’Tis not the meat, but ’tis the appetite
Makes eating a delight.

These lines are commonly attributed to Sir John Suckling’s light, courtly lyric “Song” (often identified by its opening, “Out upon it, I have loved / Three whole days together”). Written in the Caroline court milieu of the 1630s, the poem plays with the conventions of love poetry by treating desire as something fickle and self-renewing rather than solemnly constant. The couplet appears as a witty, proverbial aside: Suckling uses the everyday example of eating to illustrate how pleasure depends less on the object itself than on the condition of the person who desires it—an attitude that fits the poem’s playful, skeptical stance toward romantic idealization.

The couplet argues that enjoyment depends less on the objective quality of what is consumed (“the meat”) than on the subjective condition of the consumer (“the appetite”). Read literally, it is a maxim about food: hunger makes even plain fare pleasurable, while satiety dulls delight. Figuratively, it extends to love, art, and worldly pleasures: desire, anticipation, and receptivity create value more than the thing desired. In Suckling’s characteristic mode, the thought is both worldly and slightly skeptical—suggesting that delight is produced by human longing rather than inherent excellence, and that managing appetite (want) may matter more than acquiring ever better “meat.”