In this post I would like to begin the documentation of a culinary project to undertake the reverse-engineering of “Kurdish lemonade,” a chilled citrus beverage served at Babani’s Kurdish Restaurant in St. Paul, “the United State’s first Kurdish restaurant.” The drink at Babani’s is made not from fresh lemons, but dried limes (this much I know) and, despite the generic name, is very likeable. It is citric, tart and refreshing, but also tannic and kind of earthy. The sole recipe I managed to turn up that in any way involves what I already know making this drink must, is as follows:

Omani Lemon Tea

4 cups of water
5-6 whole dried Omani lemons (or Basri lemons, or black lemons)
2 large Tablespoons of honey
more sugar to taste, if desired

Open up the Omani lemons and remove the interiors, reserving the rinds. Boil them with the water and honey for 5 minutes. Strain and serve.

*

Omani lemons are actually limes, and in the Middle-east, and probably elsewhere as well, the lemon-lime distinction as enunciated in the commodities of the West does not seem to exist. There, limes are just another kind of lemon (and as such belong to something more like a lemon-lime continuum).

Omani lemons, or “black lemons” are limes that have been boiled in salt water and sun-dried. When the limes dessicate, the flesh within them turns black. In the image of the product below, the script, which is Farsi, reads “limoo omani.”

This is a recipe for the ‘refrigerator dill’ pickles my mother makes. She used to make the old-fashioned kind in vapor-sealed glass jars. This she stopped doing after years and years because the batches ceased to turn out well for whatever reason, despite her use of the same old family recipe. Now she makes these, and they are fantastic, though unlike their forebears, these pickles cannot be stored without refrigeration. What follows is my transcription of her recipe.

1 gallon plastic ice cream pail
cucumbers sliced and quartered
1 large white onion, sliced                                                   
4-6 garlic buds     
4-6 dill heads
1.5 quarts water
1 quart white vinegar
1/2 cup canning salt

Fill pail with cucumbers standing on end. Add the remaining ingredients. Heat and boil 1.5 quarts water, 1 qt. white vinegar, 1/2 cup canning salt. Pour over cucumbers.
Let stand 3 days uncovered. 
Cover and refrigerate.
Will keep 1 yr.  

Abat-faim, Guy Debord, 1985. 

Abat-faim 

One knows that this term designated a “meal’s principal dish, which one served first to quiet down, to reduce the hunger of the dinner guests” (Larousse).

In their dictionary, Hatzfield and Darmesteter refer to the term as “antiquated.” But history is the infallible master of dictionaires. With the recent progress of technology, the totality of nourishment consumed by modern society is uniquely becoming hunger reduction. The extreme degradation of nourishment is a banality that, in the manner of other banalities, is generally tolerated with resignation: as a fatality, a ransom paid for progress that one knows can’t be stopped because one is overwhelemed by it everyday.

Everyone keeps quiet about it. Some because they don’t want to speak of it, others because they can’t. The immense majority of the population that tolerates this degradation, as well as their strong suspicions about it, simply can’t face such an unpleasant reality. It is never agreeable to admit that one has been played for a fool, and those who have created “beefsteak” – and its claims — in the form of a “reconstituted” shadow of itself are also little disposed to admit what they have lost by allowing convenient ersatz semblances into their habitats. Those who can refuse nothing for fear of going back upon all that they have let happen in their lives are habitually the same.

