"People ask me: why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power, security and love, the way others do?
They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow unfaithful to the honour of my craft.
"The easiest answer is, to say that like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food, security and love, are so mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied... and it is all one.
"I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love."
MFK Fisher, The Gastronomical Me, 1943
this is a great quote. thanks for the inspiration.
Posted by: jen | November 24, 2004 at 12:37 PM
One of my gastronomical heroes! Thanks for the reminder of what it is all about. ;-)
Posted by: Seattle Bon Vivant | November 25, 2004 at 11:24 AM