Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
A pulling back of skin and forceps on flesh reveal an inner world of the human body in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Anatomy lessons entertained curious spectators throughout Europe from the sixteenth into the nineteenth century. Such spectacles danced the edge of the sacred and profane as worlds under the skin … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater Of Anthony Bourdain
Ah, if only our bodies featured an ever-growing fruit basket a la Arcimboldo, then food distribution would be at our hands, from our faces. Exploring the metaphysics of food includes the portrayals of its production and distribution. The seed I hold in my hand has a real growth potential and biochemistry to its existence; just … Continue reading Metaphysics Of The Food Labyrinth.
To cook, to eat, to kill. An animal’s life taken, body split open, applied to fire and torn between teeth. What are the aesthetic and ethics? Dan Barber argues that good taste necessitates sustainable farming to table. Tayyib and Halal mean the animal has been raised in a “good” environment–think ethically sourced and sustainable–and then … Continue reading Brains and Balls.
In the early sixteenth century, Leonardo Da Vinci sketched many anatomical drawings and wrote many notes concerning the human heart. Nature has made the cords on the back side of the fleshy membrane of the three gates with which the gateway of the right ventricle is shut; and she has not made them on the … Continue reading Eating A Burning Heart Of Love.
My friend Doug Arno went for a walk with a compound bow in Northern Ontario near Longlac during bear hunting season and brought down a black bear weighing nearly 300 pounds. With one arrow. Bear hunting in North America dates back to the beginning of the Holocene. Bear Hunting at the Pleistocene/Holocene Transition on the Northern … Continue reading “Looking After the Bones:” A Hunt And Bear Stew.
Ah, ginger beef tripe from Yum Yum Cha Cafe. Though no longer a fixture of Rice Village, many a Sunday morning the Harvey/Maya family traveled to its storefront window and entered in search of dim sum. Beef tripe comes to us from the muscle wall of the first three chambers of a cow’s stomach. The … Continue reading The Anatomical Theater: The Stomach Our Cultural Engine.
The year begins with champagne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (circa 1880-81) and new dietary guidelines. Well, something like that. Marion Nestle at Food Politics offers a review of the impregnable document: The 2015 Dietary Guidelines, At Long Last, while Mother Jones points out that climate goes missing in the document: There’s A Huge … Continue reading A Week Thinking About What We Eat
To further my French studies, Natalie Holstein-Charron has lent me Alistair Horne’s Seven Ages of Paris. I truly admire the tenacity the Parisians display in executing each other from the time of Philippe Auguste in the twelfth century to the notorious Cardinal Richelieu in the sixteenth. And I haven’t yet reached the Revolution! Here is … Continue reading Thoughts of Gallows, Ossuaries, Bourdain, Zombies and Cézanne As I Once Again Prepare Roasted Bone Marrow (Part One Of A Meal)
For Monday 16-Tuesday 17 May, Rene Redzepi writes the following in his journal, I went foraging, sinking into the forest, tasting things, hoping to clear my thoughts and take that deep, relaxing breath that allows me to shrug off the bustle of the kitchen. I took a second and rested on my haunches, absentmindedly picking … Continue reading A Taste Of Spring In Fall: Redzepi, Heaney and Vivaldi With A Dram Of Johnnie Walker Black
I used to burn them with a magnifying glass when I was a kid. Yes, not the most humane, civilized moment in my youth, and since then it’s been a tense relationship. Accidentally stepping into a fire-ant mound ranks as one of my least favorite things about Texas, and I usually respond with gallons of … Continue reading Eating Ants (Or How All That’s Good Tastes Like Bacon)
