Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Tusser

In six blunt words, Tusser turns providence into a pantry inventory: if God provides the appetite (“mouth”), He also provides the means to satisfy it (“meat”). The line works because it’s not lofty theology so much as rural accounting, a proverb-sized bridge between faith and subsistence. Tusser, best known for his didactic verse on husbandry, wrote for a world where hunger wasn’t metaphorical. “Meat” in early modern English often meant food broadly, not just flesh, which makes the phrase feel even more practical: the whole system of need and supply is bundled into a single divine shipment.

The intent is reassurance with a moral edge. It consoles the anxious by insisting that basic desire isn’t a trap laid by a cruel universe; it’s paired, by design, with some provision. At the same time, it quietly disciplines complaint. If both mouth and meat are “sendeth and giveth,” then scarcity can be framed as a test of patience, thrift, and diligence rather than a reason to indict the social order. That’s the subtext that made such sayings durable: they soothe, and they socialize.

Context matters. Mid-16th-century England was rocked by enclosure, price inflation, and periodic dearth; survival depended on weather, landlords, and a fragile local economy. Tusser’s piety is therefore also a coping technology, packaging uncertainty into a readable story: want and sustenance arrive as a matched set, so keep working, keep praying, keep the household steady. The line’s spare symmetry is the persuasive trick - it sounds like common sense, which is how ideology travels best.