A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom.
Interpretation
True gourmets approach food with a sense of freedom and confidence, free from caution.
This quote by M. F. K. Fisher suggests that a genuine gourmet is characterized by their fearless exploration and enjoyment of food. For them, the absence of caution indicates a deep appreciation and understanding of culinary experiences, allowing them to indulge in gastronomical freedom both instinctively and as a result of cultivated knowledge.
In practice
This quote could be used in a food critic's review to emphasize the joy of culinary exploration.
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...
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.
In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.
Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
There's a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.
...it was so rich and exotic I was seduced into taking one bite and then another as I tried to chase the flavors back to their source.
One day, the people who work in my kitchen stir-fried chopped Napa cabbage to serve with some meat or fish for their own dinner. I got to thinking: 'What if the cabbage was the most important thing on the plate?'
Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.
Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.
My work has gotten more political over time, but once you start exploring food, you find you're up against economics and politics and psychology and anthropology, all of these different things you have to deal with.
The best thing you can do for someone is make them a beautiful plate of food. How else can you invade someone's body without actually touching them?
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