Epicurus recommends bread and cheese as the staple, and his emphasis is more on avoiding pain than on seeking pleasure, insofar as pleasure-seeking tends to be followed by painful after-effects.
Epicureanism did inspire libertine culture in isolated sects, but Epicurus himself rejected an ethics of sensory indulgence, and he would have disowned latter-day 'Epicureanism' as a fussy, expensive, unphilosophical approach to eating and drinking.
Leibniz accepted the argument that there must be indestructible simple entities if there is to be a complex world, but Epicurean morals and politics and anti-theology dismayed him. His 'monadology' which said that the true atoms of nature were unextended 'living mirrors,' was an imaginative and beautiful system, and even in many ways more modern than Epicurean atomism, than Epicurean atomism, but there was a reactionary aspect to it.
Order can arise from chaos without anyone or anything directing the process when unstable combinations of atoms perish and others persist. In the 17th century, Descartes applied this insight to cosmology, and long before Darwin presented his more rigorous ideas about variation and selection, people began to speculate more openly about the origins of life and the species in Epicurean terms.
Aristotle saw nature as intelligent and purposive, whereas for the Epicureans, and the 17th century 'mechanical' philosophers, there is no intentionality in nature except where there are animal minds and bodies.
The life-world of human and animal experience, with colours, tastes, solid objects, is a perceptual effect of massed atoms.
