Category: Food and Drink

Is Beef Food?

A Substack excursus into the alimentary.

This article ought to be of interest to James TaIarico who, in meat-eatin’ gun-totin’ Texas, is quite quixotic the candidate; but I fear he is too stupid to understand it. He thinks God is non-binary. That makes no sense. Sean Hannity’s response makes no sense either.  Hannity tells us that he was taught the “Our Father” as a child, and apparently Hannity holds that God is a Big Guy in the Sky with a penis hanging between his legs.  To discuss whether a purely spiritual, and thus wholly immaterial being is sexually dimorphic is the sort of debate that belongs in a loony bin. I plan to rant further on the conservative inability  to operate on the plane of ideas in a separate Substack entry.

Today’s Substack article starts out like this:

Beef is the flesh of a formerly sentient being, a dead cow. And of course beef is edible. For present purposes, to be edible is to be ingestible by mastication, swallowing, etc., non-poisonous, and sufficiently nutritious to sustain human life.

But is everything that is edible food? Obviously not: your pets and your children are edible but they are not food. People don’t feed their pets and children to fatten them up for slaughter. So while all food is edible, not everything edible is food.

What then is the missing ‘ingredient’? What must be added to the edible to make it food? We must move from merely biological concern with human animals and the nutrients necessary to keep them alive to the cultural and normative. Sally Haslanger: “Food, I submit, is a cultural and normative category.” (“Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground,” Chapter 11 of Feminist Metaphysics, 192)

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Coffee

Coffee DeadOctober 1st is International Coffee Day.  But we are still  in March. So I'm jumping the gun as one might do under the influence.  Herewith, some tunes in anticipatory celebration.  Not that I'm drinking coffee now: it's a morning and afternoon drink.  I am presently partaking of a potent libation consisting of 3/4 Tequila Añejo and 1/4 Aperol with a non-alcoholic St. Pauli Girl as chaser. Delicioso!

Ella Mae Morse, Forty Cups of Coffee

Cream, The Coffee Song

Johnny Cash and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, A Cup of Coffee

 

Commander Cody, Truck Drivin' Man.  This one goes out to Sally and Jean and Mary in memory of our California road trip nine years ago.   "Pour me another cup of coffee/For it is the best in the land/I'll put  a nickel in the jukebox/And play that 'Truck Drivin' Man.'"

Dave Dudley, Coffee, Coffee, Coffee

Calexico & Roger McGuinn, Another Cup of Coffee.  A good version of this old Dylan tune.

Mississippi John Hurt, Coffee Blues

Patricia Kaas, Black Coffee

Annette Hanshaw, You're the Cream in My Coffee, 1928

Johann Sebastian Bach, Coffee Cantata

What is wrong with people who don't drink or enjoy coffee?  They must not value consciousness and intensity of experience.  Poor devils! Perhaps they're zombies (in the philosophers' sense).

Patrick Kurp  recommends Rick Danko and Paul Butterfield, Java Blues, one hard-driving, adrenalin-enabling number which, in synergy with a serious cup of java will soon have you banging hard on all synaptic 'cylinders.'  

Chicory is a cheat.  It cuts it but doesn't cut it.

"The taste of java is like a volcanic rush/No one is going to stop me from drinking too much . . . ."

Warren Zevon, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

A Hot Sauce Rant from 2013

A hot (sauce rant) or a (hot sauce) rant? Both. Parentheses  matter!  Scope matters. All scope distinctions matter. Mind your p's and q's. Discriminate operators and operands. (Am I sending a coded message?)

Substack latest.

Don't complain about 'old news.' What are you, a Twitterized 'woke' presentist?

There is presentism in the philosophy of time and there is what I will call, for want of a better term, historical presentism. This, roughly, is the conceit that the present alone matters  and that we have little or nothing to learn from the past.  It is not so much a view as an attitude, a 'bad 'tude' if you will, one shared by adolescents of all ages. There is the punk who, ignorant of great literature, installs Bukowski in the literary pantheon. Self-insulation from the past and its achievements is one of the ways wokesters self-enstupidate. 

And there are those who ought to know better, spineless university administrators in the grip of fashionable obsessions, who are thereby rendered incapable of just judgments of past times and individuals. Case in point: the Flannery O'Connor unnaming.

Pasta Puttanesca

Pasta Puttanesca is a good Lenten meal for a Friday night despite its being 'in the style of the whore.' Italian la puttana means whore, harlot, slut. Didn't Jesus suffer all to come unto him, even the ladies of the evening? 

Make it with sardines: 'meatier' than anchovies. Pour some extra virgin olive oil into a pan. Don't ask how much. Eyeball it like a man. Dump some chopped-up garlic onto the  olio d'oliva  lube job.  Set the heat to moderate.  Crack open the can of sardines and dump the contents, oil, water, and all into the pan. Break the formerly-sentient sea critters into small pieces. Add a can of  diced tomatoes. Throw in your Italian spices and fresh-ground pepper.  Chop up some olives and add to the mix. Stir. Simmer.

You knew without my telling you to get a righteous quantity of  water boiling. Dump the pasta into the boiling water. Capellini cooks quickly thus comporting well with the celerity with which this dish is supposed to be thrown together at the end of a long day. Cook the pasta a little shy of al dente. It will cook further when you add it to the sauce. Eat it topped with freshly-grated Parmigiana Reggiano or Pecorino Romano.  Wash it down with a glass or two of Dago Red. Think with compassion of the ladies of the evening. But do not avail yourself of their services.

To the scholarly among you I recommend Benedicta Ward, SLG, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources, Cistercian Publications, 1987. With chapters on Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, Pelagia, Thais, and Maria the Niece of Abraham.

Are You Hungry?

Don't let the thought of the pleasures of the table persuade you to eat if you are not hungry. Eat only at meal times, but never because it is meal time. An exception is breakfast for those quitting their domiciles for a sally-forth into a mean world.  To leave your house without food in your gut is like driving into the desert without gas in your tank. You don't know what awaits you. 

Food: Medicine, Drug, or Fuel?

In an excess of the ascetic, the author of The Confessions in Book Ten, Chapter 31 recommends taking food as medicine. At the opposite extreme we find those for whom it is a soporific, a sedative, an escape from reality, a drug. The wise tread the middle path: food is fuel.  

Eat in quantity and quality precisely that alone which optimally fuels fratre asino so that he may bear up well in this vale where his services are indispensable.   Properly fortified, he will carry your load over many a pons asinorum.

Gluttony: Another Sign of Decline

So what can we teach the Muslim world?  How to be gluttons?

Another sign of decline is the proliferation of food shows, The U. S. of Bacon being one of them.  A big fat 'foody' roams the land in quest of diners and dives that put bacon into everything.  As something of a trencherman back in the day, I understand the lure of the table.  But I am repelled by the spiritual vacuity of those who wax ecstatic over some greasy piece of crud  they have just eaten, or speak of some edible item as 'to die for.'

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man.  He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do.  Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.