Food Description Quotes

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes. A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I've tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it's a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.

I grabbed the closest box of books and heaved it onto my bed. It contained all the books I had read in Iraq. Dog-eared, with broken spines, speckled with dirt, food, and even a little blood, most of the copies were marked up with notes in the margins. The better the book, the worse it looked--that's the way it should be. As I saw it, they were almost more like diaries than books.

What was once a home she had taken apart one piece at a time, one day...She sold her belongings for money to buy food.  First the luxuries: a small statue, a picture.  Then the items with more utility: a lamp, a kettle.  Clothes left the closet at a rate of a garment a day…she burned everything in the basement first; then everything in the attic.  It lasted weeks, not months.  Though tempted, she left the roof alone.  She stripped the second floor, and the stairs.  She extracted every possible calorie from the kitchen.  she wasn’t working alone, because neighbourhood pirates simultaneously stole anything of value outside: door and window frames, fencing, stucco.  They pillaged her yard.  Breaking in was a boundary her neigbours had not yet crossed.  But the animals had.  Rats and mice and other vermin found the cracks without much effort.  Like her, they sought warmth and scraps of food.  With great reluctance, she roasted the ones she could catch.  She spent her nights fighting off the ones that escaped.

In front of us, the ocean stretched for eternity. Around us, reggae mussy floated through the air. In our drying clothes and still-damp hair, we ate junk food and talked. At some point we finished and went for a long walk in the sand. We picked up shells, laughed, and talked. Before I knew it, the sun was going down and we went back to the van. We lay side by side, stretched out on the blanket. When the sun dropped completely below the horizon, we let the moon illuminate us.

The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

It's a misery peculiar to would-be writers. Your theme is good, as are your sentences. Your characters are so ruddy with life they practically need birth certificates. The plot you've mapped out for them is grand, simple and gripping. You've done your research, gathering the facts; historical, social, climatic culinary, that will give your story its feel of authenticity. The dialogue zips along, crackling with tension. The descriptions burst with color, contrast and telling detail. Really, your story can only be great. But it all adds up to nothing. In spite the obvious, shining promise of it, there comes a moment when you realize that the whisper that has been pestering you all along from the back of your mind is speaking the flat, awful truth: IT WON'T WORK. An element is missing, that spark that brings to life in a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right. Your story is emotionally dead, that's the crux of it. The discovery is something soul-destroying, I tell you. It leaves you with an aching hunger.

There is an Arabic proverb that says: She makes you feel like a loaf of freshly baked bread.

Then he explains Chinese food in Manhattan to me: 'See the way it works is, there's one central location out on Long Island where all this stuff is made. Then it's piped into the city through a series of underground pipes that run parallel to the train and subway tracks. The restaurants then just pull a lever. One lever for General Tso's chicken, another for beef with broccoli sauce. It's like beer; it's on tap.' It's amazing how convincing he is when he says this. There's no pause in his description, nowhere for him to stop and think, to make this up as he goes along. It's as though he's simply repeating something he read in the Times yesterday. This makes me love him more than I did just five minutes ago.

Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, toasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood.) For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home. The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat.

Each buoyant husk surrounds a single fist-sized kernel that is hollow except for a nutritious liquid known to health-food enthusiasts as “coconut water.” Whatever branding specialist coined that term cannot be blamed for shying away from the more accurate, technical description: acellular endosperm.

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you.

Here is part of the problem, girls: we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Back in the day, women didn’t run themselves ragged trying to achieve some impressively developed life in eight different categories. No one constructed fairy-tale childhoods for their spawn, developed an innate set of personal talents, fostered a stimulating and world-changing career, created stunning homes and yardscapes, provided homemade food for every meal (locally sourced, of course), kept all marriage fires burning, sustained meaningful relationships in various environments, carved out plenty of time for “self care,” served neighbors/church/world, and maintained a fulfilling, active relationship with Jesus our Lord and Savior. You can’t balance that job description. Listen to me: No one can pull this off. No one is pulling this off. The women who seem to ride this unicorn only display the best parts of their stories. Trust me. No one can fragment her time and attention into this many segments.

