I’ve been talking a lot about Mindful Eating lately. It’s a term that came to me out of the blue, and only weeks later did I realize that I picked up the word “mindful” in my many years of studying Buddhism and Hinduism. I studied these for so long that the vocabulary has become somewhat incorporated into my way of expressing myself and my subconscious. I am mindful; I live mindfully.
As a result, before publishing my own Mindful Eating Manifesto – a practical approach to my favorite subject of food – I only thought it fair to publish the somewhat more philosophical article by Buddhist thinker and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.
Traditional Buddhist and Hindu teachings urge us to be mindful about every act, at every moment, every day of our lives. The word “mindful” is not a trademark. It is a way of being. Mindfulness gives meaning to every action, and creates a sharper awareness and a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things.
What does mindfulness have to do with the way I eat?
This may not seem to have anything to do with how you eat, but indeed it does. It’s the current food trend in the developed world, and I feel confident that it will spread at a rapid pace. Eating is not just about filling your belly.
When my husband and I first started cooking gluten-free in our kitchen, we mainly focused on one type of meal — those that were naturally gluten-free.
The naturally gluten-free foods were the easiest to cook from scratch because they required no substitutions at all — risottos, fresh fruit, vegetables, custards & puddings, stir fry, roasted potatoes, homemade “chips”, salads, fresh steamed fish, bean stews, meringues, and even a macaron attempt or two. As a beginner to the gluten-free world nearly five years ago, I was thrilled with how many foods we could make without ever having to worry about an ingredient on a package label that could be harmful to my husband’s health. As long as we cooked from entirely fresh ingredients and avoided anything that came in a package or required flour, we were fine — and what a great variety we had to choose from!
But it didn’t take long before my husband would say, “You know, I really miss pizza,” or “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thick creamy gravy to go on mashed potatoes sometime?” It was inevitable, really, that shunning all things flour-related was bound to cause waxing nostalgia for the meals we no longer ate. While it was great to get our feet wet by starting with the easy gluten-free meals that didn’t require any substitutions or extra thought, it seemed wrong to deprive ourselves completely of other foods that we enjoyed.
I set out on a mission of sorts to figure out how to convert our favorite foods to gluten free, where I found a veritable “Wild West” frontier land when it came to recipes — myriad flour blends and formulas either in packages on grocery store shelves or listed in books, none of which explained how they came to be or why they worked, often calling for expensive and elusive ingredients. It all seemed like some esoteric recipe voodoo.
I decided instead to create my own blends, first categorizing the various alternative flours and ingredients by texture and coarseness, and then quickly realizing that while those aspects do play a role in the end product, the key factor was in fact not the texture, but the starch, protein, and fat content, as these are the things that determine most how a flour will behave in a recipe. I can’t say I get a perfect product every single time on the first try, but the turning point in my success was when I started looking into exactly what I was replacing with my gluten-free flour blends.
Sometimes it really is the gluten that needs to be emulated, such as in a bread recipe, where the developed network of gluten in conventional breads actively works to trap the air pockets made by the yeast, allowing the bread to rise. Techniques for mimicking this include adding other leavening agents to help account for the fact that some of the air will indeed escape before the bread is done, or adding binding agents to help trap the air that is formed — and maybe even a combination of both of these techniques.
Often this is why one sees gluten-free recipes that include extra eggs, or gelling agents like ground flax or chia seeds, manufactured gums, or incorporation of starches into the GF blend, such as tapioca or arrowroot. Once we understand why these ingredients exist in a gluten-free recipe, we can better judge how to make substitutions to fit our needs – for example, don’t have ground chia seeds? Maybe adding an egg in its place will do the trick. The bread fell flat a bit and was too dense? We now have options. We consider the properties of the ingredients we are using, and this information can be used as tools for determining how to logically go about changing our recipes to improve them.
Other recipes that conventionally use flour don’t actually care about the gluten at all. Take, for example, a roux, essentially made up of a flour and a fat that are cooked together and then used as a thickening agent in soups and stews, such as gumbo. In the case of roux, there’s no elasticity needed, and no air to be trapped – all we are looking for is thickening, which occurs thanks to the starch components within wheat flour. This is great news for gluten-free cooks; there are lots of starchy gluten-free ingredients at our disposal that we can use to replace conventional wheat flour!
All-purpose wheat flour contains, along with gluten, a fair amount of starch. So to create a 1:1 substitution (by weight of course), one would just need to come up with a gluten-free flour blend that is also mostly (but not all) starch. This can be done either by using flours with similar starch content to wheat flour, or by supplementing the GF blend with a pure starch (cornstarch, tapioca, arrowroot, potato, glutinous rice flour, etc.). Each type of starch differs slightly in its chemistry, but for the most part they all have gelling and viscosity properties – i.e. they help food thicken and stick together. In something like our roux example, it’s not going to matter a whole lot what kind of starches we use, because the only aspect of the starch we are calling upon in this case is its thickening power.
Obviously, for baking, things get a little more complicated, but I’m convinced the overall strategy remains the same. The first thing I ask myself when converting a recipe is, “what in conventional wheat flour is doing the work? What traits do I need to make sure I replace with my gluten-free mix?” And then we can use our knowledge about the various gluten-free ingredients available to reproduce those properties. Actually, I think once one gets a bit more comfortable with gluten-free substitutions, there is even more freedom and more possibilities for “customizing” than when working with conventional all-purpose wheat flour. This is because one has the ability to pick and choose from amongst so many great ingredients — not just for certain properties, but also for flavors. For example, I often incorporate chestnut flour, because I just love the earthy rustic qualities it lends to baked goods.
Gluten-free substitutions don’t have to involve some mysterious wizardry in order to have success. Sometimes it’s just a bit of recipe tweaking, and other times, a little knowledge about the science behind why a recipe works goes a long way.
“I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.” (What Are People For?)
“Eating is an agricultural act.” (What Are People for Essays By Wendell Berry)
The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.
Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” “A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us… What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce.
But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.” (pg. 85, “Think Little“) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
Eduardo Amorim / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA
“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. (pg. 88, “Think Little”) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“…the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer…the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; …” (The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982)
“If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man’s only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place – a much humbler place than we have been taught to think – in the order of creation. (pg.89, “Think Little”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.”
“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. (pg. 27, “A Native Hill”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
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About Jonell Galloway
Jonell Galloway grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She is a freelance writer. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris and the Académie du Vin, worked for the GaultMillau restaurant guide and CityGuides in France and Paris and for Gannett Company in the U.S., and collaborated on Le tour du monde en 80 pains / Around the World with 80 Breads with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France; André Raboud, Sculptures 2002-2009 in Switzerland; Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, and a biography of French chef Pierre Gagnaire. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. She organizes the Taste Unlocked bespoke food and wine tasting awareness workshops with James Flewellen, is an active member of Slow Food, and runs the food writing website The Rambling Epicure. Her work has been published in numerous international publications and she has been interviewed on international public radio in France, Switzerland, and the U.S. She has just signed on at In Search of Taste, a British print publication, and is now working on a book, What to Eat in Venice
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However humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate and satisfy.–Margaret Visser
Margaret Visser writes on the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life. She lives between Toronto, Paris and Southwest France.
Her most recent book is The Gift of Thanks. “Her previous books, Much Depends on Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, The Way We Are, and The Geometry of Love, have all been best sellers and have won major international awards, including the Glenfiddich Award for Foodbook of the Year in Britain in 1989, the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Literary Food Writing Award, and the Jane Grigson Award,” she says on her site.
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Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.
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O subjetivo na escrita culinária: revisitando M.F.K. Fisher
Betina Mariante Cardoso
Soon to be translated from the Portuguese to the English
Para mim, a leitura da obra de M.F.K. Fisher (Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher) ultrapassa o prazer literário provocado por sua escrita: trata-se de um profundo enriquecimento pessoal. Meu livro favorito desta autora? É difícil escolher, mas atravessar as linhas de The Gastronomical Me foi um fenômeno transformador.
Em uma tradução ligeira, o título é: “O Eu Gastronômico”. Sim, ligeira, pois há grande força e simbolismo nas fibras deste título. Apesar de Mary Frances explorar suas histórias e perspectivas subjetivas nos textos, ao ler com atenção, percebo que cada um de nós, para quem o ato culinário é precioso, poderia ocupar a identidade deste ‘Eu Gastronômico’, deste “Me”, no idioma inglês. Aliás, qualquer um de nós poderia ocupar esta identidade, pois temas como o ‘comer’ e a ‘fome’, também tratados por ela, respondem ao nosso Humano mais profundo.
Na minha leitura, são textos em que a narradora nos empresta seu lugar, seu ponto de vista, para que possamos experimentar suas vivências, como se estivéssemos em seu papel, em sua ‘primeira pessoa’, nos sabores que descobre. Esta característica dá grande força aos seus textos, através do uso desta narrativa em primeira pessoa do singular. Ler-nos em suas sensações, percepções, vicissitudes é aceitar que a autora nos conduza em uma viagem para dentro de nossas próprias narrativas. Um passeio autobiográfico, então. E pergunto: cozinhar não é também uma autobiografia, um ‘contar de si’?
