Now good digestion wait on appetite,
And health on both!

Spoken at the start of a meal in Shakespeare’s tragedy *Macbeth*. The line functions as a conventional table-blessing or toast, linking appetite, digestion, and health in a neat chain of well-being. In the play’s domestic and courtly setting, such courteous words help establish the public face of hospitality and order—an especially pointed contrast in *Macbeth*, where feasting and welcome are repeatedly shadowed by treachery and violence. The sentiment belongs to the social ritual of dining, where a host’s or guest’s good wishes frame the act of eating as both pleasurable and healthful.

On the surface, the couplet is a conventional wish that the guests enjoy their food and that good health follow. In *Macbeth*, however, its significance deepens through irony. “Good digestion” and “health” suggest harmony between desire (appetite) and bodily well-being—an image of balanced nature and social order. The play repeatedly shows appetite ungoverned by conscience: Macbeth’s ambition becomes a diseased craving that cannot be “digested” into peace. The line thus becomes an inadvertent counterpoint to the drama’s central disorder, where what is eagerly consumed (power) proves poisonous to the soul and the state.