What I Like About Food

What I Like About Food

I find food endlessly fascinating. Here are some things I like about food.

Everybody eats. You may not golf, you may not follow politics, maybe you’ve never traveled outside the country, but food is the common ground among every living creature on the planet, and if those creatures can talk, chances are they have something to say about the foods they grew up on, love/hate and maybe make at home. Everybody does a lot of the same things, of course, like breathe and have sex, but I’ve found it much harder to start conversations about those topics than about food.

Food is code. On every plate is a set of signals about the culture that produced the food and the person who ordered it. I love sitting down to a platter of Mexican food in Pilsen and spotting elements of French, Spanish, maybe a little Arabic influence, Mayan and perhaps a hint of Chicago. How a person orders, how their eyes move when the food comes, how they season -- it's revealing.

Eating is opening. It’s rare to find an open-minded person who refuses to eat anything but hamburgers, or a closed-minded who is eager to try food from, say, Burma or Samoa. Who knows what comes first, the mindset or the appetite, but the very act of taking something foreign into one’s body involves motives of trust and curiosity that I tend to admire in people. Free your mouth and your mind will follow.

That’s some of the stuff I like about food…and it tastes good.

Hammond

I appreciate the idea of cryptographically-encoded potables.

However, I think of food as language; an infinitely-variable edible syntactical Libertatia given to the heights of jouissance *and* miscommunication(which is enjoyable in it's own right).

In aquiring a new language(read: trying new foods) I startle at the "hydrogen jukebox," the cognitive dissonance, that, while at first bite may seem utterly inexplicable, draws me closer still...and, while I may never achieve fluency...it's nice to get by.

That's what I like about food.

Claude Levi-Straus's Raw & the Cooked
food being the paradigmatic key which unlocks the richness of a culture -- an epicurean path of anthropology

also like that chicago means garlicke and this is cook county

my favorite platonic dialogue the gorgias with its central metaphor cookery is to medicine as politics is to statesmanship

David,

My feeling on this subject is along the same lines as your point that "everybody eats".

I feel like exploring the world food is similar to exploring the worlds of film, music, or other arts. It's never-ending, constantly changing, and vastly influenced by cultural, economic, and other social contexts.

The big difference about food is that I have to do it, practically every day. Your mom or your wife or the cops can tell you to turn down the music, or to mow the lawn instead of going to the movies. Setting aside extreme or economic conditions, nobody is going to tell you that you aren't allowed to eat today.

Food is a passion that I'm biologically enforced to pursue.

Best,
Michael

Yeah -- all that stuff.

But I also like food because a very high percentage of it tastes really good.

I can't think of who it is who has the quote from Franklin about beer proving God loves us and wants us to be happy. I think it's taste buds.

This thread has a soundtrack

I love how the influences go back and forth and food continues to change as cultures bump into each other; how plants and animals are now indigenous to parts of the world they would never have seen if not for food...

I can't think of who it is who has the quote from Franklin about beer proving God loves us and wants us to be happy.

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be
happy." Actually, nobody has ever been able to find this quote in Franklin, who, it turns out, was a very temperate drinker (as he was in most things) and preferred wine.


http://www.beerinfood.com/Franklin.html

Another great quote is the one I've just changed my sig to, but I'll repeat it here since my sig will likely change:

Lin Yutang wrote:What is patriotism, but the love of good things we ate in our childhood

For some folks, such as my late father in law, food was mere fuel. He took little joy in it, although he craved sweet things such as hostess cakes, and putting sugar on his tomatoes, rice, etc. He ate no spices, no cheese, no alcohol.

jbw wrote:

I can't think of who it is who has the quote from Franklin about beer proving God loves us and wants us to be happy.

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be
happy." Actually, nobody has ever been able to find this quote in Franklin, who, it turns out, was a very temperate drinker (as he was in most things) and preferred wine.


http://www.beerinfood.com/Franklin.html

Fair enough -- but someone in the forum has it as their signature, and that's what I was referencing. (And, as even the site you reference notes, it is widely attributed to Franklin.)

However, having just finished a project on the American Revolution for Colonial Williamsburg, I know that it can be difficult to prove someone said something if he didn't write it down, unless one can find a contemporary letter that records what the person said --so having it not appear in Franklin's writings doesn't mean it didn't appear in someone's letter or diary entry about Franklin.

