"Eating teaches the basic lessons of love. Love is eating. Eating exists in the dialectic of love and its obscure object. This was our first lesson, learned in the breast of our mothers. Pleasure is when love and its object meet. To love is to eat. To love is to give oneself to be eaten. Every food is an aphrodisiac. There is no love-making if there is no desire. The inexhaustible varieties of the eating pleasures awaken in our bodies inexhaustible varieties of hunger. ‘Blessed are the hungry.’ Only those who are hungry have the power to make love. This is the magic food performs: it eroticizes our bodies, it awakens the fire of desire, it lights our dreams, we are made hungrier than we were. Every meal is an ‘aperitif.’ Our desire is never satisfied. If our desire is satisfied, we stop being lovers… Eating and knowing have the same origin. To know something is to feel its taste, what it does to my body."
- Rubem A. Alves, The poet, the warrior, the prophet, (London : SCM Press, 1991), p. 85
