First We Eat, Then We Do Everything Else

A reflection on food, memory, and the quiet ways it shapes our biology.

There’s a quote I’ve carried for years. Not framed above my desk or taped to the fridge. It’s lodged much deeper, somewhere between my appetite and my sense of what matters.

“First we eat, then we do everything else.”— M.F.K. Fisher

Some days, it lands like a reminder. Other days, a quiet act of defiance. But always, it feels true.

The Woman Who Said It

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is one of my favourite writers. She didn’t write about food in the way most people do. She wove her memories into food, and reminded me that even a simple meal can offer comfort, dignity, and the kind of love that doesn’t need to be named.

She didn’t talk about nutrients or restraint. She talked about need. About making a meal when you didn’t feel like it. About longing, scarcity and survival and sensuality. All in the same breath.

Her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf was created during war-time rationing, scarcity on every shelf, uncertainty in every household. The wolf was a the door.

But instead of fear, she wrote with clarity. Instead of panic, presence.

She reminded people that even when the cupboard is bare and the world feels fragile, how we eat still matters.

Not just what’s served, but the fact that we made a plate at all.

The Ritual Beneath the Routine

Fisher didn’t treat food as fuel. She wrote about it as if it were central to being alive. Not a side note, not a supplement, a starting point.

And when I look around now, at all the performative wellness trends, the calorie-counting apps, the biohacks, there’s something in her voice that still cuts through.

Because for all we’ve learned to measure, we’ve forgotten how to be with a meal. We prep. We portion. We track. But we don’t always sit.

We’ve made food more efficient, more compliant, more “clean". But not more sacred. Not more human.

This Isn’t Sentimentality

It’s not about wishing for the past or dressing things up in nostalgia. It's not chasing some vintage version of dinner, or going back to some imagined simpler time.

It’s about not treating food like an after thought.

It’s about remembering that eating is more than filling a gap. It’s a rhythm. A pulse. A pause that shapes how the rest of the day unfolds.

How we eat, when we eat, what we notice, what we make time for, changes everything. Not just how we digest. But how we decide. How we relate. How we move through the world.

Even in chaos. Especially in chaos.

Fisher knew that. She didn’t say first we fuel or first we optimise. She said first we eat. Because eating, at its core, is a way of saying: I’m still here.

When Food Falls to the Side

Of course, there are days I don’t follow that rhythm. Days when food becomes functional, something I do between deadlines, in the car, while replying to messages I didn’t want to reply to.

There are days I don't feel hunger until my focus disappears or my shoulders creep up to my ears.

Not because I don’t value food. But because bandwidth is real. And when life demands a lot, tending to the basics is often the first thing to go.

Still, I return to that line. Not as discipline. Not as guilt. But as a gentle re-entry.

First we eat.

A way to come back to the body. A way to steady what’s been stretched. A way to honour that even now, especially now, feeding ourselves with care still counts.

Why It Still Rings True

In a world that rewards speed and punishes pause, that teaches us to treat our own hunger as weakness, these words offer both invitation and anchor.

To stop. To soften. To nourish.

Because when we make space to eat, really eat, we create space for everything else to land more gently. We’re not just feeding biology. We’re reminding ourselves what it means to be in a body.

So yes. First, we eat. Then we care. Then we create. Then we cope. Then we mend. Then we begin again.

But first—we eat.