Chef's Table: Jeong Kwan Jeong Kwan, Chef's Table www.imdb.com 172. Garden Growing WildThe garden is a riot gardensfoodzen
The true meaning of tea There is no true deformation that does not follow the laws of necessity. In later years, when deformation came to be consciously created, when the rejection of perfection became a matter of deliberate manipulation, the true meaning of tea began to be lost. To put it in somewhat contradictory terms, true tea existed only before the advent of the tea ceremony. After the coming of tea, when deformation came to be consciously sought, common everyday beauty disappeared and unnatural manipulation began. Yanagi Sōetsu, The Japanese Perspective food
Substitutes for the thermal experience Such clues from other senses can become so strongly associated with a sense of coolness or warmth that they can occasionally substitute for the thermal experience itself. For example, the taste of mint seems refreshing and cool regardless of what temperature it is. Similarly, the pressure of heavy blankets conveys a feeling of warmth quite independent of their actual thermal qualities. Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture You can taste it with your eyes sensesfood
You can taste it with your eyes It was one of those good rides, where the motion of the train is soothing, and the interior temperature pleasantly warm but not hot. I imagined the subway car as a rapidly moving load of bread. The motto "You can taste it with your eyes" occurred to me. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine Substitutes for the thermal experience food
Madness All our madness comes from having our stomachs empty and our heads full of air. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote foodmadness
If you can't beat the classics Choi: I love [this contemporary banana cream pie] because sometimes new presentations create that iconic or nostalgic thing, but then they don't taste like nostalgia. But this one tastes like a banana cream pie. Puck: So many young chefs today forget that food has to be delicious. If it's not delicious, why do it? If it's just interesting, you go once, that's it – "okay, I get it, but I don't want to go back." Choi: I hear you chef. That's what I teach my cooks. I say, "You can do anything you want, but if you can't beat a banana cream pie, then the banana cream pie still wins." In most cases they don't. They can't beat the original. Jon Favreau, Roy Choi & Wolfgang Puck, The Chef Show: Wolfgang Puck foodnostalgiaprogress
Waiting there to be experienced "Paintings are like what you can barely make out through a keyhole compared with the richness of perception that's just waiting there in the world to be experienced all the time. It's strange. With food, for instance, people seem able to understand what's involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience." Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees perceptionfood
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat A Book by Samin Nosrat www.saltfatacidheat.com Research, empathy, simplicity, speed foodcraft
The Incompatible Food Triad An Idea www.georgehart.com Can you find three foods such that all three do not go together (by any reasonable definition of foods "going together") but every pair of them does go together? food
Art of the Menu A Blog www.underconsideration.com Cataloguing the underrated creativity of menus from around the world. foodcollections
I recommend eating chips An Essay by Sam Anderson www.nytimes.com Join me. Grab whatever you’ve got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams. Now we’re in business: We have broken the seal. The inside of the bag is silver and shining, a marvel of engineering — strong and flexible and reflective, like an astronaut suit. Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief! We are the first humans to see these chips since they left the factory who knows when. They have been waiting for us, embalmed in preservatives, like a pharaoh in his dark tomb. Looking Closely is EverythingOne brick seeingdetailsfood
In Praise of Small Menus An Article by Rachel Sugar www.grubstreet.com The best way to experience a restaurant, I have always felt, is by eating exactly what it wants to feed you. I do not want choices. I want the best thing. A restaurant might have five or ten best things, but it cannot have 45. There are many infuriating things about the world, but one of the more fixable is the sensation of acute regret from having ordered wrong. Why are there possibly wrong orders? Recently, I was at a fancy restaurant with great pastas and bad pizzas. So cut the pizzas! A kitchen that focuses on its strengths turns out consistently excellent things, even if that results in fewer total things. fooduxchoicesimplicity
On onion cutting An Article by Ana Rodrigues ohhelloana.blog In the television show Masterchef there was an episode where the judges did a test on what they call “basic skills”. One of the judges often says that in order to be a “true chef”, you must know how to quickly and finely cut onions. ...This was really bothering me and I am stubborn so I wanted to win this fake argument really badly so I looked up why the way one cuts onions is important: as it turns out, the shape and even the surface area affect the end flavour. I thought the whole “chop chop chop” was about performance in the kitchen. Cut quickly to serve quickly! I was wrong. craftfoodwwwskill
It's All Over An Essay by Justin E. H. Smith justinehsmith.substack.com It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles. A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find, once finished, that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is, it seems to me, no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the nineteenth century, there has been for weavers. Into the system of flightThe gutting of our human subjecthoodA performative contradictionThe one reveals a subject and the other reveals an algorithm metrics
Into the system of flight It seems this transformation, from physical object to vector of data, is a general and oft-repeated process in the history of technology, where new inventions begin in an early experimental phase in which they are treated and behave as singular individual things, but then evolve into vectors in a diffuse and regimented system as the technology advances and becomes standardized. In the early history of aviation, airplanes were just airplanes, and each time a plane landed or crashed was a singular event. Today, I am told by airline-industry insiders, if you are a billionaire interested in starting your own airline, it is far easier to procure leases for actual physical airplanes, than it is to obtain approval for a new flight route. Making the individual thing fly is not a problem; inserting it into the system of flight, getting its data relayed to the ATC towers and to flightaware.com, is. The navigation is our property flightsystemstechnology
The gutting of our human subjecthood Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects. This gutting of our human subjecthood is currently being stoked and exacerbated, and integrated into a causal loop with, the financial incentives of the tech companies. People are now speaking in a way that results directly from the recent moneyballing of all of human existence. humanityidentity
A performative contradiction I have found myself coming away from discussions with my good PR people feeling vaguely guilty that I do not have enough followers on Twitter (five thousand is the cut-off, I think) to be considered an “influencer,” or even just a “micro-influencer,” and feeling dismayed to learn that part of what is involved in launching a book like this into the world is strategizing over how to catch the attention of a true influencer, for a retweet or some other metrically meaningful shout-out. You would be a fool to think that it is the argument of the book, the carefully crafted sentences themselves, that are doing the influencing. And yet for me to try to insert myself into the metrics-driven system would be a performative contradiction, since the book itself is an extended philippic against this system. And so what I do? I play along, as best I can, until I start to feel ashamed of myself. I contradict myself.
The one reveals a subject and the other reveals an algorithm My own book may be crap, but I am certain, when such an imbalance in profitability as the one I have just described emerges, between photojournalism and selfies, that it is all over. This is not a critical judgment. I am not saying that the photos of Pol Pot are good and the selfies are bad. I am saying that the one reveals a subject and the other reveals an algorithm, and that when everything in our society is driven and sustained in existence by the latter, it is all over. algorithmssociety