One of the greatest secrets of great leaders; 'they are not controlled by what they cannot do'. They directed by what they can.

The difference between where you are now and where you will get to later defines your range of work which you have to be responsible for.

HOW TO THINK ABOUT … EATING Avoid distractions during meals and pay attention to the food you are consuming. Try to cultivate strong memories of the experience, which will help you to feel and stay sated. If you are trying to cut down on snacks, remind yourself what you ate for your last meal. You may find that recollection helps to curb hunger pangs. Be aware of food descriptions that create a sense of deprivation. Even if you are looking for low-calorie meals, try to find products that evoke a feeling of indulgence. When dieting, pay particular attention to flavor, texture, and presentation—anything that will heighten your enjoyment of the food and leave you feeling more satisfied afterward. Avoid sweetened drinks—it is hard for the body to adapt its energy regulation to their high calorie content. Enjoy the anticipation of food—this will prime your digestive response and help you to feel more satisfied afterward. Don’t feel guilty about the occasional treat, but instead relish the moment of pleasure.

What Gisela was describing to me was an exquisitely intimate and happy love. I thought it was the most compelling description of faith that I had ever heard. I wasn’t about to grab a Bible; nor was our conversation about me or my choices in any way. It was food for thought.

Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.

In the passenger seat, Nahil is all questions. Was Kabul safe? How was the food? Did he [Idris] get sick? Did he take pictures and videos of everything? He does his best. He describes for her the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it's like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. Kabul's vivid, arresting details--the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window. Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.

The junkie derives his opioid supply exogenously; while the release of endogenous opioids in the rest of us is triggered, and not always very reliably either, by stimuli such as food, sex, exercise and social interaction. We're all still seeking the same core states of psycho-chemical well-being under one description or other.

During breaks out in the field, when our grumbling stomachs sent a sour taste up into our mouths, our greatest entertainment was talking among ourselves about food. We, along with some of the other field hands, would trade descriptions of delicious foods we had eaten or heard about. It was truly food for the soul. The speakers would invariably have us all drooling.

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentleman, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered lanes; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Thus it was we entered a low eating-house on the lamplit shores of the river in a Moslem neighbourhood, a modest boxwood shanty having no walls at all, but sufficiently screened with hanging bags. There were several benches and three tables, and upon each table were oil-lamps which cast soft shadows on the haze of airborne cooking-fats and wood-smoke, and gently illuminating a dozen Africans at food; on the floor at the farther end were cooking-fires, and a fine diversity of smells arose from bubbling pots and sizzling pans. The chef was a robust ogre of glistening dark bronze with an incense pastille smouldering in his hair, a swearing, sweating Panta-gruel naked to the waist and stoking fires, lifting lids, and scooping out great globs of meat and manioc and fish: he might have been cooking skulls on the shores of River Styx.

Psalm 63 offers insight into the satisfied soul. Look at David's descriptions of satisfaction: “My soul thirsts for you, / my body longs for you, / in a dry and weary land” (v. 1). “Because your love is better than life, / my lips will glorify you” (v. 3). “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods” (v. 5). The most obvious symptom of a soul in need of God's satisfaction is a sense of inner emptiness. The awareness of a “hollow place” somewhere deep inside—the inability to be satisfied.

