(no subject)

To eat and be eaten is a consummation devoutly to be wished in a universe that is all mouth, where black holes have a prodigious appetite for stars and neutrinos are always changing flavors.  Small wonder then that humans have but the one orifice for food, speech, and love, or that the mouth, in eating, speaking, kissing, should be the portal to the serpentine tubing of the gut, the electrical wiring of the brain, the palpitations of the heart.  The mouth is the shaman's portal to the Other Side, whether the Other is a kosher-keeping Yahweh, a vegetarian Puritan, or a dieter's Thin Man.  All foods, all mouths, are sacred to the force that created them, whatever sumptuary laws man invents to triumph over his enemies in the vain attempt to deny that all alike are food for the mouths of worms.

Betty Fussell, from "My Kitchen Wars"


"Mutual pleasures are the sacred core of life: food, body warmth, love and sex...these things are sacred because they are necessary, because they confer pleasure in the giving and the receiving, so it is impossible to say who is giving and who is receiving."
- Marilyn French