Bread

"My publisher once had the idea of writing a cookbook with the writers. The muse ties a bun and stirs the roux. Typical for the age, mind your stomach. Many people are deceived by the German pun that a man is what he eats. The excellence of the human spirit is not developed at the dinner table. Let's look through the series from Homer to Petőfi, and let's look through the series that lives through the year with Baron Brisse's 366 menus. Homer did not drink champagne, Petőfi did not know the table of Brillat-Savarin. The Wise Man of Nazareth tore and ate wheat on the road. Napoleon grew up next to a lousy cauldron in a military school. Socrates ate salad without vinegar oil and bacon. Spinoza was glad to have bread. Burns and Arany both produced their flowery thoughts at a peasant's table. Where is the spirit in the picky eaters? Numbers prove that the aristocratic class gives the least thought to mankind, and experience proves that cooks are in line with tenorists in the matter of mind. In 1892, an old vine-hayward died in Nagykőrös. He lived for one hundred and four years and was never ill. During those one hundred and four years, the man ate no other food, but bread, and drank nothing but water. I would not dare to say that he was a vine-hayward because he lived like that. If by chance he had the soul of Kant, he would have been a first-rate star of philosophy even with such a lifestyle. If everyone got used to living like this from a young age, what a different view of the world it would be! Thousands and thousands of millions of people would be freed from the chains of office and raise their heads from abject servitude. But it is man's destiny to revolve around his own stomach. Fish-farmers put pike in the pond to keep the fish from getting lazy and thus their flesh from becoming flabby. The Creator put a stomach in man, so that he who has no nobler work to do may move and work. Thus the life of the multitude is nothing but carrying to the table, and the chief delight of the multitude is to eat. But the nation is perishing which makes the table an altar, and holds Lucullus to be the noblest man. The fortunes of the Roman and Greek empires were hatched between plates of earthenware and sacrificed between bowls of gold."