thoughts on eating

I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that "some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them;" and they lay it down as "a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly," .. "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larvae. This is the tid-bit which tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larvae state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. 

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden