Food Rituals Quotes

The food habits of the different classes of Hindus have been as fixed and stratified as their cults. Just as Hindus can be classified on their basis of their cults, so also they can be classified on the basis of their habits of food.

Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.

In Judaism, almost every ritual entails either food or the absence of food. Yom Kippur, for instance, is the absence of food. Part of it is Talmudic, part of it is custom. So much of Judaism was bound up in dietary laws. So everything you ate - the very act itself - was part of religion.

Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.

A Jewish food is one that is almost sanctified, either by its repeated use or use within the holidays or rituals. So food that may have not been Jewish at one point can become Jewish within the cultural context.

When you look at food as an ethical issue in the Christian tradition, you don't find very much about it. You don't find, as you do in the Jewish or Islamic or Hindu traditions, a lot of restrictions saying you can eat this but you can't eat that.

In no religion is beef-eating a part of faith.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.

Food is culture. Food is an identity, a footprint of who you are.

A person's relationship with food is one of their most important relationships.

Food not only connects us at the idyllic dinner table setting with family and friends: it is also part of our mundane, daily transit to and from work.

I have the same thing every day. I find it comforting. I have a banana, but I can never eat the whole banana. And I'll drink a couple of Actimels. And some kind of cereal with almond milk. And then after that, I have a Coke.

One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function - like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks.

I tend to eat things in fours. I'll eat four nuts, four grapes, four chips at a time. I don't know why. It's not really a superstition. I don't think anything bad will happen if I don't, but three potato chips doesn't seem right.

Food is a lens for culture.

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

I used to have this superstition where I had to eat steak every night before I played, and my nutritionist told me don't do that. So after I lost that one, the other ones fell off pretty quickly.

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

If I've gone to get a takeaway, and I get chips... I like to match up the chips in length. That is actually quite weird. Obviously, if I've got chips, I pick them out in twos. That's a weird thing as well. You know, if they're not the same length, well, I go hunting for the same length in chips.