Tag: Food

Walking. And stuck in the moment.

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If you are looking for worldly insights, for something new and fresh, move on. And don’t look back. Save 5 minutes of your life doing something productive. Because you ain’t going to Live & Learn here.

Speaking of Blog Mastheads, I’ve been thinking about changing it, after what now, 13 years? To Live & Don’t Learn. It’s closer to reality.

Yesterday. 6:30 pm. 1510 consecutive (almost) days at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row.

I’m now at two-a-day visits to Cove Island Park.  Daybreak for the morning walk. And late afternoon/evening to try to rid of the disgust for gaining 14 lbs in less than 60 days. This outcome was due to three factors: (a) the suspension of my 18 hour fasts, (b) suspension of snacks after 6 pm, and (c) just suspending all common sense.

Culprit? This time?

Oui French Style Coconut Yogurt.

And you might ask: Well, how bad can that be?

And I would say, not so bad, until you start adding the toppings. Think Dairy Queen Sundae.

Continue reading “Walking. And stuck in the moment.” →

Savory food writing.

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For what is home if not the first place where you learn what does and does not nourish you? The first place you learn to sit still and slow down when someone offers you a bite to eat?

— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees (Ecco, April 30, 2024)

Notes:

  • Kirkus Review of Bite by Bite: …A collection of flavorful memories. Poet and essayist Nezhukumatathil, award-winning author of World of Wonders, creates a graceful memoir centered on 40 different kinds of food, some exotic, some familiar, all evoking recollections of childhood, family, travels, friendships, and much more. “This book is a bite of personal and natural history,” she writes, “a serving if you will—scooped up with a dollop of the bounty and largesse of the edible world.” With a father from India and a mother from the Philippines, some of the author’s memories center on traditional food such as kaong, the fruit of the sugar palm, prized in Filipino salads; jackfruit, her favorite fruit, which she first tasted during a visit to her grandparents in Kerala; bangus, the national fish of the Philippines, served fried as part of breakfast; and lumpia, a deep-fried Filipino finger food, with a crisp outer skin filled with chicken, ground beef or pork, carrots, and green beans. She takes sides in her parents’ debate over which mangoes are sweetest, those from India or those from the Philippines. For her, it’s Alphonso mangoes, from India, “hands down.” Eating lychees reminds her of her 20s, when she lived in Buffalo and would fly to New York City to meet friends. She’d buy a sackful of lychees, eating them happily on a bench while people-watching. Cherries, figs, and maple syrup are among other foods that elicit the author’s lyrical responses. The taste of apple banana, for example, “becomes a party in your mouth featuring a banana host and a sort of pineapple-strawberry DJ spinning tunes.” Her memoir is not unlike halo-halo, a mixture of unexpected ingredients that make for a delectable dessert. “With halo-halo,” she writes, “you never know what you are going to discover and when.”Savory food writing.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Three hundred trout are required to support one man for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume 90,000 frogs, which must consume 27 million grasshoppers, which live off of 1,000 tons of grass.

—  Jeremy Rifkin, The The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (St. Martin’s Press, October 4, 2011)

Photo: sawyer via Unsplash

Body

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When bodies are discussed, especially in popular culture, it has often meant a very circumscribed set of themes, largely to do with what the body looks like or how to maintain it at a pinnacle of health. The body as a set of surfaces, of more or less pleasing aspect. The perfect, unattainable body, so smooth and gleaming it is practically alien. What to feed it, how to groom it, the multiple dismaying ways in which it might fail to fit in or measure up. But the element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliably subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire…

I wanted to formalise my understanding of the body, and I was fascinated too by the idea that it might have its own language, distant from speech but just as eloquent and meaningful, composed of symptoms and sensations rather than words… Over the next two years, I drew every bone, muscle and organ in the body, memorising their functions and their names, right down to the tiny bones of the hand: lunate and pisiform, named for their resemblance to moons and peas. On sheets of butcher’s paper, I mapped the metabolic transformations that went on inside the miniature factory of each cell. At the beginning I had only the crudest notion of how the body worked, but I struggled gamely on, fascinated and a little appalled by how much of my life happened beneath the Plimsoll line of conscious control. Gradually it all came into focus. The body was a device for processing the external world; a conversion machine, hoarding, transforming, discarding, stripping for parts.

— Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (W. W. Norton & Company, May 4, 2021)

 

T.G.I.F.: Truth

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Source: Thisisn’thappiness