Arab poets extolled just about everything under the soon and in the moonlight. Even a loaf of bread could inspire passion. The following is a poem by Abu al-Mukhaffaf, an early 9th century Baghdadi poet. Here is the introduction (nasîb) in his ode:

Please, no abodes abandoned in the wastelands!
Spare me your lines about expensive wines;
No virgin girls with narrow waists and waistbands.
Describe a noble loaf: a sun that shines,
Or like the moon when it is full and round;
For only them my poetry is sound.

I’ve given up all contacts with attractive girls.
I’ve sobered up: no more consorting with all those
Who please the eye until you die from love.
Leave those campsite remains to stupid people
Who cry at all abodes abandoned.
Don’t praise in poems beardless youths
Or servants, or those pretty girls,
But praise a loaf of bread, embellished with a crust
Transcending all description.

It leaves a sober man madly in love, out of his wits,
So that he bungles his devotions.
The pattern on the loaf: like stars that rise at night.
Withholding such a loaf is insolence,
To grant it is a true donation.

Translated by Geert Jan van Gelder in his God’s Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 112-13.