Food and Memory

An excellent comment from an open thread at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog:

I agree that it's more than just the food or the convenience. It's a whole host of ancillary stimuli. I go to Popeye's, this specific one right across the Harrison bridge, when I'm feeling disappointed, which is about once in two or three months. It's just a place where I feel it's okay to be disappointed. It's that ambience, the people there, just something, I don't quite know what that allows for it. Man, after that first bite of Popeye's, it's all disappointment. If I wanted, I could make better chicken than they do and with less guilt attached. But that's not the point. I'd rather not take my disappointment home and cook with it, nor clean up after. 

Food is not just about eating.

Read this blog: Sichuan Oddysey

My friend Kareem has a new blog/mission:

My mission is to eat in every Sichuan restaurant in Manhattan and then report back to you here.

Also:

Given that Sichuan food is the third best world cuisine (after Arabic food and the Birreria in Pilsen but before hamburgers and Per Se), this should be an exciting—if caustic and grossly unhealthy—project. A quick note about authenticity: one of the worst things about food writing and its culinary Orientalism is the idea that authenticity can be sought out, understood, and explained. As a blogger I find that stupid and lame, and as a student of cultural anthropology I find it troubling and full of incorrect assumptions about basically everything. So, I’m not going to describe this stuff as if there’s a central, essential Sichuanness that I can appraise and these places can emulate, I’m just going to talk about whether or not I like them.

Right on, even if the ordering is wrong. So, you know: read it, add to RSS, etc.

Montgomery's Unpasteurized Cheddar

William Gibson sayeth:

A SOVEREIGN FOR SOUL-DELAY
posted 5:03 AM
Yesterday morning I walked around the corner to Neils Yard Dairy and bought myself 200g. of the Montgomery's unpasteurized cheddar.

Asked for it by name. The clerk, in a proper cheeseman's cap, wrapped my interestingly discoloured wedge in that special white paper they use, glossy on the inside, folding it that way I can never quite master.

Now it's 5:23AM PST, back in Vancouver, and the Montgomery's cheddar really *is* a sovereign medicine for jet lag. And that is the reason it costs almost as much as heroin, in America.