Apetyt przychodzi w miarę jedzenia.

The English CM translation is given as ‘Appetite comes with eating’. I understand that the phrase ‘… w miarę (+ genitive)’ means ‘to the extent of’. Applied to the original sentence, I guess this sort of means that ‘Appetite is triggered (instead of satisfied) by eating’??? Seems like a tricky one!

This is a Polish saying, and not the most obvious one at that… I’m not sure if there’s a good English equivalent—Wiktionary says it’s “once you start you can’t stop”, but I’m not sure I ever heard anyone say that.

We say “apetyt rośnie w miarę jedzenia” when someone gradually becomes more hungry/greedy/excited when doing something. So this works both in literal contexts (e.g. a person is not feeling hungry when they start eating, but their appetite seems to improve as they go on eating) and non-literal contexts (e.g. someone seems to never be satisfied with their material conditions—the more stuff they own, the more they seek to enrich themselves).

Do you think the current translation “Appetite comes with eating” reflects that well enough? Is there any alternative English translation that would also convey this meaning (perhaps better)?

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I am pretty sure that translation of this sentence to the Czech language should be “Mám hlad”.