Skip to content

Food Quotes

The page leans toward the ethics of eating more than cooking. The Buddha, Gandhi and two writers on vegetarian and vegan diets, Victoria Moran and Joanne Stepaniak, head the list. Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) is the oldest sourced piece, and Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) adds the remark that all wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.

For a lighter line, Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) holds that there is no love sincerer than the love of food. None of the entries on this page is flagged as misattributed.

Random quote on Food

Most quoted on food:

That it is easily possible to sustain life on the products of the vegetable kingdom needs no demonstration for physiologists, even of the majority of the human race were not constantly engaged in demonstrating it; and my researches show, not only that it is possible, but that it is infinitely preferable in every way, and produces superior powers, both of mind and body.

Alexander Haig

For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy. And then we fancy that the voices it utters and screams forth to us are nothing else but certain inarticulate sounds and noises, and not the several deprecations, entreaties, and pleadings of each of them.

Plutarch

I do not mean here absolute want of food, but want of healthful nutriment. How to provide good and plentiful food is, therefore, a most important question of the day. On the general principles the raising of cattle as a means of providing food is objectionable, because, in the sense interpreted above, it must undoubtedly tend to the addition of mass of a "smaller velocity."

Nikola Tesla

[To help combat climate change] Give up meat for one day (per week) initially, and decrease it from there. In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity.

Rajendra K. Pachauri

Simply let those, like him of Samos, live!
Let herbs to them a bloodless banquet give.
In beechen goblets let their beverage shine,
Cool from the crystal spring their sober wine!
Their youth should pass in innocence secure
From stain licentious, and in manners pure.

John Milton

No member of the animal kingdom nurses past maturity, No member of the animal kingdom ever did a thing to me, Its why I don't eat red meat or white fish, Don't give me no blue cheese, Were all members of the animal kingdom, Leave your brothers and sisters in the sea.

Prince

Veganism has given me a higher level of awareness and spirituality, primarily because the energy associated with eating has shifted to other areas. … If you're violent to yourself by putting [harmful] things into your body that violate its spirit, it will be difficult not to perpetuate that [violence] onto someone else.

Dexter Scott King

I decided to become Vegan simply because if you care about animals and people, there is no other choice but to be vegan. It’s a very simple equation — meat and dairy = animal and human suffering. … When you know the truth about meat and dairy the hard thing would be to continue to eat them.

Chris DeRose

When John Coltrane came to me, he looked different from his contemporaries: so clean, well-mannered and humble. About six months earlier he had apparently given up drugs and drink, become a vegetarian and taken to reading Ramakrishna's book's.

Ravi Shankar

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds (1898)

Many years ago I found out something about hamburgers that really grossed me out. You may not know this, so I hope I don't make you sick, but it turns out hamburgers are actually made out of dead cows. I am not making this up. Needless to say, as soon as I discovered that, I gave up meat entirely.

"Weird Al" Yankovic

The old man … received the Sabbath with sweet song and chanted the hallowing tunefully over raisin wine; while it was still day he hallowed and the sun came to gaze at his glass. … The table was well spread with all manner of fruit, beans, greenstuffs and good pies, plum water tasting like wine, but of flesh and of fish there was never a sign. … in truth it is in no way obligatory to eat flesh and fish … He and she, meaning the old man and the old woman, had never tasted flesh since growing to maturity.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon

This leads me of course to at least mention here the cruel methods used in the slaughtering of animals and fowls for human consumption. The creatures are treated as if they possessed no feeling or consciousness of their own - and such attitudes show a most unfortunate misreading of natural events. As a direct result, at least as many diseases develop through such procedures as would exist in a highly primitive society with unsanitary conditions.

Jane Roberts The Way Toward Health (1997)

Mainly the fact that I love animals and don’t want to be involved in anything that causes or contributes to animal suffering. Also, I never really liked meat that much, unless it neither looked [n]or tasted like meat. Like taco filling. But, mainly because I love animals and don’t want them to suffer. Death is unavoidable, suffering is avoidable.

Moby

Until the age of twelve, then, I only lived on bread, milk-food, vegetables, and fruit. My health was not less robust on this account, nor my growth less rapid, and it was to this diet, perhaps, that I was indebted for that purity of feature, that exquisite sensibility of feeling, and that serene gentleness of humor and character which I had preserved up to that period.

Alphonse de Lamartine Les confidences (1849)

Cruelty stares at me from the butcher's face. I tread amidst carcasses. I am in the presence of the slain. The death-set eyes of beasts peer at me and accuse me of belonging to the race of murderers. Quartered, disembowelled creatures on suspended hooks plead with me. I feel myself dispossessed of the divinity.

Amos Bronson Alcott

All my life, I have been sickened by everything connected with meat-, fish-, and poultry eating. As a child, I saw apparently nice, kind people wring the necks of fowls, and I thought it foul; and I wondered if I could ever exert any influence to help bring such unworthiness to an end.

Percy Grainger

I watched a TV documentary about how animals are farmed, killed and prepared for us to eat. I saw all those cows and pigs and realised I couldn’t be a part of it any more. It was horrible. I did some research to make sure I could still obtain enough protein to fight and, once satisfied that I could, I stopped [eating animal products]. I’ll never go back.

David Haye

I am a vegetarian because I believe that present-day ethics is founded on that puerile, pre-Darwinian delusion that all other kinds of creatures and all worlds were created explicitly for the hominine species. Vegetarianism is the ethical corollary of evolution. It is simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin. Evolution has taught us the kinship of all creatures.

J. Howard Moore Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895)

As a meat-eater, I've long found it convenient to categorise veganism as a response to animal suffering or a health fad. But, faced with these figures, it now seems plain that it's the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue. We stuff ourselves, and the poor get stuffed.

George Monbiot

Related topics