The last time I’d been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps: The Let’s Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, ‘Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’ The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I’d have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, ‘What have you got to be depressed about?’ The It’s All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn’t kill myself because they’d miss me so much. More often than not, I’d end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, ‘Have you any idea how many people love you?’ The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn’t care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, ‘I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?’ Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender. The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. those purveying alternative cures. And actually there were hundreds of them – urging me to do reiki, yoga, homeopathy, bible study, sufi dance, cold showers, meditation, EFT, hypnotherapy, hydrotherapy, silent retreats, sweat lodges, felting, fasting, angel channelling or eating only blue food. Everyone had a story about something that had cured their auntie/boss/boyfriend/next-door neighbour. But my sister Rachel was the worst – she had me plagued. Not a day passed that she didn’t send me a link to some swizzer. Followed by a phone call ten minutes later to make sure I’d made an appointment. (And I was so desperate that I even gave plenty of them a go.) Most likely to say, ‘This man’s a miracle worker.’ Followed by: ‘That’s why he’s so expensive. Miracles don’t come cheap.’ There was often cross-pollination between the different groupings. Sometimes the Let’s Laugh It Off merchants teamed up with the Tough Love people to tell me that recovering from depression is ‘simply mind over matter’. You just decide you’re better. (The way you would if you had emphysema.) Or an All About Me would ring a member of the Woo-Woo crew and sob and sob about how selfish I was being and the Woo-Woo crew person would agree because I had refused to cough up two grand for a sweat lodge in Wicklow. Or one of the Runaways would tiptoe back for a sneaky look at me, then commandeer a Denier into launching a two-pronged attack, telling me how well I seemed. And actually that was the worst thing anyone could have done to me, because you can only sound like a self-pitying malingerer if you protest, ‘But I don’t feel well. I feel wretched beyond description.’ Not one person who loved me understood how I’d felt. They hadn’t a clue and I didn’t blame them, because, until it had happened to me, I hadn’t a clue either.

Humans never outgrow their need to connect with others, nor should they, but mature, truly individual people are not controlled by these needs. Becoming such a separate being takes the whole of a childhood, which in our times stretches to at least the end of the teenage years and perhaps beyond. We need to release a child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue the natural agenda of independent maturation. The secret to doing so is to make sure that the child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient. Children need to have their attachment needs satiated; only then can a shift of energy occur toward individuation, the process of becoming a truly individual person. Only then is the child freed to venture forward, to grow emotionally. Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child's need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority. A child is not free to proceed with his learning and his life until the food issues are taken care of, and we parents do that as a matter of course. Our duty ought to be equally transparent to us in satisfying the child's attachment hunger. In his book On Becoming a Person, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers describes a warm, caring attitude for which he adopted the phrase unconditional positive regard because, he said, “It has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so.” Rogers was summing up the qualities of a good therapist in relation to her/his clients. Substitute parent for therapist and child for client, and we have an eloquent description of what is needed in a parent-child relationship. Unconditional parental love is the indispensable nutrient for the child's healthy emotional growth. The first task is to create space in the child's heart for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything or be any different to earn that love — in fact, she cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost. It is not conditional. It is just there, regardless of which side the child is acting from — “good” or “bad.” The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative, and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved. Ways have to be found to convey the unacceptability of certain behaviors without making the child herself feel unaccepted. She has to be able to bring her unrest, her least likable characteristics to the parent and still receive the parent's absolutely satisfying, security-inducing unconditional love. A child needs to experience enough security, enough unconditional love, for the required shift of energy to occur. It's as if the brain says, “Thank you very much, that is what we needed, and now we can get on with the real task of development, with becoming a separate being. I don't have to keep hunting for fuel; my tank has been refilled, so now I can get on the road again.” Nothing could be more important in the developmental scheme of things.

I begin to describe a three-tier cake. The bottom tier would be a deep, dark devil's food cake filled with thick chocolate custard. The middle tier would be a vanilla cake filled with a fluffy vanilla mousse and a layer of roasted strawberries. The top tier, designed to be removed whole and frozen for the first anniversary, would be one layer of chocolate cake and one of vanilla with a strawberry buttercream filling. The whole cake would be covered in a layer of vanilla buttercream, perfectly smoothed, and the tiers separated by a simple line of piped dots, looking like a string of pearls.

Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not. William Styron renders an eloquent description of “the many dreadful manifestations of the disease,” among them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a “dank joylessness” with “gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety.”14 Then there are the intellectual marks: “confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memories,” and, at a later stage, his mind “dominated by anarchic distortions,” and “a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.” There are the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a zombie, “a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility,” along with a “fidgety restlessness.” Then there is the loss of pleasure: “Food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.” Finally, there was the vanishing of hope as the “gray drizzle of horror” took on a despair so palpable it was like physical pain, a pain so unendurable that suicide seemed a solution. In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new beginnings emerge. The very symptoms of depression bespeak a life on hold. For

Once I've coated the parsnips in a honey-saffron glaze, Rachel helps me plate them alongside the brisket, stuffed cabbage, and sweet potato tzimmes, and we carry the plates out to the dining room together. "Let me explain a little about tonight's dinner," I say, addressing the softly lit faces around the table, which is covered with flickering votives and tapered candles. I launch into a description of the Jewish New Year and the symbolism behind all of the food: how the honey represents the hope of a sweet new year, how the challah is round instead of braided to represent the circle of life, how my grandmother used to make stuffed cabbage on every possible occasion because it reminded her of her Hungarian mother. I tell them lots things- about food, about my bubbe, about me- and to my surprise, they actually pay attention. They hang on my every word and ask intelligent questions and make thought-provoking points of their own. And I realize, hey, these are people who get it, people who love to eat and talk about food and culture as much as I do. Most of them aren't Jewish, but that doesn't matter. Every family has its traditions. Every family has a story to share. That's the point of this dinner- to swap stories and histories and see how food can bring people together.

Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was never used to insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one heard it from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s — until, finally, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticism, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting.

The deep, salty, black sea rolls toward us, cold and indifferent, lacking all empathy. Detached, merely itself. This is what the ocean does every day. It doesn't need us for anything. It doesn't care about our hopes and fears, not does it give a damn about our descriptions. The dark weight of the sea is a superior power. Many have been in this situation every since some of our overconfident ancestors set a hollowed out tree trunk in the water and paddled off on languid waves, only to venture out too far where the currents were stronger than their arms or paddles. Or maybe like us, they were surprised by a storm. All of them must have felt the same cold shiver when they realized the sea is truly without sentimentality or memory. Whatever it swallows is gone, becoming food for the fish, crabs and annelid worms. For the lamprey, hag fish, flat worms, ring worms, and all the parasites of the deep. To be drowned and embraced by the eternal, indeterminate all.

Autumn Cannibalism depicts a plastic couple in intimate embrace in the act of eating each other. Although the features are not uniformly rendered—the hands detailed, the heads leavening into each other like rising bread—the anthropophagy is clearly a function of sexual intimacy. The man pinches a doughy inch from his lover’s waist while spooning cream from the breast region (although there is no breast here, only a white enameled flatness) while the woman’s left arm dangles about his neck, her hand languidly holding a knife. The knife cuts into the torso of the man, which presents itself as a loaf of bread. Although perhaps my description of the anatomy is lacking, the cyclical nature of love—one’s feeding and feeding, the plastic ability of the bodies to nourish as food, the constant flux of the forms, the flow of man into woman, their rendering as a single, spiraling form—should seem more familiar. Or maybe it doesn’t, this elemental desire, the lovers reduced to ingredients and appetite.

THE Oldest Ones of All were gluttons. Probably it was because they seldom had enough to eat. You can read even nowadays a poem written by one of them, which is known as the Vision of Mac Conglinne. In this Vision there is a description of a castle made out of different kinds of food. The English for part of the poem goes like this: A lake of new milk I beheld In the midst of a fair plain. I saw a well-appointed house Thatched with butter. Its two soft door-posts of custard, Its dais of curds and butter, Beds of glorious lard, Many shields of thin pressed cheese. Under the straps of those shields Were men of soft sweet smooth cheese, Men who knew not to wound a Gael, Spears of old butter had each of them. A huge cauldron full of meat (Methought I’d try to tackle it), Boiled, leafy kale, browny-white, A brimming vessel full of milk. A bacon house of two-score ribs, A wattling of tripe—support of clans— Of every food pleasant to man, Meseemed the whole was gathered there. Of chitterlings of pigs were made Its beautiful rafters, Splendid the beams and the pillars Of marvellous pork.

