Life & Wisdom Quote by M. F. K. Fisher

Fisher makes pairing feel less like a foodie preference and more like a law of nature, then quietly punctures the pretension that can cling to “good taste.” The line works because it braids the sensual with the ordinary: wine and cheese sit beside aspirin and aches, a deliberately unglamorous couple. Pleasure, she suggests, isn’t a rarefied art object; it’s a practical remedy, a small technology for living with the body’s annoyances. That’s classic Fisher: appetite as intelligence, eating as a way to meet reality without flinching.

The little rhyme of “June and moon” adds a wink. It’s almost corny, like a song lyric you half-remember, and that’s the point: some combinations are so familiar they stop needing explanation. By placing the romance of summer next to the pharmacy of pain relief, she collapses high and low registers and makes them equally legitimate. Pairings aren’t only about “matching notes”; they’re about the comfort of recognition.

Then she escalates to “good people and noble ventures,” and the metaphor shows its real ambition. Fisher isn’t merely talking about a menu; she’s smuggling in an ethics of companionship. Wine and cheese become a model for how to move through the world: seek what fits, what steadies, what makes the burdens bearable, what turns appetite into fellowship. Written in a century shaped by war, austerity, and American domestic reinvention, her praise of simple, durable pleasures reads as cultural resistance: a refusal to let hardship dictate the terms of daily life.