Lent starts on Wednesday, so Fat Tuesday is three days away. We’re going out to dinner tonight, so I’m starting my Lenten food awareness tomorrow. I’ve already been reading and writing about food and fat at Refiguring. Here are a few things that came up this morning:
In movies she was fascinated by fat actresses. . . . Did they eat as heedlessly as Bishop Humpries and his wife who sometimes came to dinner and, as Louise’s mopther said, gorged between amenities? Or did they try to lose weight, did they go about hungry and angry and thinking of food?
                       — Andre Dubus, “The Fat Girl” (short story)
From Robert Girardi’s essay “Spaghetti,” in We Are What We Ate, a book of essays and memoirs assembled as a fundraiser for Share Our Strength, an organization working to end hunger.
The fragrance of the sauce cooking was no mere odor; it was family history in a smell.
Obviously, there is a certain imperial virtue in bland food. One is not long at the table over a meal of boiled steak and kidney pie, or pork chops done like shoe leather; one is instead quickly out into the world.
Recipes are strange things. The power of great food resides in the fact that, like music, its meaning is beyond words.