To all appearances, Vincent was at once knowledgeable and honest, a combination that gave him great credibility. He was quick to exploit the advantage. When the party had finished giving their food orders, he would say, “Very well, and would you like me to suggest or select wines to go with your meals?” As I watched the scene repeated almost nightly, there was a notable consistency to the customer’s reaction—smiles, nods, and, for the most part, general assent. Even from my vantage point, I could read their thoughts from their faces. “Sure,” the customers seemed to say, “You know what’s good here, and you’re obviously on our side. Tell us what to get.” Looking pleased, Vincent, who did know his vintages, would respond with some excellent (and costly) choices. He was similarly persuasive when it came time for dessert decisions. Patrons who otherwise would have passed up the dessert course or shared with a friend were swayed to partake fully by Vincent’s rapturous descriptions of the baked Alaska and chocolate mousse. Who, after all, is more believable than a demonstrated expert of proven sincerity?

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

Meet people properly: It all starts with the introduction. Exchange contact information. Make sure you can pronounce everyone’s names. Find things you have in common: You can almost always find something in common with another person, and from there, it’s much easier to address issues where you have differences. Sports cut across boundaries of race and wealth. And if nothing else, we all have the weather in common. Try for optimal meeting conditions: Make sure no one is hungry, cold or tired. Meet over a meal if you can; food softens a meeting. That’s why they “do lunch” in Hollywood. Let everyone talk: Don’t finish someone’s sentences. And talking louder or faster doesn’t make your idea any better. Check egos at the door: When you discuss ideas, label them and write them down. The label should be descriptive of the idea, not the originator: “the bridge story” not “Jane’s story.” Praise each other: Find something nice to say, even if it’s a stretch. The worst ideas can have silver linings if you look hard enough. Phrase alternatives as questions: Instead of “I think we should do A, not B,” try “What if we did A, instead of B?” That allows people to offer comments rather than defend one choice. At

other gentlemen had come out with him. One was a low-spirited gentleman of middle age, of a meagre habit, and a disconsolate face; who kept his hands continually in the pockets of his scanty pepper-and-salt trousers, very large and dog’s-eared from that custom; and was not particularly well brushed or washed. The other, a full-sized, sleek, well-conditioned gentleman, in a blue coat with bright buttons, and a white cravat. This gentleman had a very red face, as if an undue proportion of the blood in his body were squeezed up into his head; which perhaps accounted for his having also the appearance of being rather cold about the heart. He who had Toby’s meat upon the fork, called to the first one by the name of Filer; and they both drew near together. Mr. Filer being exceedingly short-sighted, was obliged to go so close to the remnant of Toby’s dinner before he could make out what it was, that Toby’s heart leaped up into his mouth. But Mr. Filer didn’t eat it. “This is a description of animal food, Alderman,” said Filer, making little punches in it, with a pencil-case, “commonly known to the labouring population of this country, by the name of tripe.” The Alderman laughed, and winked; for he was a merry fellow, Alderman Cute. Oh, and a sly fellow,

This journey by time capsule to the early 1940s is not always a pleasant one. It affords us a glimpse at the pre-civil rights South. This was true in the raw copy of the guidebooks as well. The Alabama guidebook copy referred to blacks as “darkies.” It originally described the city of Florence struggling through “the terrible reconstruction, those evil days when in bitter poverty, her best and bravest of them sleep in Virginia battlefields, her civilization destroyed . . . And now when the darkest hour had struck, came a flash of light, the forerunners of dawn. It was the Ku Klux Klan . . .” The Dover, Delaware, report stated that “Negroes whistle melodiously.” Ohio copy talked of their “love for pageantry and fancy dress.” Such embarrassingly racist passages were usually edited out, but the America Eats manuscripts are unedited, so the word darkies remains in a Kentucky recipe for eggnog. In the southern essays from America Eats, whenever there is dialogue between a black and a white, it reads like an exchange between a slave and a master. There also seems to be a racist oral fixation. Black people are always sporting big “grins.” A description of a Mississippi barbecue cook states, “Bluebill is what is known as a ‘bluegum’ Negro, and they call him the brother of the Ugly man, but personal beauty is not in the least necessary to a barbecue cook.

