The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in history, health sciences, sociology, economics, and related fields.

Why Food Matters is by Professor Paul Freedman, who teaches history at Yale University, the United States of America. Professor Freedman specializes in medieval social history, the history of Spain, comparative studies of the peasantry, trade in luxury products, and the history of cuisine.

Why Food Matters argues that food has played an essential role in the evolution of human identity and human civilizations. Food has a unique role in our lives because it is a way of expressing community and celebration. It can also separate people in terms of race, cultural difference, gender, and geography. Food helps us understand how cultures and identities are formed and maintained.

The TU Library collection owns  many books about different aspects of the history and impact of food.

Here are some thoughts about food by authors, mostly from books owned by the TU Library:

Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.

• Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.

• Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

• Mahatma Gandhi The Spirituality of Bread

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.

• Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

Moses … denied to the members of the sacred commonwealth unrestricted liberty to use and partake of the other kinds of food. All the animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, thus titillating and exciting the malignant foe pleasure, he sternly forbade them to eat, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of the senses, the taste, and produce gluttony, an evil very dangerous both to soul and body.

• Philo, On The Special Laws

The Gods have not ordained hunger to be our death: even to the well-fed man comes death in varied shape,

The riches of the liberal never waste away, while he who will not give finds none to comfort him,

The man with food in store who, when the needy comes in miserable case begging for bread to eat,

Hardens his heart against him, when of old finds not one to comfort him.

Bounteous is he who gives unto the beggar who comes to him in want of food, and the feeble,

Success attends him in the shout of battle. He makes a friend of him in future troubles,

No friend is he who to his friend and comrade who comes imploring food, will offer nothing.

Let the rich satisfy the poor implorer, and bend his eye upon a longer pathway,

Riches come now to one, now to another, and like the wheels of cars are ever rolling,

The foolish man wins food with fruitless labour: that food – I speak the truth – shall be his ruin,

He feeds no trusty friend, no man to love him. All guilt is he who eats with no partaker.

• Rigveda, Mandala 10, Hymn 117

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

• George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

 All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.

• Charles M. Schulz

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

• R.R. Tolkien

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.

• Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

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

• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

• A. A. Milne

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

• Mark Twain

You can’t just eat good food. You’ve got to talk about it too. And you’ve got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

• Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird

All sorrows are less with bread.

• Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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.

• M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

• M.F.K. Fisher

Eating is an agricultural act.

• Wendell Berry, What Are People For: Essays By Wendell Berry

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

• Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

No one is lonely while eating spaghetti: it requires so much attention.

• Christopher Morley

There was something sort of bleak about her tone, rather as if she had swallowed an east wind. This I took to be due to the fact that she probably hadn’t breakfasted. It’s only after a bit of breakfast that I’m able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a fellow the universal favourite. I’m never much of a lad till I’ve engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee.

“I suppose you haven’t breakfasted?”

“I have not yet breakfasted.”

“Won’t you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?”

“No, thank you.”

She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage league or a league for the suppression of eggs. There was a bit of silence.

• P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves And The Unbidden Guest

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)