Meals

"The only case in which I can conceive a person having breakfast over night is that he is not likely to have it next morning."

"There is a lot of scientific evidence behind this. Obviously the traditional fry-up is too fat and calorie rich to aid weight control, but cereals and toast are of benefit. Breakfast can be a very good source of vitamins. Many processed cereals are fortified with vitamins and minerals which people can find it difficult to get elsewhere if they are just having two meals a day."

"In Wilson’s scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality."

"Never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it causes him to wonder if women are necessary. If you always get his breakfast and don’t raise controversial issues until after his second cup of coffee, you can get away with murder the rest of the time. They don’t notice other odors when they smell bacon."

"Our results suggest that breakfast may really be the most important meal of the day. It appears that breakfast may play an important role in reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease."

"I think you live a fuller life with someone else, you know, you're firing on all cylinders. It can be a nightmare at times, we all know that, but nevertheless in the end I think to have someone else's input on anything - a book, a meal, your children, life, a walk - is fantastic."

"Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality."

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend."

"In the Lord’s supper...Jesus is the host of the meal...we experience both his welcome to the meal and his “peace be with you” as we return to the world. This event is an actual encounter. Christ is present, Christ is host, Christ welcomes and blesses. We are in actual – not virtual - fellowship with Jesus...The Lord’s Supper is never a solitary individual event. It is always the meal of the community of faith hosted by Christ as an event wherein we both declare and experience the grace that we are at peace with one another."

"Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence."

"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."

"For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There's a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that."

"If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way."

"Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman - or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle."

"You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

"So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

"The Mid Day Meal is the world’s largest school feeding programme reaching out to about 120 million children in over 126,500 schools/EGS centres across the country. Mid Day Meal in schools has had a long history in India. In 1925, a Mid Day Meal Programme was introduced for disadvantaged children in Madras Municipal Corporation. Today, Mid day Meal scheme is serving primary and upper primary school children in entire country."

"In today’s fast life most of the students, managers and workers do not have a choice of having a fresh and hot homemade complete meal. Mostly they are dependent on fast food or a monotonous office canteen that cannot last long. Fortunately, Mumbai people are very lucky to have “Mumbai Dabbawala” Mumbai Dabbawala is a renowned name not only in India but throughout the world. The BBC produced a documentary when Prince Charles, when visited Mumbai Dabbawala during his official visit to India in 2003. Mumbai Dabbawala has taken shape in many management programs worldwide including Harvard Business School."

"Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want."

"After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished."

"A barbecue: an outdoor meal or party at which food is cooked on a barbecue... a social gathering especially in the open air at which barbecued food is eaten."

"A banquet: a sumptuous feast; especially: an elaborate and often ceremonious meal for numerous people often in honor of a person...a meal held in recognition of some occasion or achievement"

"In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from."

"An American blue-plate lunch in honour of our great American Allies. Surely you know what a blue-plate is, man? They shove the whole meal at you under your nose, already dished up on your plate – roast turkey, cranberry sauce, sausages and carrots and French Fried. I can't bear French fried but there's no pick and choose with a blue-plate. No pick and choose? You eat what you're given. That's democracy, man."

"Instead of England's early Sunday dinner, a postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savory pies, why not a new meal, served around noon, that starts with tea or coffee, marmalade and other breakfast fixtures before moving along to the heavier fare? By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday-night carousers. It would promote human happiness in other ways as well. Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting. Beringer wrote."It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.""

"Quantity in diet is more to be regarded than quality. A full meal is a great enemy both to study and industry; that a well built house required but little repairs."

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, cone a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."

"In parts of Christian world, All Souls Day is celebrated by making complete meals for the dead, reflecting their preferences in life, and laid out on a table overnight. All of these symbolic food acts or ritual meals serve to maintain and ensure good relations between family and friends, the living and the dead."

"From an essentially egalitarian “table-fellowship”, the early Christian Church developed a ritual Holy Meal, the Eucharist or Thanksgiving for the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, in which the food and drink (wine and bread) symbolized flesh and blood, as a rite served only to the faithful from the hands of an exclusive priestly class."

"In India an older tradition saw mid-day meals delivered by lunch-wallahs to the desks and workstations of bureaucrats and business people across the major cities of India."

"Certain special meals attained ritual status, serving to symbolize central beliefs and doctrines of religious traditions. For example, meals had a central role in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ from the miraculous feeding of the five thousand to the Last Supper and his breaking bread with tax collectors and sinners."

