Empires, Cannibals, and Magic Fish Bones
Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
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.
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.
Above our heads in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo offers us a calm, High Renaissance view of mass extinction; whereas, The Flood (1588) by Kaspar the Elder Memberger has a darker tone. Then the Lord said to Noah, “Go into the ark, with all your household, for you alone have I found righteous before Me in … Continue reading The Ark Of Corn, Uncle Tupelo, And Red Wattle Pigs.
It’s a scene out of Goethe’s Faust and a print by Jacob II de Gheyn (1600)–a witch’s kitchen. Lord knows what’s bubbling in the cauldron. It’s an old legend. A magician strives for all knowledge and power crafting a bargain with the Devil, and rules over the world for a few years, but then plummets … Continue reading Cooking: A Faustian Wager.
A dog barks, the Lute Suites of Sylvius Leopold Weiss drift through an open window, and I pour a Stone Brewery Russian Imperial Stout and light an Alec Bradley American Sun Grown cigar. I’m sitting on my back patio in the evening, contemplating the life of the gastronome. Actually, this could also be the opening … Continue reading Gastronomic Dreams: From Brillat-Savarin to Jorge Luis Borges With A Number Of Stops Along The Way.