‘Dip’ agridoce de tomates, para aperitivo- receita minha
Bom, há vários focos de encanto, no conjunto desta obra, que, sem aviso, despertam o leitor para a reflexão. Sou pega de surpresa já pelo trecho de abertura:
[Para ser feliz, você deve ter conhecido a dimensão de suas forças, experimentado as frutas de sua paixão e aprendido qual é seu lugar no mundo]- Santayana
(Tradução livre- Betina MC)
Ao folhear este livro, encontro diversos capítulos de mesmo nome, escritos em datas diversas e entremeados com textos de títulos diferentes.”The Measure of my powers” (‘A dimensão de minhas forças‘), repete-se uma série de vezes, trazendo à tona a menção ao trecho de abertura, de Santayana; a repetição deste título específico, contudo, dá o tom autobiográfico e intimista de “The Gastronomical Me”. Sinto, ao percorrer as páginas, a profundidade com que a autora conta de suas histórias culinárias, suas descobertas e reflexões. É como se, a cada um dos capítulos que intitula ‘A dimensão de minhas forças’, ela respondesse ao trecho inicial, contando de sua busca pela dita felicidade. “Para ser feliz, você deve ter conhecido a dimensão de suas forças”, diz o trecho, e Mary Frances trata de retomar esta ‘ordem’, nos capítulos do livro, mantendo a busca como linha condutora de sua escrita subjetiva.
Mercado Público: convite aos sentidos…
Se a tônica me parece estar no ‘ser feliz’, há, nas entrelinhas, uma procura ainda mais profunda: a procura pela sua identidade, por suas ‘forças’ e potenciais, por sua essência, facetas de si que ela traduz por sua relação com o universo do ‘comer’e do ‘fazer culinário’. Para mim, é neste aspecto que seu ‘eu‘, primeira pessoa do singular, pluraliza-se e torna-se ‘nós‘; é neste aspecto que o título do livro, “The Gastronomical Me” (“O ‘Eu’ Gastronômico”) destina-se a um plural de sujeitos que se identificam com as sensações, vivências e sentimentos escritos pela autora. Sujeitos em qualquer parte do mundo. É neste aspecto que ela empresta seu pronome ‘Me’ ao leitor, emprestando, também, seus sentidos para que possamos experimentar, em palavras, os sabores, aromas, texturas, sons, gostos e cores de suas cenas. É possível, ainda, ir além desta compreensão: ao abordar a dimensão de suas forças, ou ao exprimir emoções e memórias no conjunto de textos deste livro, a autora não apenas nos empresta sua fome, mas a partilha conosco, seus leitores. Fome que nós, humanos, sentimos.
Fome?
Esta é a palavra-chave da famosa introdução desta obra, em que ela responde por que escreve sobre comida, e não sobre a luta pelo poder, pela segurança, ou sobre o amor ou sobre a guerra. “A resposta mais fácil é dizer que, como a maioria dos Humanos, eu sinto fome“. E acrescenta, com maestria, que, quando escreve sobre fome, na verdade está escrevendo sobre o amor e a fome por este, sobre o afeto e o amor por este e a fome por este…”Conto sobre mim mesma (…), e acontece, sem que eu queira, que estou contando também sobre aqueles que estão comigo, e sobre sua necessidade mais profunda pelo amor e pela felicidade.”
Cocada: doce brasileiro de coco, tradicional e saboroso
Sendo o alimento parte essencial da vida de todos nós, bem como as emoções e percepções através dos sentidos, cada indivíduo está presente no texto desta autora; suas experiências coincidem com as nossas próprias lembranças. Temos em comum a humanidade e, como ela refere, a ‘fome’. Por instantes, nos sentimos personagens de sua autoria; noutras vezes, nos sentimos o ‘Eu Gastronômico’ que escreve as histórias. As fomes são as mesmas.
E, então, a beleza do último parágrafo deste prefácio está na partilha de sua emoção, com o leitor: “Há uma comunhão para além dos nossos corpos, quando o pão é partido e o vinho é bebido. E esta é minha resposta, quando as pessoas me perguntam: ‘por que você escreve sobre fome, e não sobre guerras ou amor?‘”
Partilha do meu pão de salame e funcho, no primeiro dia de 2013…
Seja ao ver sua avó fazendo geléias, seja ao partilhar uma refeição com sua irmã e seu pai, seja ao olhar com atenção um cardápio e escolher seu desejo, pela primeira vez: em cada história contada, há algo de nós. Porque, se as emoções são tão diversas em nossa subjetividade, há um ponto em comum em nós, humanos, e que nos torna co-autores destes textos: comemos, sentimos o sabor (ou a falta dele), temos fome, preparamos o alimento, sentimos prazer(aceso ou apagado)…Em qualquer tempo e geografia, comida e emoção nos despertam ou adormecem, nos satisfazem ou nos incompletam, nos nutrem ou nos destroem; seja como for, comida e emoção respondem à nossa necessidade primordial, a fome. Esta, de que Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher fala com tanta profundidade.