And yet, one can easily date with precision the arrival of the global phenomenon that affects nearly all of the economically advanced countries and that immediately acts upon the countries that are subject to the retardation of the same process. Although the loss of quality has resulted from gradual modifications, the threshold — a sudden reversal of all the old “alimentary habits” — was crossed in two or three years. This anti-qualitative leap took place in France, for example, around 1970; about 10 years earlier than that in Northern Europe; and about 10 years later than that in Southern Europe. The criteria that permits one to very simply evaluate the state of advancement of this process is, of course, taste: modern necessities are prepared precisely by an industry that one calls “agro-alimentary,” a phrase [3] that summarizes the character of its disastrous results, because its colorized appearance didn’t guarantee taste or innocuous insipidity. First of all, chemistry is massively imposed upon agriculture and animal husbandry so that the yield can be augmented to the detriment of all other considerations. Then there was the use of new techniques of preservation and stockpiling. Dating back as far as the beginning of industrialization, each instance of this “progress” has been a reversal of what the experts of hunger reduction call our “mental barriers,” that is to say, our the long-standing experiences of quality and taste. Thus, the techniques of freezing and rapid de-freezing at first served to commercialize “poultry thighs” that are composed of materials that have been ground up and reconstituted by “forming.” At this stage, the materials in question still have a certain connection with the word “poultry,” which isn’t stretched too far from “poultry” that wasn’t produced by industrial breeding. But once this form has been accepted, its content can be altered all the more easily: new examples from Japan — from the East comes the light [4] — are “crab legs” and “shrimp” that are in fact industrially produced from low-cost fish that has been reconstituted into these forms. Developments such as these make optimistic someone like Jacques Gueguen, who is “in charge of research at the I.N.R.A. [5] station in Nantes,” at which one studies the conditions under which we will swallow steaks made of “protein material derived from vegetables.” They [these products] certainly have faults, but these can be remedied. “The color isn’t all there, Jacques Gueguen recognizes. ‘The soy isolates are creme-white, with a perceptible aroma of cabbage. The sunflowers in it have grey fibres. As for the rape-seeds, they are yellow, and always have an aftertaste of cabbage. In any event,’ he affirms, ‘the fibres are ground up, re-colorized and aromatized, and so you won’t see them when they take the form of beefsteak, veal, pork or turkey.’ Sceptical, you say that you will never eat such meat. Well then, cast an attentive glance upon the composition of your favorite ravioli or hamburger that you buy in the frozen-foods section: a very banal package, with a photo of a medium-grilled steak resting on a bed of lettuce. Made of beef, just like the others? Not at all, if you read what is written on the carton: 69% (sometimes as low as 65%) ground beef, ’seasoned’ with vegetable proteins. In fact, the 31% of vegetable proteins don’t have any flavor but constitute a kind of additional stuffing for the true meat” (Cosmopolitan, June 1985).

But the same logic that tells us that we have already swallowed this crap has no need to be frank about what is coerced: it suffices that we forget all that we can’t taste. Thus, after we have bought beer infected by whatever conditions in which it was stocked, we will no longer regret our adaptation to the necessities of its market circulation: “The Adelshoffen-on-Schiltigheim brewery in the outskirts of Strasbourg has launched a beer-concentrate. One volume of beer to five volumes of water. Thanks to modern techniques of ultrafiltration, the brewer is simply a mechanic who separates out each element: water, alcohol, aromatic sources. . . . Like Coca-Cola, Adelshoffen already dreams of shipping the reconstituted syrup from Alsace to local bottlers all over the world [...] ‘This reduces the costs of transportation and packaging, since the brewers are more and more becoming the retailers of the packaging, which one regards as part of the price of the liquids in the final product,’ Michel Debuf explains. ‘The beer-concentrate is a fantastic project for the global outlets,’ he says enthusiastically. Henceforth, there will be simple local bottlers trying to break the monopoly of the breweries. ‘With the concentrate, all a chain of bottlers has to do is add the water and carbonic gas. All bottlers of soda of the Coca Cola type can do it’” (Liberation, 29 July 1985).

This senseless pursuit of economies of time and the minimumization of the costs of labor and materials (which cuts into profits) reinforces the logic of the commodity in all of its abstract purity, which, over time — for example, the accumulation of human history necessary to acquire the know-how to make a good beer — pretends to ignore the qualitative. But the qualitative doesn’t fail to return negatively, as sickness. For the qualitative, one substitutes various ideological claims — State laws that are supposedly imposed in the name of hygiene or simply to guarantee the appearance of it — that favor the concentration of production, which serves to better support the normative weight of the new infected products. At the end of this process, the monopoly of the market aims at letting the choice be between hunger reduction and hunger itself.

The United States thus has the Food and Drug Administration [6], which visibly provides the abstract consumption of abstract commodities with its own laws, although these don’t function too well in the regulations of what’s called the “Common Market.” One might say that this is the principal reality of this institution. All historical traditions must disappear and the abstraction rules in the absence of quality (see the article “Abstraction”). All countries obviously don’t have the same characteristics (geographical and cultural) in nourishment. To abide by the requirements of Europe, France has the worst beer (except for that of Alsace), very bad coffee, etc. But Germany drinks good beer, Spain drinks good chocolate and good wine, Italy has good coffee and wine. France has good bread, good wine, numerous cheeses, lots of poultry and beef. In the framework of the Common Market, all of this becomes reduced to equally polluted merchandise. Tourism plays a certain role here. On the spot, the tourist gets used to the misery of commodities, which have been polluted just for him; he comes to consume all that has deteriorated precisely because of his presence. In effect, the tourist is treated as badly everywhere as he is at home: he is the displaced voter.

The essential utility of the modern commodity, which is developed at the expense of everything else, lies in its being bought; by a miracle of which it has the secret and by the mediation of capital, the modern commodity can “create jobs”! As for the employment or use of the commodity, it is authoritatively postulated or fallaciously evoked, in the case of food, in the artifical preservation of some of its old characteristics. But these appearances are of course addressed to meanings that are the easiest to abuse: “Thanks to the new methods employed in the avoidance of food spoilage, in our markets in all seasons of the year one can find fruits and vegetables that used to appear only a few weeks out of every month. For example, the apples that one stocks in gigantic refrigerators. The only big problem is the fact that fruits placed in cold storage lose a lot of their natural flavor” (Cosmopolitan, ibid.). When months didn’t count as several weeks, there was a season for each thing: today we lack both the reality of time and the reality of things. The meanings that are the most directly practical are the ones that are sacrificed: the flavor, aroma and touch are abolished to the profit of the delusions that permanently lead sight and hearing astray (see the article “Abbe”). When the usage of certain meanings becomes hazy (it is certain that one wants to abolish odors when one lives in a large town) and the usage of others becomes misplaced, one assists in the general revocation of sensuality, which goes hand-in-hand with the extravagant revocation of intellectual lucidity, which itself begins with the disappearance of reading and the bulk of vocabulary. For the voter who drives a car and watches television, taste has no importance whatsoever: this is why one eats Findus and votes for Fabius, or swallows Fabius and reads Findus. [7] The voter’s important activities, his growing passivity, don’t allow him the time to develop acquired tastes that, most opportunely, commodity production itself doesn’t have time to satisfy: this marvelous adequation between the absence of use and the use of absence defines the current loss of all criteria of value. We thus recover the crucial question of time, of time saved for not living. Thus, the time formerly devoted to the preparation of meals has, today, been absorbed by the contemplation of television, “conumers are demanding less and less the cheap cuts that require long alimentary preparations.” “Cheap cuts,” with which one used to prepare a number of excellent dishes of popular French cuisine, are now recycled in the forms most convenient for rapid preparation: “If one looks at them closely (but not too closely) and tastes them, one is deceived. It seems to be sirloin steak: it has the look, the texture, the ‘tenderness.’ But this sirloin is made of round steak, flank, and collar beef, in short, of the cuts that are usually reserved for the preparation of braised meats or simmered ragus. Braised beef transformed into beefsteak? It is this that is prepared by the researchers and industrialists who destroy the architecture of meat, taking more-or-less finely chopped cuts and putting them back together in the created form of ‘reconstituted’ meat” (Le Monde, 25 September 1985). We don’t doubt that this reconstitution will very quickly extend its field of action beyond the domain of the bovine. “One has succeded in making appetizing and tender ‘beefsteaks’ from poultry or pork, which are cheaper than beef, and ‘the future of the bovines is behind them,’ M. Dumont emphasized” (Ibid.). This full-of-the-future Dumont is the director of a meat research laboratory at the National Institute of Agronomic Research; he is a specialist in hunger reduction, as is he who — regarding the technique of “extrusion cooking” that permits the fabrication of “cell-structured products” such as those destined to be consumed by dogs and cats — declares: “As concerns the application of this process to human nourishment, ‘everything remains to be done’” (Ibid.). As concerns our acquiescence to this bestiality without instinct, a lot has already been done.

A long time ago, the bourgeoisie said: “There was history, but not any more” (Marx). When it bureaucraticizes its domination, the bourgeoisie adds to the mix: “There was taste, but not any more.” Each person no longer has an individual history in and through which he discovers and forms his own tastes. It is necessary to accept all this without making any distinctions, without pretending to hold on to some criteria by which judgments can be made. Only those who listen to the proclamations of experts — who, for example, dazzle us with visions of the radiant future of irradiated vegetables — believe that “vegetables were looked so good” (L’Express, 6-12 September 1985). Such are the last looks [8] of the society of the spectacle. All individual looks [9], as connected as they want to be, can’t be connected to the society of the spectacle, because it controls the entire network. And so, the “mashed meat” that is the hunger reducer for poor salaried workers, who eat it standing up in the decor of train stations, can give itself the allure of modernism, chosen by those who eat McDonald’s [10] and think Actuel.

How did we get to this point? Who wanted this? Previously, no one did. Ever since the Physiocrats, [11] the bourgeois project has explicitly been to improve, both qualitatively and quantatively, the products of the earth, which had previously been more immutable than the products of industry. This project was effectively realized during and since the 19th century. Critiques of capitalism are sometimes more preoccupied with the highest qualities. In particular, Fourier [12] — who favored pleasure and passion, and loved pears — expected the reign of harmony to provide a tasty variety of this particular fruit. But, as elsewhere, the progress of civilization accomplished the opposite result. Today, the problem can be concretely defined by taking a classic recipe from traditional French cuisine and examining what each ingredient has become under current consumption (see the article “Agro-Alimentaire”).

The harmful effects of hunger reduction aren’t limited to the things that it eliminates, but also include the effects that its schema, by virtue of its very existence, has upon each new product of the old world. The food that has lost its taste presents itself in every case as perfectly hygienic, dietary, and healthy in comparison to the risky adventures of pre-scientific food preparation. But it lies, cynically. Not only does this food contain an incredible amount of poison (see the sadly famous example of the powerful agricultural products manufactured by Union Carbide [13]), but it produces deficiencies that are only measured later, after the fact, in the health of the general public. In the completely scientifically euphemistic words of a doctor: “It seems that the intensification of agricultural productivity has been realized without sufficient attention to the notion of quality, of which trace elements are an important factor” (H. Picard, Therapeutic Use of Trace Elements). Terrifying in its own right, what’s legal in food processing is accompanied by blatantly illegal activity that, nevertheless, is tolerated (growth-hormones in veal products, antifreeze in wine, etc.) The principal form of cancer spreading in the United States doesn’t affect smokers of polluted tobacco products or the inhabitants of the most polluted towns, but the guts of President Reagan and other chow-hounds of that type. [14]

The practice of generalized hunger reduction [abat-faim] is also responsible for the famine [la famine] among the peripheral people who are absolutely at the mercy of what one dares to call the global capitalist system. The process is simple: living cultures are eliminated by the global market, and the people of so-called underdeveloped countries are magically transformed into unemployed workers the vast shantytowns, which one sees growly rapidly in Africa and Latin America. The fish that was formerly caught and eaten by Peruvian peoples is now monopolized by the proprietors of the advanced economies, who use it to nourish the poultry that they sell on the market. To get rid of the fishy taste, without creating another after-taste, the manufacturers secretly add acroline, a very dangerous chemical substance made right in the middle of Lyon, without the knowledge of the town’s inhabitants. Currently dangerously uninformed, both consumer of the product and neighbor of the manufacturer won’t fail, one of these days, to become informed of these matters in the light of catastrophe.

The world’s specialists in hunger (there are a lot of them, and they work hand-in-hand with other specialists, who work to create the impression of a banquet of abundant delights) communicate the results of their calculations to us: the planet produces enough cereals to feed everyone, but what troubles this idyll is the fact that the “rich countries” abusively use half the world’s cereals as feed for livestock. But when one has experienced the disastrous taste of butchered creatures fattened on cereals, can one really speak of “rich countries”? Surely not. While a part of the planet is dying of famine, the inhabitants of these countries are not living like Sybarites [15]: they live in shit. But the voter is flattered when reminded that, strictly speaking [16], he is the one who has the hard heart, because he lives so well while the graves of underprivileged countries are fattened by the cadavers of children. He loves to believe the agreeable things that he has been told.

Like medicine and some other things, nourishment is becoming a State secret. During the rise of the proprietary classes, which, not without reason, feared what democracy would effectively mean for them, one of the most forceful objections to democracy was the evocation of the ignorance of the masses, which effectively prevented them from knowing and taking care of their own affairs. Today, the proprietary classes believe themselves to be protected by recently discovered anti-democracy vaccines or by the small dosages of democracy-residue that they pretend to guarantee us. Because people ignore the mysteries of the economy that are put on their plates, the cut-rate performances of “choices society must make” concerning the deployment of strategic weapons and other subtlties can be staged again and again.

When the secret thickens everywhere, even on our plates, it isn’t necessary to believe that everyone ignores everything. But it is necessary that the experts in the spectacle do not spread dangerous truths. They must keep quiet. It is in their interests to do so. The individual, who is really isolated, who cannot trust his own tastes and experiences, also cannot trust socially organized deceptions. A union spoke up? Not without being irresponsible and revolutionary. In principle, unions defend the interests of salaried workers within the framework of salaried work. [17] Unions defend the workers’ “bread and butter,” their right to “bring home the bacon.” [18] But this “beef” is abstract (today, work itself is abstract and abstractly defended). Although real beefsteak has almost disappeared, these specialists [unions] haven’t disappeared, at least officially. Beefsteak, meat free of chemicals, still exists clandestinely, is expensive, and, simply by its existence, forcefully shakes the columns of the temple of “contractual politics.” In Western nomenclature [19], one well knows the returns on investment that can be gained from selling high-priced health food.

In the period that immediately preceded the Revolution of 1789, tentative and moderate efforts to falsify bread caused large-scale riots. Many bold experimenters in corrupt bread were hung from streetlamps after being made to explain their reasons for doing so. All through the entire 19th century, it was the retailer who engaged in marginal and artisanal falsifications; it wasn’t until the war of 1914, which gave birth to the ersatz, that manufacturers began to falsify their products. But it stirred up anger among the masses. Different times, different habits. Said another way, the benefits that class society derives from its spectacular equipment and personnel out weigh the expenses of the ballyhoo that inevitably accompanies the ersatz. And so, in the last ten years, bread has disappeared from France and been replaced by a pseudo-bread (non-panifiable flour, chemical yeast, electric ovens), but these traumatic events, unlike the recent closings of so-called free schools, didn’t incite protests or defense movements. Quite literally, no one said anything. Now that we have lost the taste of bread, one can — full of cynicism — pretend that extending the bureaucratization of culture is instructive: “It’s a question of an education in taste that begins with elementary things: making one’s bread, identifying the elements of its composition. This is bread that one should make the object of a national campaign: ‘bread considered as an object of patrimony,’ as ‘living national treasure,’ as the Japanese say” (Jack Lang, quoted by Le Monde, 7-8 April 1985). With the advent of this new “national bread,” one knows better than ever that the authentic world has no place in current life and will end up in a museum. The pleasures once thought to be “simple” will soon disappear and thus become the objects of scholarly museography.

Modern architecture has already suppressed a large part of the simple life’s previously vast field of action. Certainly, as pleasure becomes spectacular enjoyment, consumers are happy when they find images to graze upon. But the dangerous dialectic threatens to return, because everything works to decompose the dominations of this world. While critique preserves the management of domination, its results kill it. This is the syndrome of the fatal malady of the end of the 20th century: in a constant and omnipresent effort, the society of classes and specializations tries to immunize itself against all pleasures. The collapse of its immuno-defensive system against the poisons that it produces will be total.

Note: Written by Guy Debord and published without attribution in Encyclopedie des Nuisances, #5, November 1985. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! in August 2004.

[1] There is no equivalent in English for the antiquated French term abat-faim, which was typically a piece of high-quality beef to which one returned again and again (la piece de resistance). The abat-faim didn’t satisify hunger: it merely reduced hunger or staved it off for a little while longer. Note that an abat-jour is a lampshade or a light-of-day reducer. And so, for our purposes, the phrase “hunger reducer” will have to do.

[2] The word Debord uses is Bifteck, a piece of steak.

[3] The term agro-alimentaire can be translated as either the “food processing industry” or “agribusiness.”

[4] Latin in original.

[5] Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (National Institute of Agronomic Research).

[6] English in original.

[7] Laurent Fabius was a French politician (Socialist Party) and Findus a manufacturer of food products that contain genetically modified organisms.

[8] English in original.

[9] English in original.

[10] English in original. Spelling of “Mac Donald” corrected.

[11] The Physiocrats were a group of French Enlightenment thinkers of the 1760s who surrounded the French court physician, François Quesnay. They proposed to advance the interests of agriculture by adopting a system of economic freedom.

[12] Charles Fourier was one of the favorites of Raoul Vaneigem and others members of the Situationist International, of which Guy Debord was a co-founder.

[13] English in original.

[14] In 1985, the American President Ronald Reagan had cancerous growths removed from his colon and nose. “Chow-hounds” is my attempt to render soupeurs (literally “soupers,” perhaps “suppers” or “soup suckers”).

[15] In an ancient Greek city in Italy, the Sybarites indulged in sensuous luxury.

[16] Latin in original.

[17] The word Debord uses, salariat, is a neologism that designates the proletariat of salaried workers.

[18] The word Debord uses here is bifteck.

[19] Russian in original.

Chopsticks (Roland Barthes, from Empire of Signs, 1970, translated into English in 1982)

At the Floating Market in Bangkok, each vendor sits in a tiny motionless canoe, selling minuscule quantities of food: seeds, a few eggs, bananas, coconuts, mangoes, pimentos (not to speak of the Unnamable). From himself to his merchandise, including his vessel, everything is small. Occidental food, heaped up, dignified, swollen to the majestic, linked to a certain oepration of prestige, always tends toward the heavy, the grand, the abundant, the copious; the Oriental follows the converse moement, and tends toward the infinitesimal: the cucumber’s future is not its accumulation or its thickening, but its division, its tenuous dispersal, as this haiku puts it:

Cucumer slices
The juice runs
Drawing spider legs

There is a convergence of the tiny and the esculent: things are not only small in order to be eaten, but are also comestible in order to fulfill their essence, which is smallness. The harmony between Oriental food and chopsticks cannot be merely functional, instrumental; the foodstuffs are cut up so they can be grasped by the sticks, but also the chopsticks exist because the foodstuffs are cut into small pieces; one and the same movement, one and the same form transcends the substance and its utensil: division.

Chopsticks have other functions besides carrying the food from the plate to the mouth (indeed, that is the least pertinent one, since it is also the function of fingers and forks), and these functions are specifically theirs. First of all, a chopstick – as its shape sufficiently indicates – has a deictic function: it points to the food, designates the fragment, brings into existence by the very gesture of choice, which is the index; but, thereby, instead of ingestion following a kind of mechanical sequence, in which one would be limited to swallowing little by little the parts of one and the same dish, the chopstick, designating what it selects (and thus selecting there and then this and not that), introduces into the use of food not an order but a caprice, a certain indolence: in any case, an intelligent and no longer mechanical operation. Another function of the two chopsticks together, that of pinching the fragment of food (and no longer of piercing it, as our forks do); to pinch, moreover, is too strong a word, too aggressive (the word of sly little girls, of surgeons, of seamstresses, of sensitive natures); for the foodstuff never undergoes a pressure greater than is precisely necessary to raise and carry it; in the gesture of chopsticks, further softened by their substance – wood or lacquer – there is something maternal, the same precisely measured care taken in moving a child: a force (in the operative sense of the word), no longer a pulsion; here we have a whole demeanor with regard to food; this is seen clearly in the cook’s long chopsticks, which serve not for eating but for preparing foodstuffs: the instrument never pierces, cuts, or slits, never wounds but only selects, turns, shifts. For the chopsticks (third function), in order to divide, must separate, part, peck, instead of cutting and piercing, in the manner of our implements; they never violate the foodstuff: either they gradually unravel it (in the case of vegetables) or else prod it into separate pieces (in the case of fish, eels), thereby rediscovering the natural fissures of the substance (in this, much closer to the primitive finger than to the knife). Finally, and this is perhaps their loveliest function, the chopsticks transfer the food, either crossed like two hands, a support and no longer a pincers, they slide under the clump of rice and raise it to the diner’s mouth, or (by an age-old gesture of the whole Orient) they push the alimentary snow from bowl to lips in the manner of a scoop. In all these functions, in all the gestures they imply, chopsticks are the converse of our knife (and of its predatory substitute, the fork): they are the alimentary instrument which refuses to cut, to pierce, to mutilate, to trip (very limited gestures, relegated to the preparation of the food for cooking: the fish seller who skins the still-living eel for us exorcises once and for all, in a preliminary sacrifice, the murder of food); by chopsticks, food becomes no longer a prey to which one does violence (meat, flesh over which one does battle), but a substance harmoniously transferred; they transform the previously divided substance into bird food and rice into a flow of milk; maternal, they tirelessly perform the gesture which creates the mouthful, leaving to our alimentary manners, armed with pikes and knives, that of predation.

Fresh Figs (Walter Benjamin, from “Food”. Published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, May 1930.)

No one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it. Unless you do this, you at best enjoy it, but never come to lust after it, or make the acquaintance of that diversion from the straight and narrow road of the appetite which leads to the primeval forest of greed. For in gluttony two things coincide: the boundlessness of desire and the uniformity of the food that sates it.

Gourmandizing means above all else to devour one thing to the last crumb.

There is no doubt that it enters more deeply into what you eat than mere enjoyment. For example, when you bite into mortadella as if it were bread, or bury your face in a melon as if it were a pillow, or gorge yourself on caviar out of crackling paper, or, when confronted with the sight of a round Edam cheese, find that the existence of every other food simply vanishes from your mind.

- How did I first learn all this?

It happened just before I had to make a very difficult decision. A letter had to be posted or torn up. I had carried it around in my pocket for two days, but had not given it a thought for some hours. I then took the noisy narrow-gauge railway up to Secondigliano through the sun-parched landscape. The village lay in still solemnity in the weekday peace and quiet. The only traces of the excitement of the previous Sunday were the poles on which Catherine wheels and rockets had been ignited. Now they stood there bare. Some of them still displayed a sign halfway up with the figure of a saint from Naples or an animal. Women sat in the open barns husking corn.

I was walking along in a daze, when I noticed a cart with figs standing in the shade. It was sheer idleness that made me go up to them, sheer extravagance that I bought half a pound for a few soldi. The woman gave me a generous measure. But when the black, blue, bright green, violet, and brown fruit lay in the bowl of the scales, it turned out that she had no paper to wrap them in. The housewives of Secondigliano bring their baskets with them, and she was unprepared for globetrotters. For my part, I was ashamed to abandon the fruit.

So I left her with figs stuffed in my trouser pockets and in my jacket, figs in both of my outstretched hands, and figs in my mouth. I couldn’t stop eating them and was forced to get rid of the mass of plump fruits as quickly as possible. But that could not be described as eating; it was more like a bath, so powerful was the smell of resin that penetrated all my belongings, clung to my hands and impregnated the air through which I carried my burden. And then, after satiety and revulsion – the final bends in the path – had been surmounted, came the ultimate mountain peak of taste. A vista over an unsuspected landscape fo the palate spread out before my eyes – an insipid, undifferentiated, greenish flood of greed that could distinguish nothing but the stringy, fibrous waves of the flesh of the open fruit, the utter transformation of enjoyment into habit, of habit into vice.

A hatred of those figs welled up inside me; I was desperate to finish them, to liberate myself, to rid myself of all this overripe, bursting fruit. I ate to destroy it. Biting had rediscovered its most ancient purpose. When I pulled the last fig from the depths of my pocket, the letter was stuck to it. Its fate was sealed; it, too, had to succumb to the great purification. I took it and tore it into a thousand pieces. 

A Nice Cup of Tea
by George Orwell
Evening Standard, 12 January 1946
 

IF YOU look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than 11 outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own 11 rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

• First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays—it is economical, and one can drink it without milk—but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
• Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities—that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
• Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
• Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes—a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
• Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
• Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
• Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
• Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup—that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold—before one has well started on it.
• Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
• Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
• Lastly, tea—unless one is drinking it in the Russian style—should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connection with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become.

There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet.

It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the 20 good, strong cups that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

This article, about the politics (somewhat) of eating fish, is from the Opinion section of The New York Times of Sept. 8, 2006. 

OTHER FISH TO FRY 

By PAUL GREENBERG

Published: September 8, 2006 

AFTER years of carving up tuna carcasses in my bathtub, catching cod in the dead of winter and cooking fish and chips for crowds of 50-plus I have come to be known among my friends as the fish guy.

Until recently I’ve enjoyed being the fish guy and my ability to correctly answer questions about fish has felt like a game of “Jeopardy” rigged for my benefit. How do you tell a flounder from a fluke? Easy, fluke have prominent teeth, flounder don’t. Should bluefish and striped bass be cooked differently? Definitely: broil the bluefish, bake the bass.

But lately being the fish guy has become complicated. With every new warning about a species being overfished into extinction, friends have started asking if they should eat fish at all. The Pew Oceans Commission report “America’s Living Oceans” first alerted the public to the desperate state of the seas in 2003 when it declared them to be “in crisis.” That year a study in the journal Nature reported that up to 90 percent of the stocks of the ocean’s major predators (Atlantic cod and bluefin tuna to name two) have been wiped out. In the next few weeks, Congress will debate what to do about the dire state of the nation’s fisheries when it takes up the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens fisheries management act.

Making matters more problematic, numerous recent studies on methyl mercury and PCB’s have connected these pollutants in fish with health problems like birth defects, heart disease and memory loss.

It might now seem advisable for a fish guy to hang up his hooks and start pushing flax or any of the other dull foods that contain the legendary Omega-3 fatty acid — a compound found in fish that ameliorates as many ills as the fish-borne contaminants seem to aggravate. But for those of us who feel passionately about the ocean, abstinence is just not an option.

Unlike the land animals we confine to pens, fatten on synthetic feed and selectively breed for growth, most fish we eat roam the open ocean, hunt down prey and choose their mates according to their own inexplicable desires. They feed us without any interference on our part. Giving up on fish would mean the end of the last large-scale hunter-gatherer relationship we have with wild food, as well as signal our capitulation in the fight to save the oceans.

If we can learn to harvest wild fish sustainably we will have succeeded in something we have failed at on land: finding a balance with a naturally productive ecosystem. In addition, by keeping a food connection with the ocean we will retain a motivation to stop polluting it.

The route to a well-managed sea is not as difficult as many environmental problems. And, curiously, many of the modifications that would repair the damage we have done to marine fisheries would also steer us clear of mercury and PCB contamination. With that in mind here are some things to strive toward:

First, go vegetarian, in a manner of speaking. Farmed fish have gotten a bad name in recent years — even while our production of them has grown to rival the wild fish harvest, as the Food and Agriculture Organization reported this week.

This is mostly because the farmed fish we eat in the West are carnivores. Raising carnivores like salmon requires the capture of wild prey fish that wild fish also consume. By eating farmed carnivores we rob Peter to pay Paul, stealing the food source for wild fish and feeding them to farmed.

There are, however, species of vegetarian fish that grow well in captivity like tilapia, carp and catfish. Because these fish generally eat lower on the food chain, they are often lower in PCB’s and methyl mercury.

In our ingredient-obsessed food culture, it might seem boring to order such commonplace fare. But I share the opinion of a fishing boat mate who once told me “fish is fish.” Often it’s the freshness and the cooking method that make a fish tasty, not its evolutionary provenance.

Second, don’t eat the cheap fish. Once upon a time, we had more fish than we knew what to do with. The United States government practically shoved fish down consumers’ throats after World War II, sponsoring ad campaigns on behalf of the fishing industry and subsidizing institutional purchases of seafood. But decades of this kind of behavior drove us to eat through our fish surpluses and we must now import the majority of our seafood, much of which is supplied by international conglomerates that use unsustainable fishing practices.

The modern commercial fishing vessel is most often a trawler — a large ship that pulls weighted nets along the seafloor, destroying all flora and fauna in its path. This practice does not have to continue. A new generation of hook-and-line fishermen is offering an alternative to trawl-caught fish. Line-caught fish cost more, sometimes twice the price of trawl-caught fish. But shouldn’t we be willing to pay more for the chance to eat a truly undomesticated creature? Should we really be paying just a few dollars for a fast-food fish sandwich made from the pureed flesh of a wild animal?

Finally, don’t eat the big fish. Dining on a 500-pound bluefin tuna is the seafood equivalent of driving a Hummer. Ten pounds of little fish are required to produce one pound of bluefin and all the pollutants contained in a tuna’s prey “bio-concentrate” in a tuna’s flesh, making it a particularly compromised animal, chemically speaking. And because it takes so many little fish to make a big fish, the sea can sustain only a relatively small amount of large fish.

It therefore follows that if we reduce our consumption of the big fish we can reduce our mercury and PCB load and reduce the burden we place on the marine environment. Sardines, mackerel and most fish that are shorter in total length than the diameter of a dinner plate are generally safer to eat.

I would like to report that I am now a fully reformed fish guy who adheres to all of the above. I know, however, that I would have a hard time throwing back a 500-pound bluefin and that I might be tempted to choose the swordfish over the tilapia in a high-end eatery. But fighting the American urge to consume whatever we want is a battle worth fighting with ourselves, particularly when it comes to the sea.

Considering what’s at stake is the survival of the ecosystem of the world’s oceans, I’d rather eat fewer, smaller and more expensive fish than no fish at all.

Paul Greenberg, the author of the novel “Leaving Katya,’’ is writing a book about seafood.

I came across the following in the letters section of the most recent issue of the Nation:

Ah, the all-American supermarket dumpster: our greatest symbol of plenty. Feelings of nostalgia well up whenever I overhear youths bragging about their latest haul. Genuine recyclers, dumpster-divers are rewarded with a cornucopia that is all the more enjoyable because of its illicit origins. 

I can remember dumpster diving only once in my life, and that was with my parents at a liquor store to get packing boxes for a move. The whole experience was humiliating and slightly traumatic, so I’ve never had any desire to repeat it.

While returning from New York recently on the Chinatown bus, I sat by a producer from NPR who told me that his roommates frequently dumpster dove, and that he had even made requests for certain items. He must have noticed the disgust on my face because he defensively added, “you know, expiration dates are only an indication of when foods should be sold. Most food will stay good well past their date of expiration.”

Yikes. Am I totally naive in thinking that this is not a widespread practice? And am I a priss for thinking that rummaging around in rotten food is revolting, not to mention imprudent?

Speaking of dumpster diving, did anyone hear this news?:

[Northwest Airlines] gave pink-slipped employees a tip sheet on how to cut living expenses. Among the suggestions: Rummage through other people’s garbage (Tip# 46: “Don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash”).

Yeesh. Tip# 47: ward against potential food-borne bacteria by taking nips of scotch (but not single-malt, too pricey) after eating rummaged items.

The Oil We Eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq

by Richard Manning, Harper’s Magazine - February 2004

Debbie Does Salad:The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography 

by Frederick Kaufman, Harper’s Magazine – October, 2005