For the Williamsburg project, I spent days trying to track down documentation for Franklin's "We must hang together, or most assuredly, we shall hang separately" quote, and the only documentation I could find online was a letter (not from Franklin) written well before Franklin was supposed to have said this, referring to "a Wit" who had made the statement. I was not able to determine with the resources available whether perhaps the "Wit" was Franklin himself, and that he'd said it before (his "Join or Die" cartoon had come out years before). So we left it out. But still, failing to prove someone said something is not the same as saying they didn't say it. Conversely, the world is afloat in anecdotal tales with now basis.

(And there are, of course, other misattributions -- Franklin's "God helps those who help themselves," which did appear in Poor Richard's Almanac, is often attributed to the Bible.)

But it's nice to know Franklin didn't make beer proof of God's love -- because I love God but don't like beer at all.

Cynthia wrote:

jbw wrote:

I can't think of who it is who has the quote from Franklin about beer proving God loves us and wants us to be happy.

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be
happy." Actually, nobody has ever been able to find this quote in Franklin, who, it turns out, was a very temperate drinker (as he was in most things) and preferred wine.


http://www.beerinfood.com/Franklin.html

Fair enough -- but someone in the forum has it as their signature, and that's what I was referencing. (And, as even the site you reference notes, it is widely attributed to Franklin.)

However, having just finished a project on the American Revolution for Colonial Williamsburg, I know that it can be difficult to prove someone said something if he didn't write it down, unless one can find a contemporary letter that records what the person said --so having it not appear in Franklin's writings doesn't mean it didn't appear in someone's letter or diary entry about Franklin.

For the Williamsburg project, I spent days trying to track down documentation for Franklin's "We must hang together, or most assuredly, we shall hang separately" quote, and the only documentation I could find online was a letter (not from Franklin) written well before Franklin was supposed to have said this, referring to "a Wit" who had made the statement. I was not able to determine with the resources available whether perhaps the "Wit" was Franklin himself, and that he'd said it before (his "Join or Die" cartoon had come out years before). So we left it out. But still, failing to prove someone said something is not the same as saying they didn't say it. Conversely, the world is afloat in anecdotal tales with now basis.

(And there are, of course, other misattributions -- Franklin's "God helps those who help themselves," which did appear in Poor Richard's Almanac, is often attributed to the Bible.)

But it's nice to know Franklin didn't make beer proof of God's love -- because I love God but don't like beer at all.

You guys looking for me?

And, as even the site you reference notes, it is widely attributed to Franklin.

Precisely because of this, I thought it useful to indicate that the assumed provenance of the quote currently stands on a very shaky (indeed, nonexistent?) foundation.

Flip,

I was once going to use the quote myself as a tagline, if you hadn't gotten there first. I was as surprised as anyone to discover later that it was, if not spurious, at the very least "temporarily unattributable."

When I was in grad school, we young philosophers-to-be took everything quite seriously, of course. Occupational hazard. Now what might not be widely known is that, of any and all departments in a university, the philosophy department KNOWS FOOD. And takes it seriously, indeed, more seriously than most other things. If you're marooned in a town, nothing known to eat, call the philosophy dept. in the local university, ask them where they take guests/themselves to eat. You won't be disappointed.

One very serious issue that used to come up (so to say) on about a sesqui-annual basis was: "Which is better, sex or food?" The discussion always played out the same way, even with an ever-changing jury: are we talking long run here? if so, then there's no question.

[Now remember, we're describing the behaviour of a gaggle of randy twenty-somethings here...]

Even at our age, sex didn't usually come (again, so to say) any 21 times a week. (Although, truth be told, I *did* know a high-energy physicist who knew these numbers...) Moreover, creative as we were, we couldn't think of sexual variations as diverse as those exhibited by, say, the culinary variational diversity of the then 130+ countries of the UN.

"Just do the numbers" was the instant response. And thus concluded the argument, as ever. Logic alone gave you the result: food was better than sex.

Now, of course, on can think of climactic moments (so to say) where this conclusion is befogged by emotion. But, in the long run, food is better than sex.

And that's a bigtime major reason I like food.

Geo

PS. And sex too, maze wee.

I rather like the original quote cited on the site to which jbw sent us --

"Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy."

Personal preference -- wine makes me happier than beer.

And thanks for the insight into philosophy departments, Geo. Good travel tip.