"They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach."
"Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works." N.B.: "Eat, Drink and be merry." See also Luke 12:19
"Eat not garlic nor onions, lest they find out thy boorish origin by the smell; walk slowly and speak deliberately, but not in such a way as to make it seem thou art listening to thyself, for all affectation is bad. Dine sparingly and sup more sparingly still; for the health of the whole body is forged in the workshop of the stomach. Be temperate in drinking, bearing in mind that wine in excess keeps neither secrets nor promises. Take care, Sancho, not to chew on both sides, and not to eruct in anybody's presence."
"Eruct!" said Sancho; "I don't know what that means."
"To eruct, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "means to belch, and that is one of the filthiest words in the Spanish language, though a very expressive one; and therefore nice folk have had recourse to the Latin, and instead of belch say eruct, and instead of belches say eructations; and if some do not understand these terms it matters little, for custom will bring them into use in the course of time, so that they will be readily understood; this is the way a language is enriched; custom and the public are all-powerful there."
"In truth, senor," said Sancho, "one of the counsels and cautions I mean to bear in mind shall be this, not to belch, for I'm constantly doing it."
"Eruct, Sancho, not belch," said Don Quixote.
"Eruct, I shall say henceforth, and I swear not to forget it," said Sancho.
-M. F. K. Fisher, from her 1943 book "The Gastronomical Me" [quoted in "Time," May 16, 1983], [When asked why she wrote about eating and drinking]
"I shall content myself with merely declaring my firm conviction that, for the seeker who would live in fear of God and who would see Him face to face, restraint in diet both as to quantity and quality is as essential as restraint in thought and speech."
-Mahatma Gandhi, Te Story of My Experiments with truth - An Autobiography; p. 228
Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
"Their [the waiters'] eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet - pâté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, filet mignon, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes."
"[B]ut 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."
http://www.bravebirds.org/plutarch.html
"Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration."