Love and Hunger

"It seems that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one."

--M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

Savage Barbecue

"...from the era of conquest onward, barbecue arose less from native cooking practices than from a European gaze that wanted to associate those practices with preexisting ideas of savagery and innocence... barbacoa or barbicu or barbikew or barbeque, however it has been spelled, not only referred to the smoked foods of American Indians, it also enacted Europeans' deep desire to see those foods as barbarous--as the result of a primitive kind of cookery, savage and base, akin to that which their own distant ancestors long ago performed."

--Andrew Warnes, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food

Quote of the Week: Hungry Fellows

April 2, 1847: Happy birthday to little Tommy Reed!

Tommy was the son of Margret and James Reed. He was four years old during the Donner Party's ordeal. It was less than a month ago that Tommy made it to safety. Now he celebrates his fifth birthday with his family on a Napa Valley Ranch.


Seventy years later...
 

San Jose Evening News 

April 7, 1917

"Always so long as Mr. [Thomas] Reed lives to him the most terrible of all pain was hunger. He could not endure the sight of wasted food. He often surprised people by picking up scraps from the table and putting them in a paper. It was not to save the food, but because he wished to give it to someone in need.

'I am sure,' he often said, 'I'll find some hungry fellows over at the railroad station.' He always found the poor fellows, gave them what he had, sought out more hungry men and returned to the house for another supply of food."

 

James and Marget Reed 

Quote of the Week: Kindred Flesh

“All day Mrs. [Sarah] Foster held her brother's head in her lap and by every means in her power sought to soothe his death agonies. The sunlight faded from the surrounding summits. Darkness slowly emerged from the canyons and enfolded forest and hill slope in her silent embrace. The glittering stars appeared in the heavens and the bright full moon rose over the eastern mountain crests. The silence, the profound solitude, the ever present wastes of snow, the weird moonlight, and above all the hollow moans of the dying boy in her lap rendered this night the most impressive in the life of Mrs. Foster. She says she never beholds a bright moonlight without recurring with a shudder to this night on the Sierra. At two o clock in the morning Lemuel Murphy ceased to breathe. The warm tears and kisses of the afflicted sisters were showered upon lips that would never more quiver with pain.

…

Days and perhaps weeks of starvation were awaiting them in the future and they dare not neglect to provide as best they might. Each of the four bodies was divested of its flesh and the flesh was dried. Although no person partook of kindred flesh sights were often witnessed that were blood curdling. Mrs. Foster as we have seen fairly worshiped her brother Lemuel. Has human pen power to express the shock of horror this sister received when she saw her brother's heart thrust through with a stick and broiling upon the coals? No man can record or read such an occurrence without a cry of agony! What then did she endure who saw this cruel sight?”

--C. F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy in the Sierras, 1879

Gaze First, Then It's Time to Drink

"I craved a swig of whiskey, but it was in the knapsack on my back and the idea of twisting around to extract the bottle did not seem altogether wise. Nix on that. So I thought about having a drink instead. A quiet bar, MJQ's Vendome playing low, a bowl of nuts, a double whiskey on the rocks. The glass is sitting on the counter, untouched for a moment, just looked at. Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it's time to drink."


--Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

 

Act of Translation

"...ingesting food is our primary act of translation, in which the mouth is a portal for both eating and speaking, for ingesting the world of things and articulating the world of ideas." 

--Betty Fussell, "Translating Maize into Corn"

Taste the Fruit

"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit."

--Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Week: Love of Tasting

"There is, however, one point of view deeper yet and more important than the love of tasting of the variety of human modes of life, and that is the desire to turn such knowledge into wisdom."

--Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Quote of the Week: Butter

“When I think about forever I get upset. Like the Land O’Lakes butter has that Indian girl sitting holding a box, and it has a picture of her on it holding a box with a picture of her on it holding a box. Have you ever noticed that?”

—Sally Draper, Mad Men

Quote of the Week: Perfect Freedom

“Seating themselves on the greensward, they eat while the corks fly and there is talk, laughter and merriment, and perfect freedom, for the universe is their drawing room and the sun their lamp. Besides, they have appetite, Nature's special gift, which lends to such a meal a vivacity unknown indoors, however beautiful the surroundings.”

—Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Quote of the Week: Raisins

"Everything happens for a raisin."

Quote of the Week: Mermaid

"It's like eating a mermaid."

--Don Draper, Mad Men (on eating oysters)

Quote of the Week: A Reasonable Dish

"…the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter."

--Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"

Quote of the Week: Bittersweet

"It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more."

—Herman Hesse

Quote of the Week: Baking and Parenting

"Baking to me seems like how parenting must be. First you have to create it, which is messy. Then you have to watch it grow in the oven, and then you have to eat it... And that could taste really bad."

--Hannah Hart, My Drunk Kitchen

Quote of the Week: Unselfishness of an Oyster

"Oysters are more beautiful than any religion...There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster."

--Saki

Quote of the Week: You Can't, Like, Own a Potato

Lisa: Dad, do you mind? Your feet are really close to my potato.

Homer: Your potato? You can't, like, own a potato, man. It's one of Mother Earth's creatures.

Quote of the Week: Sandwiched

"Maybe you are in a sandwich. We're always sandwiched because we have a past, we have a present, and we have a future. We are sandwiched by our father, our mother, our child, Even timewise, we are sandwiched. We are sandwiched between breakfast, lunch, and dinner."


--Chogyam Trungpa

Quote of the Week: Pass the Poi

"Mookalakaheeki, come on you want to lei me. Pass the poi, mahalo."

--Wayne Campbell, Wayne's World

Quote of the Week: Grits in Madison, NJ

"Feasting is also closely related to memory. We eat certain things in a particular way in order to remember who we are. Why else would you eat grits in Madison, New Jersey?"

--Jeff Smith