hum

I would have made supper, but Federico was even more fussy and valetudinarian than your average Italian man, and insisted on making himself risotto bianco with only a single leaf of basil to flavour it. He was already on beta-blockers and drank no wine at all. There was never any question of his sleeping anywhere but in the big bed with me, but he was horrified to find that I slept with all the windows open.
[…]
The next day he said, “Let me bring you light. I’m going to give you a generator.” I thought he meant an old one, but what I got was brand new. Then he sent his own electricians to wire it up. “Now, every time you turn the lights on, you’ll think of me,” he said.

Germaine Greer

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Michael Pollan

Suffering because life cannot satisfy selfish desire is like suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.

George said:
‘You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.’
George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.
[…]
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!)

As the ship neared the tropics and the heat, boredom and gossip intensified, so too did the tensions, both alimentary and sexual. The filth in first class was as bad as it was in the third - from the shy newlyweds who kept half the ship awake by “reciting Spanish verbs” in their cabin at night, to the opera tenor who cruised the lower decks for peasant beauties, to the Swiss-Italian woman in black silk stockings who gaily betrayed her bookish husband with the Argentinian politician, the Tuscan adolescent and the opera tenor. As the old hunchback commented in despair, “Se ‘e porcaie pesassan, saiescimo zà a fondo”: “If filth was heavy, we’d be on the bottom already.”

John Dickie

How did the Italians come to eat so well?

John Dickie

At his trial, when Socrates was asked to propose his own punishment, he suggested a wage paid by the government and free dinners for the rest of his life.

“I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.”

Abstaining from meat one day a week is, according to Ghent councillor Tom Balthazar, “good for the climate, your health and your taste buds”. Indeed, the UN says meat and dairy production account for 18 per cent of greenhouse gases – more than the world’s entire transport system – and the amount of carbon saved by turning vegetarian for a year is, says the Vegan Society in Australia, equal to switching from a normal car to a hybrid for 12 months.

Emma Bamford