The ancient Greeks did not have to wrestle with the philosophical problem of the existence of evil. They did not claim their gods were good, just magnificent.

A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled, enticements, variety, patterning and plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form, but also the details matter intensely.

One can never be too rich or too thin' is an aphorism attributed to the Duchess of Windsor. Being both rich and thin is a difficult enterprise, indeed almost unprecedented as an ideal. Into the paradoxical gap between the capacity to spend money and the need to eat less steps a brilliant solution: 'light' food. In buying 'light' food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place.

Salt is the only rock directly consumed by man. It corrodes but preserves, desiccates but is wrested from the water. ... It preserves things from corruption - even as it corrodes other things with its bite. A little of it fertilizes the land; a lot sterilizes it.

Salt represents the civilized: it requires know-how to get it, and a sophisticated combination of cooking and spoilt, jaded appetites to need it.

Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.

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.