É de cada um de nós que a autora conta, quando escreve um texto que intitula: ‘A dimensão de minhas forças’. Você pode não desejar cozinhar, nem desejar escrever sobre a comida ou sobre o ato culinário; entretanto, a leitura desta obra é um passo firme, e prazeroso, na trajetória do comer consciente. E, com certeza, também na trajetória da conscientização de nossa fome pelo amor, pelo afeto, pela segurança, pela felicidade.
Bolo para celebrar o amor!
Minha leitura? A busca é, no fim das contas, pela ‘dimensão de nossas forças‘ e pelo saciar de nossas fomes, quanto mais buscamos conhecer a nós mesmos. Lendo ou cozinhando, descobrimos trechos de nosso subjetivo, experimentamos nossos sentidos e sentimentos. Somos nós, ali, refletidos em temperos ou em palavras. Basta nossa fome pela descoberta.
Sou Betina Mariante Cardoso, brasileira, trinta e poucos anos. Nasci e moro em Porto Alegre, no Sul do Brasil, cidade que amo de coração e onde vivencio o apego, o calor da família e a constância, virtudes necessárias na minha vida. Paradoxo, tenho encantos por viajar, romper a linearidade rotineira, esquecer o mapa no hotel e perder-me pelas ruas dos lugares que visito. Por quê? Para ter a chance de conhecer aquela confeitaria antiga na rua lateral, coisa que só o acaso permite. Tenho uma ligação forte com o conforto do cotidiano mas, quando me torno viajante, parto em busca das descobertas, do desconhecido. É quando me entrego à Serendipity que as viagens propiciam. E é com este mesmo estado anímico que venho para a cozinha: trazendo comigo a aventura, a curiosidade, o ímpeto pelo novo. Gosto de criar minhas receitas, mas sou também fã dos cadernos culinários, escritos à mão e com manchas de vida em suas páginas. Outro paradoxo.
Agradam-me os livros, as revistas, os blogs de forno-e-fogão. E tenho verdadeiro encanto pelas ‘Histórias do como-se-faz’, as narrativas orais que transmitem o conhecimento empírico, prático e caseiro, de geração a geração. Escutar uma história de cozinha é, para mim, uma riqueza única, porque faz parte de uma conversa, de uma partilha entre as pessoas. Sou médica psiquiatra e psicoterapeuta, profissão que exerço com amor e dedicação, e que dispara meu olhar para o subjetivo de nossas entrelinhas. Minha segunda atividade profissional é como proprietária de uma pequena editora, a Casa Editorial Luminara, ligação entre trabalho e espaço de liberdade.
No tempo livre, meu hobby principal é a culinária, desde a infância. Hoje, com a descoberta da ‘food writing‘, realizar a escrita culinária é, para mim, uma prática tão lúdica quanto cozinhar. Realizo algo que chamo de ‘cozinha perceptiva’. Nesta, escrita e a fotografia são ferramentas, pois ampliam a percepção e a descrição dos detalhes do ato culinário, ampliando também a exploração sensorial e a atenção ao presente, com benefícios para o autoconhecimento. Escrever, curiosar, ler, fazer colagens, blogar, viajar e fotografar são também experiências prazerosas para mim, com altas doses de felicidade.
The Brasserie Lipp in Geneva even tops the one in Paris. Some may say that’s not difficult to do in a sleepy, provincial town like Geneva, but it is not so simple as that.
It’s l’ensemble, the “package” with all its details, that makes it work to perfection: the top-notch French-style service, the professionalism, the decor, the reliability of the food, the atmosphere, its late opening hours, even on Sunday.
You can watch them in action on their site!
I love their site, which gives you a glimpse of all the qualities above through a short video.
Menu
The menu includes classic brasserie fare, such as choucroute, souris d’agneau confite or lamb’s shank – one of the tenderest parts of the lamb, steak with Béarnaise sauce, leeks ravigote and shellfish platters. They offer Gillardeau oysters as well as the usual selection of shellfish found in a brasserie. It is always impeccably fresh.
But unlike many brasseries, they also have a menu that changes with the seasons. It invariably offers an assortment of tartares, cold or hot soups, salads, and dishes that often have North African and Asian accents. One of my favorites that they have been doing for 3 or 4 winters, is the vegetarian couscous. It’s like no other couscous I’ve ever had, a modern, up-to-date “revision” that I never tire of.
Service
If you listen to their video, you’ll understand what I mean about the professionalism of the service. They will never get annoyed with you if you ask questions about the dishes or if you change your mind 3 times. They are old-fashioned, but in the good sense of the term. The servers are always polite and patient.
When our souls are happy, they talk about food.–Charles Simic
Dušan “Charles” Simić is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of The Paris Review. He is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today, and his work has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his prose poem “The World Doesn’t End:”
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.
He also received the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate.
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Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.
Rachel Laudan is the prize-winning author ofThe Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritageand a co-editor of theOxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. In this wide-ranging interview, Rachel and I talk about her long-awaited book, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. Paul Freedman remarks that the book is “a riveting and unique combination of culinary ideas and exposition on the materiality of eating.” Other delighted early readers include Anne Willan, Naomi Duguid and Dan Headrick. As a food lover, a cook, a world traveler or a student of cultural history, you might have asked yourself: What is this thing called food? If so, this is the book for you.
ELATIA HARRIS: To begin, I would love to know what was involved in the transition from historian of science to historian of food. I can remember when there was no such academic discipline as food history, and I’ll warrant so can many readers.
RACHEL LAUDAN: I can remember when there was no such discipline as science history! I think history is the thread through my life. Growing up in history-heavy Wiltshire, I felt I had to escape the weight of the past. I studied the key historical science, geology, at university, although this was almost unheard of for a woman. I then changed to history and philosophy of science and technology. Then to history of food. History is my way of understanding things.
A lot of food writing is about how we feel about food, particularly about the good feelings that food induces. I’m more interested in how we think about food. In fact, I put culinary philosophy at the center of my book. Our culinary philosophy is the bridge between food and culture, between what we eat and how we relate to the natural world, including our bodies, to the social world, and to the gods or morality.
EH: Your earlier book, The Food of Paradise, necessarily dealt with food politics and food history. So many cultures were blended into local food in Hawaii. I treasure that book — almost a miniature of what you’re doing in Cuisine and Empire.
RL: Well, thank you. It came as a surprise to me that I had a subject for a book-length treatment of something to do with food or cooking — as interested in the subject as I certainly was. The only genre I knew was the cookbook, and I am not cut out to write recipes.
It was prompted by a move to teach at the University of Hawaii in the mid-1980s. I went reluctantly, convinced by the tourist propaganda that the resources of the islands consisted of little more than sandy beaches and grass-skirted dancers doing the hula.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. These tiny islands, the most remote inhabited land on earth, have extraordinarily various peoples and environments. And as to the food, I was humiliatingly lost. The first morning in the office, Barbara Hoshida, the department secretary, held out a plate of golf-ball sized fried, well, fried whats? “These are Okinawan andagi,” she explained, “They’re just like Portuguese malasadas.” I didn’t dare ask what Portuguese malasadas were.
Before I knew it I had a stack of essays on the foods of the three diasporas that had ended up in the islands: the taro-based cuisine of the peoples from the South Pacific (the Hawaiians); the rice-based cuisine of the Asians (Koreans, Han and Hakka Chinese, Japanese, Okinawans, and Ilocanos and Tagalogs from the Philippines); and the bread-based cuisine of the Anglos (British and Americans).
Food doesn’t exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented. –– Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is an American author, born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York. She developed a love for writing as a child, going on to become an acclaimed, bestselling scribe known for her novels, stories, poetry and essays, and winning the National Book Award for 1969’s them. Oates has had a prolific, award-winning career, with books such as A Garden of Earthly Delights, We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter and The Accursed.
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Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.
Swiss Supermarket Discoveries, Part III: Hike Switzerland
by Sonja Holverson
If you actually want to take a hike in Switzerland (and of course you do!), there are all levels from hikes for flatlanders to experts to alpinists. (See Swiss Alpine Wanderlust Packing List for Serious Hikers.)
So don’t let those enormous Alps intimidate you, because you can do a lot at lower altitudes. You might start by hiking around the Swiss vineyards, a common practice in Switzerland, or even in villages; you can hike down to the lake and the one of the relaxing and scenic cruises on Lake Geneva. Whatever the activity you will need a picnic lunch and the best place to find the ingredients is the Swiss supermarket.
Mindful Eating from a Buddhist Point of View
by 
 until 2:00 a.m. in the morning, which does not happen often in this city of Calvin. Perfect for Sunday meals on summer evenings, but RESERVE AHEAD OF TIME.</p>
<address><em>A version of this article was originally published on GenevaLunch.</em></address>
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