Am enjoying watching Masterchef at the moment, though the overly dramatic, 'Cooking DOESNT get much tougher than THIS' opener always makes me chuckle. It's a line more suited to bare knuckle fighting than the controlled application of olive oil to a non-stick pan.

I love cooking and am I suppose passionate about food, compared to some - I will go out of my way to visit a local store stocking good ingredients, can spend hours wandering around markets and delis and am blissfully happy with a complex recipe necessitating hours in the kitchen. Despite this, I do wonder about the unadulterated passion for food that some of the Masterchef contestants and presenters display. Food appears to literally rule their lives. Food is culture of course and deserves to be considered as an integral part of life's rich tapestry just like art and literature. But unlike the latter, food I don't believe can enrich the soul or challenge the mind so I find it somewhat baffling that some-one can devote their lives to the pursuit of the perfect hollandaise sauce and believe they have found nirvana - as Masterchef implies they do. Food is ancillary to life surely?

Anyway, some good food quotes below.

Being a cheese-lover, I can't agree more with GK Chesterton - though I doubt he was quite so sincere as I!

"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." ~G.K. Chesterton

"Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans." ~Fred Allen

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." ~Calvin Trillin

"If you ate pasta and antipasto, would you still be hungry?" ~Author Unknown

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. " Albert Einstein