‘Appetites’ is here for all the ways we’re hungry and all the ways we’re fed. Weekly stories, essays, poems, photographs, recipes, and a look behind the scenes of my life in rural Maine—foraging, hunting, fishing, growing, homesteading, cooking, writing, and talking with other hungry people.
“I cannot count the good people I know, who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers. There are too many of us, otherwise, in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers. Some stuff the wax of religious solace in our ears, others practice a spartan, if somewhat pretentious disinterest in the pleasures of the flesh, or pretend that if we do not admit our sensual delight in a ripe nectarine, we are not guilty of even that tiny lust. I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert, and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and wars, fears, and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of our selves. Then fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.”
—M.F.K. Fisher
