“What they discovered was that not only fish, but spiders and many insects can taste their food by the structures that are most likely to first come in contact with the food. And this in many invertebrate species turns out to be the feet.”

“But hunger, like food, comes in many shapes and colors.”

“Rejection of food: This was the first hurdle I encountered after parting with him. Refusing food is basically a refusal of relationships, and if it gets worse it can turn into a frightening illness, leading to a complete destruction of all human contact.”

“All organisms can make the most basic distinctions--between food and not-food, danger and safety, light and dark, same-species and not-same. But only people can use language to make the highly complex categorizations of, say, animals or physical forces, or however many different kinds of quarks there are now, putting them in separate piles and naming the piles. It's how we proceed; it's how we communicate. Organization into categories is, at bottom, human.”

“I would like to coin the phrase alimentary theology, a theology that is more attentive to and welcoming of the multiple layers contained and implied in the making of theology. This is a theology that not only pays closer attention to matters related to food and nourishment, and the many ways they can relate, inspire, and inform theological reflection. Most importantly, it is an envisioning of theology as nourishment: food as theology and theology as food. Alimentary theology is envisioned as food for thought; it addresses some of the spiritual and physical hungers of the world, and seeks ways of bringing about nourishment.”

“Many more people could ride out the storm-tossed waves in their economic lives if they had their year's supply of food…and were debt-free. Today we find that many have followed this counsel in reverse: they have at least a year's supply of debt and are food-free.”