The Grocers'! oh the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of like mistakes, in the best humor possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

For the Fertile Crescent, the answer is clear. Once it had lost the head start that it had enjoyed thanks to its locally available concentration of domesticable wild plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent possessed no further compelling geographic advantages. The disappearance of that head start can be traced in detail, as the westward shift in powerful empires. After the rise of Fertile Crescent states in the fourth millennium B.C., the center of power initially remained in the Fertile Crescent, rotating between empires such as those of Babylon, the Hittites, Assyria, and Persia. With the Greek conquest of all advanced societies from Greece east to India under Alexander the Great in the late fourth century B.C., power finally made its first shift irrevocably westward. It shifted farther west with Rome’s conquest of Greece in the second century B.C., and after the fall of the Roman Empire it eventually moved again, to western and northern Europe. The major factor behind these shifts becomes obvious as soon as one compares the modern Fertile Crescent with ancient descriptions of it. Today, the expressions “Fertile Crescent” and “world leader in food production” are absurd. Large areas of the former Fertile Crescent are now desert, semidesert, steppe, or heavily eroded or salinized terrain unsuited for agriculture. Today’s ephemeral wealth of some of the region’s nations, based on the single nonrenewable resource of oil, conceals the region’s long-standing fundamental poverty and difficulty in feeding itself.

But, after one quick trace of his tongue between her lips, he abruptly pulled away and stepped back from her. She was leaning into him so hard he had to put his hands on her shoulders to steady her. Catherine’s eyes flew open. Releasing her shoulders, he pointed past her to the books he’d set on the desk. She opened her mouth to protest, but closed it again. As she followed Jim, she caught a glimpse of his profile when he picked up the books and slate. There was a smug grin on his face. He was toying with her, teaching her a lesson—that two could play at heating things up and abruptly cooling them down. Indignation and amusement competed in her as she took her seat beside him and he handed her the paper he’d written. She hadn’t set him any homework. He’d done it on his own, printed a brief description of their picnic in short sentences or single words. It was almost like a poem without rhyme. “Fish swim water. Sky. Trees. Leaves. Eat food. Drink.” She smiled at him. “Very good.” He touched his lips, puckering them in a kiss, and tapped the signing book. “Kiss,” she said and looked up the sign for it. “Fingers touching thumbs as both hands come together,” the text said. Her cheeks flushed as she read, “trembling slightly to indicate the degree of passion.” Catherine made the movement as she repeated the word aloud. “Kiss.” Jim copied the movement, shaping his lips like hers. He pointed to the slate and offered her the chalk so she could spell the word. He studied each letter as she wrote it, before printing them himself: K-i-s-s. Catherine’s cheeks flamed even hotter from seeing it written in glaring white against the black slate. Kiss. Kiss. Somehow there seemed to be no denying or hiding it now that it was written down. She glanced at Jim’s lips and her nipples tightened at the memory of his mouth sucking them.

As Japan recovered from the post-war depression, okonomiyaki became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables- noodles, protein, fishy powders- added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description. Okonomi means "whatever you like," yaki means "grill," but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and oko officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though okonomiyaki looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing okonomiyaki in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos. There are two overarching categories of okonomiyaki Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated nagaimo, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas okonomiyaki in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style okonomiyaki are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on table side teppans. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider monjayaki, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the okonomiyaki family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.) Otafuku entered the picture in 1938 as a rice vinegar manufacturer. Their original factory near Yokogawa Station burned down in the nuclear attack, but in 1946 they started making vinegar again. In 1950 Otafuku began production of Worcestershire sauce, but local cooks complained that it was too spicy and too thin, that it didn't cling to okonomiyaki, which was becoming the nutritional staple of Hiroshima life. So Otafuku used fruit- originally orange and peach, later Middle Eastern dates- to thicken and sweeten the sauce, and added the now-iconic Otafuku label with the six virtues that the chubby-cheeked lady of Otafuku, a traditional character from Japanese folklore, is supposed to represent, including a little nose for modesty, big ears for good listening, and a large forehead for wisdom.

