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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the basic human need for nourishment over abstract ideas of power and love.
M. F. K. Fisher reflects on her choice to write about food and the satisfaction it brings, rather than the more commonly addressed themes of love and power. This suggests that for many, the fundamental aspects of life, such as hunger and the pleasures of eating, hold more immediate importance and relevance than the arguably more complex and less tangible struggles of human existence.
In practice
In a presentation on the importance of food culture, this quote can highlight the significance of everyday experiences.
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...
It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. 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.
In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.
Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
There's a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
I would go through these cycles of being really, really focused on work, and not being around anyone, to being around everyone. And that could be distracting. It was nothing or everything.
We need to confront the life-killing stereotype that says we're all about suffering. We need to bear witness to our pleasures.
What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?
When you're 40, you can't ride the fence anymore. You gotta make definite decisions about your life.
Life is hard. After all, it kills you.
Let choice whisper in your ear and love murmur in your heart. Be ready. Here comes life.
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