"Around 1200, the Chinese in all regions had three meals a day, the evening repast being the most substantial and typically consisting of several courses…Three meals remained the norm in China into modern times, with farmers sent their midday meals in containers, while women and children ate at home."

"In Western Europe, the pattern of three meals was common from the sixteenth century, but industrialization shortened the time spent on meals for the working classes whereas the bourgeois devoted much more time to the table and steadily delayed the times of their meals."

"For some students, school is the only place where they get a hot meal and a warm hug. Teachers are sometimes the only ones who tell our children they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League, from the home of a struggling single mom to the White House."

"My mom's always been a good cook, so I took a lot of stuff from her, but most of the stuff I took from Emeril or Bobby Flay right off the TV and make it. I just loved to cook, so it just became a thing. It's a release. Even if I'm alone, I'll cook a full meal, maybe even a two-course meal, just because I love to cook. It's my secret love!"

"I always treat myself to one meal on Sundays when I can have whatever I want. Usually it's pizza, which is my favorite indulgence."

"There's nothing like a home-cooked meal - nothing! When people ask me what the best restaurant in L.A. is, I say, 'Uh, my house.' It's more intimate. Food can connect people in a forever sort of way."

"He didn't come out of my belly, but my God, I've made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride."

"Gandhi believed that it was sheer waste of time and labour to cook various dishes for one meal. He was not prepared to cater to the differing tastes of the different members of the ashram. He prescribed a simple menu for all. The meals were cooked in common kitchen."

"Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal... I've decided that I'm going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up."

"When you start one of these programs, school lunch programs, in a country that heretofore had nothing of that kind, immediately school enrollment jumps dramatically. Girls and boys get to the classroom with the promise of a good meal once a day."

"Fame is like caviar, you know - it's good to have caviar but not when you have it at every meal."

"When I am traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly."

"...When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep - it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them..."

"If we are ever to halt climate change and conserve land, water and other resources, not to mention reduce animal suffering, we must celebrate Earth Day every day - at every meal."

"The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that's what's happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal."

"Going out for a meal, especially for young urbanites, is less about socialising over enjoyable food than about enjoying food as a way to socialise."

"If a man dies young he hath left us at dinner; it is bed-time with a man of three score and ten; and he that lives a hundred years hath walked a mile after supper. This life is but one day of three meals, or one meal of three courses? Childhood, youth, and old age. To sup well is to live well, and that's the way to sleep well."

"The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture."

"Dessert is probably the most important stage of the meal, since it will be the last thing your guests remember before they pass out all over the table."

"Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production."

"Any time women come together with a collective intention, it's a powerful thing. Whether it's sitting down making a quilt, in a kitchen preparing a meal, in a club reading the same book, or around the table playing cards, or planning a birthday party, when women come together with a collective intention, magic happens."

"It is the mark of a mean, vulgar and ignoble spirit to dwell on the thought of food before meal times or worse to dwell on it afterwards, to discuss it and wallow in the remembered pleasures of every mouthful. Those whose minds dwell before dinner on the spit, and after on the dishes, are fit only to be scullions."

"Is it gluttony to eat for the pleasure of eating? Is it gluttony to eat more than the bare necessity for survival? Is it gluttony to think about food outside of meals (such as, "oh, I think I'll go have a cookie" or "yeah, I really like prime rib, myself")?"

"In Ethiopia, food is often looked at through a strong spiritual lens, stronger than anywhere else I know. It's the focal point of weddings, births and funerals and is a daily ceremony from the preparation of the meal and the washing of hands to the sharing of meals."

"Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories."

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."

"In Texas, the “Execution Protocol” clearly outlines a last meal choice to the condemned individual, things accessible by the regular prison kitchen staff... as a scheduled step in the execution process: At least seven days prior to the execution, the warden or designee will contact the condemned individual to arrange for his/her last meal, and The condemned individual will be served a final meal at a time determined by the warden."

"I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them."

"A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek."

"Let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do."

"But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast."

"A dinner lubricates business."

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."

"A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety."

"Come when the heart beats high and warm, With banquet song, and dance, and wine!"

"I shall treat the bird as befits him, I shall treat Anzud as befits him. I shall greet his wife affectionately. I shall seat Anzud's wife and Anzud's child at a banquet."

"Hommes, femmes et enfants, à vous de choisir; vous pouvez rester esclaves dans l'état de colonie, ou devenir indépendant et libre, au milieu des autres peuples qui, de leurs voix toutes puissantes vous convient au banquet des nations."

"Born but to banquet, and to drain the bowl."