In Italian, food is rarely just food. It organizes time, relationships, and expectations. This column explores Italian sayings and proverbs as ways of thinking shaped at the table.
These expressions preserve that knowledge in compact form. Read literally, they speak about eating. Read more closely, they offer insight into how experience, pleasure, and social life are understood.
The aim is simple: to treat language as another ingredient—handled with care, tasted slowly, and shared. No prior appetite required. It tends to arrive along the way.
Literal translation: Appetite comes with eating
Meaning: desire grows through practice
If there is one proverb with which to open a column on food sayings at Appetito, it could only be l’appetito vien mangiando.
The expression does not offer advice or prescribe behavior; it describes an experience. More precisely, it names a familiar bodily shift that occurs once eating has already begun, when appetite is no longer what draws one to the table but something the table itself begins to generate. The desire for good food is not always fully present at the start of a meal. Often it emerges gradually, stirred by smell, taste, and repetition. One bite follows another. The proverb records a process already in motion, not a plan or an intention.
What matters here is not success or outcome, but duration. Appetite does not arrive once eating has proven satisfying; it takes shape while the act is unfolding. There is no decisive moment that separates before and after. The transformation happens within the continuity of eating itself.
From this experiential logic, the saying extends naturally beyond the table. Italians use l’appetito vien mangiando to speak about work, study, projects, and relationships—situations in which motivation appears only after one has begun. One can starts without strong desire, sometimes without conviction, and later discovers interest or pleasure. In this sense, desire is not the cause of action but something that emerges from it.
This way of extending a culinary experience into other domains gives the proverb a distinctly Italian inflection that can be clarify when the Italian sayingis set beside its most common English counterpart, Nothing succeeds like success. The two expressions are often treated as equivalents, and in many contexts, they do function as such. Yet they belong to different experiential fields.
In the English formulation, motivation is tied to outcome. Success generates further success: momentum builds once something has already worked. Satisfaction arrives after the act, once a result can be recognized and confirmed. The present matters primarily insofar as it points forward.
The Italian proverb remains anchored in the culinary domain. Here, pleasure is not associated with the completed meal—if anything, that moment brings fullness, even heaviness—but with the act of eating itself. Appetite grows while the meal is still unfolding, bite after bite. Satisfaction is not postponed until the end; it accompanies the process.
This contrast does not imply a hierarchy. Each proverb organizes experience differently. Nothing succeeds like success emphasizes continuity through achievement. L’appetito vien mangiando emphasizes continuity through participation. One looks back at what has been accomplished; the other stays with what is happening. Neither excludes the future, but only the Italian expression allows the present to be sufficient in itself.
Notably, l’appetito vien mangiando carries little moral weight. It does not praise ambition, nor does it warn against excess. In everyday Italian, it often functions as an explanation—sometimes even as a mild justification—uttered with the same tone used when reaching for another serving.
The persistence of the culinary image matters. Although similar proverbs exist in other European languages, Italian has preserved the concreteness of appetite and eating. The saying has not dissolved into abstraction. Even when used far from the table, it still sounds as if it belongs there.
This reflects a broader feature of Italian food language: its attention to duration and rhythm. Eating is not a single decision followed by consequences, but an act that unfolds, adjusts, and deepens. L’appetito vien mangiando names the transformation that occurs along the way. Meaning does not precede experience; it takes shape within it.
For a column devoted to food idioms, this proverb is a natural place to begin. It does not use food as decoration, but as a way of thinking: you start, and appetite follows. And if this is true at the table, it may also be true on the page. This column does not ask for curiosity in advance; it hopes to awaken it as it goes.
