TNY weekend reader: is that a cabbage pie in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
(Eat up!)
In France, one tends to “savor,” “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dine,” “snack,” or “nibble” (a favorite word, “grignoter“). What’s more, it’s all about doing so with someone, which could even mean you, yourself, in a self-centering moment. When I returned to New York, I was often struck by the simple “eating” that got done here. Asked if I needed to “go get some food,” I took it to mean: stuff something into my “pie-hole” to make the stomach stop its grumbling. The “Food Issue” reveals that while it really is all about “food” here, depending where we’re from, the meaning behind all this ingesting and digesting shines out of different places in our psyches.
Which reminds me: never mind that awful “shimmering” thing in Judith Thurman’s “Fast Lane” (not online, but here’s the abstract). If you ever want to experience a subtle joy, pay for your boyfriend’s colonic irrigation. Especially if he is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and you are convinced he’s full of “it.”
For me, the stars of this “Food Issue” were “Luda and Milena,†the heroines of Lara Vapnyar’s fiction piece. Wherein it is confirmed that all is fair in love and war, even when the arms race inventory includes cheese puffs and cabbage pies.
Was it the homonym that made this the perfect issue in which to feature an article about Manu Chao (pronounced, at least by anglophones, as “chow”) ? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice! Travelling Man: Manu Chao’s polyglot pop, by Sasha Frere-Jones.
“Real Food,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie features this compliment that I will be actively seeking to use at every opportunity:
“Auntie, this is soup that you washed your hands well before cooking.â€
I worry about Adam Gopnik putting hits on chickens in “New York Local: Eating the fruits of the five boroughs.” I was hoping he’d render an account of how, before the awed eyes of his children, he actually wrings the neck of a chicken he raised himself. (No, not really! But putting a price on the head of a New York chicken does raise questions of just how far one can go in one’s mission to eat local…)
Gary Shteyngart nearly made me cry at the end of Sixty-nine cents, but personally, I’d have taken the beet salad: I used to wish I were dead every time my parents announced we were going to MacDonald’s.
David Remnick sobers us up with a digestive expresso in the form of “The Lobby,” on the bitter subject of the “Isreal Lobby.”
And for dessert? Make your own Orange and Almond cake! Only seven simple ingredients (two of which are almonds and oranges), and online only: Claudia Roden’s recipes.
Favorite food-related cartoon (besides mine): Crawford’s “You can stop the pain, Marcel…,” based, he tells me, on a true story.
