dah sayin' "Pies."

Tu'key gobbler gwine 'roun' blowin',

Gwine 'roun' gibbin' sass an' slack;

Keep on talkin', Mistah Tu'key,

You ain't seed no almanac.

Fa'mer walkin' th'oo de ba'nya'd

Seein' how things is comin' on,

Sees ef all de fowls is fatt'nin' —

Good times comin' sho's you bo'n.

Hyeahs dat tu'key gobbler braggin',

Den his face break in a smile —

Nebbah min', you sassy rascal,

He's gwine nab you atter while.

Choppin' suet in de kitchen,

Stonin' raisins in de hall,

Beef a-cookin' fu' de mince meat,

Spices groun' — I smell 'em all.

Look hyeah, Tu'key, stop dat gobblin',

You ain' luned de sense ob feah,

You ol' fool, yo' naik's in dangah,

Do' you know Thanksgibbin's hyeah?

From Gogol's Dead Souls on the difference between a "foodie" and an eater:


The author is obliged to confess that he is most envious of the appetite and digestion of such people. He has no time at all for all the grand folk of St. Petersburg and Moscow, who spend an age deliberating what they would like to eat tomorrow and what they might fancy for dinner the day after tomorrow, never embarking on these dinners without first swallowing a pill, after which they gobble down their oysters, sea spiders, and other horrors and then go off to Karlsbad or the Caucasus for a cure. No, these gentlemen have never excited his envy. But people of the middle estate, who at one post-house order ham, at the next, sucking pig, at the third, a collop of sturgeon or a spiced sausage fried with onions, and then, quite as if they had not eaten all day, will sit down at any time you like and tuck into a bowl of sterlet soup with burbot and soft roe, which hisses and sizzles between their teeth, followed by kedgeree pie or a sheat-fish pastry. Just to watch them makes your mouth water. These people are truly blessed with a most enviable gift from heaven! Many a gentleman of quality would, without a moment's hesitation, sacrifice half his serfs and half his estates, mortgaged and unmortgaged, complete with all improvements in the foreign and the Russian manner, to have a digestion such as that of his less exalted brethren, but the sad truth is that no amount of money, nor estates, with or without improvements, can buy the kind of digestion generally enjoyed by people of the middle estate.

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country...

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America... He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.

"Benjamin Franklin to daughter Sarah Bache, January 26, 1784".Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We communicated by cheeses,
unwrapping them gingerly,
parting the crust with a fork,
tasting dew, must, salt....

From "A Marriage in the Dolomites" by D. Nurske

Next to the voice and touch of those we love,
food may be our last pleasure on earth--
a man on death row takes his T-bone
in small bites and swishes each sip
of the jug wine around in his mouth,
tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt
this supper out of him....

From "Parkinson's Disease" by Galway Kinnell.

Pablo Neruda wrote a surprising number of poems to different foods: salt, maize, tomatoes, lemons, wine, tuna, conger chowder, and artichoke.

You can find these odes here:
http://sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl/chile/misc/odas.html

Cynthia wrote:Pablo Neruda wrote a surprising number of poems to different foods: salt, maize, tomatoes, lemons, wine, tuna, conger chowder, and artichoke.

You can find these odes here:
http://sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl/chile/misc/odas.html

These are wonderful! Thanks!

LAZ wrote:

Cynthia wrote:Pablo Neruda wrote a surprising number of poems to different foods: salt, maize, tomatoes, lemons, wine, tuna, conger chowder, and artichoke.

You can find these odes here:
http://sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl/chile/misc/odas.html

These are wonderful! Thanks!

I thought they were quite remarkable. Glad you liked them. I think Salt is my favorite:

In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.

And then on every table
in the world...

The latest issue of the New Yorker has a poem by Jackie Kay titled "Egusi Soup." The text is behind a paywall, but I can PM it to anyone interested.

I just started reading the recently published Anthology of Rap (Yale University Press, 2010), which includes MC Lyte's "Cappuccino" (1989, I think). Here, it isn't coffee that provides the jolt. The rap starts:

MC Lyte wrote:It was a cafe on the West Side, midtown
Said they had the best cap-a-cappuccino around
So I stepped in and I ordered a cup
Someone grabbed me by my throat and said, "Shut the f*** up!"

The stanzas that follow evoke a kind of nightmare until the end, when the rapper chooses a different drink.

MC Lyte wrote:But when you start drinkin, shit, it be workin
I'm hooked, well, I was, 'cause yo, it's the best
But if every time I drink I voyage through death
I leave it alone and just stick to tea, Cappuc-
Cino was fly, but too fly for me

Why, oh, why did I need cappuccino?

I loved this so much, I may paint it on my kitchen wall:

"Last night, there was a piece of cake in my fridge with a 'Don't eat me' note on it.
Now there's an empty plate and a note that says, 'I don't take orders from cake' ." - Unknown