“Hunger is the best sauce in the world,” wrote Miguel de Cervantes in Part II, Chapter V, of Don Quixote, published in 1615.

“I am the emperor, and I want dumplings,” said Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria. His only lucid remark, the historian A. J. P. Taylor thought.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s digestive “milk cure” involved drinking a half pint of milk every half hour for twelve hours, supplemented by bran and paraffin four times a day, fruit twice a day, and two enemas a day.

“I’m not leaving, and by the way I’m hungry,” President George W. Bush said on September 13, 2001, when he was told there was a credible threat to the White House. He ordered a cheeseburger. 

In the 1790s in the United States, the average American over the age of fifteen consumed almost six gallons of pure alcohol per annum. The modern figure is 2.8.

Kobe beef, black truffles, seared foie gras, aged Gruyère cheese, wild mushrooms, and flakes of gold leaf, are most of the components that comprise the hamburger served at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe. Price: $175.

The first Olympic champion on record, Coroebus, was a cook. He won the sprint in 776 BC.

The choirmaster of the Cologne Cathedral gave sugar sticks to his young singers to keep them quiet during the long Nativity ceremony in 1670. They were shaped like a shepherd’s crook.

“If you’re just going to sit there and stare at me, I’m going to bed,” Elvis Presley said, breaking an awkward silence when the Beatles visited him on August 27, 1965. As midnight snacks for his guests, he requested broiled chicken-livers wrapped in bacon and sweet-and-sour meatballs.

Cornbread, hot biscuits, wheat bread, and fried chicken were among the foods that Mark Twain said couldn’t be cooked north of the Mason-Dixon line.

As to why he didn’t drink water, an inebriated W.C. Fields purportedly responded, “Fish fuck in it.”

Breaking the necks of pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens while the gendarme went for a glass of wine was supposedly how Ernest Hemingway on occasion fed his family in Paris in the 1920s. He hid the bodies in his son Bumby’s stroller. Sometimes when he went without, the novelist studied the paintings by Paul Cézanne, which “looked more beautiful if you were belly empty, hollow hungry.”

“I have made a bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I could get you to say more than two words,” a lady remarked to the president during a dinner. “You lose,” he responded.

As a young man studying in Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh on August 18, 1877, wrote to his brother Theo, “I breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer—that is what Dickens advises for those who are on the point of committing suicide, as being a good way to keep them, at least for some time, from their purpose.” 

The G8 met in Hokkaido, Japan, in July 2008 to address the global food crisis. Over an eighteen-course meal—including truffles, caviar, conger eel, Kyoto beef, and champagne—prepared by sixty chefs, the world leaders came to a consensus: “We are deeply concerned that the steep rise in global food prices coupled with availability problems in a number of developing countries is threatening global food security.”