There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect.” This action can be motivated by a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fullness of one’s own life and existence. All this unites into the clear awareness that one is rich enough to share one’s being and possessions. Love, sacrifice, help, the descent to the small and the weak, here spring from a spontaneous overflow of force, accompanied by bliss and deep inner calm. Compared to this natural readiness for love and sacrifice, all specific “egoism,” the concern for oneself and one’s interest, and even the instinct of “self-preservation” are signs of a blocked and weakened life. Life is essentially expansion, development, growth in plenitude, and not “self-preservation,” as a false doctrine has it. Development, expansion, and growth are not epiphenomena of mere preservative forces and cannot be reduced to the preservation of the “better adapted.” ... There is a form of sacrifice which is a free renunciation of one’s own vital abundance, a beautiful and natural overflow of one’s forces. Every living being has a natural instinct of sympathy for other living beings, which increases with their proximity and similarity to himself. Thus we sacrifice ourselves for beings with whom we feel united and solidary, in contrast to everything “dead.” This sacrificial impulse is by no means a later acquisition of life, derived from originally egoistic urges. It is an original component of life and precedes all those particular “aims” and “goals” which calculation, intelligence, and reflection impose upon it later. We have an urge to sacrifice before we ever know why, for what, and for whom! Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact. When he tells us not to worry about eating and drinking, it is not because he is indifferent to life and its preservation, but because he sees also a vital weakness in all “worrying” about the next day, in all concentration on one’s own physical well-being. ... all voluntary concentration on one’s own bodily wellbeing, all worry and anxiety, hampers rather than furthers the creative force which instinctively and beneficently governs all life. ... This kind of indifference to the external means of life (food, clothing, etc.) is not a sign of indifference to life and its value, but rather of a profound and secret confidence in life’s own vigor and of an inner security from the mechanical accidents which may befall it. A gay, light, bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself—that is the feeling which inspires these words! Egoism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life. ... This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid—a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in a bug.

My analysis work proved that there are thirty major reasons for failure, and thirteen major principles through which people accumulate fortunes. In this chapter, a description of the thirty major causes of failure will be given. As you go over the list, check yourself by it, point by point, for the purpose of discovering how many of these causes-of-failure stand between you and success. 1. UNFAVORABLE HEREDITARY BACKGROUND. There is but little, if anything, which can be done for people who are born with a deficiency in brain power. This philosophy offers but one method of bridging this weakness-through the aid of the Master Mind. Observe with profit, however, that this is the ONLY one of the thirty causes of failure which may not be easily corrected by any individual. 2. LACK OF A WELL-DEFINED PURPOSE IN LIFE. There is no hope of success for the person who does not have a central purpose, or definite goal at which to aim. Ninety-eight out of every hundred of those whom I have analyzed, had no such aim. Perhaps this was the 3. LACK OF AMBITION TO AIM ABOVE MEDIOCRITY. We offer no hope for the person who is so indifferent as not to want to get ahead in life, and who is not willing to pay the price. 4. INSUFFICIENT EDUCATION. This is a handicap which maybe overcome with comparative ease. Experience has proven that the best-educated people are often those who are known as "self-made," or self-educated. It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others. Education consists, not so much of knowledge, but of knowledge effectively and persistently APPLIED. Men are paid, not merely for what they know, but more particularly for WHAT THEY DO WITH THAT WHICH THEY KNOW. 5.LACK OF SELF-DISCIPLINE. Discipline comes through self-control. This means that one must control all negative qualities. Before you can control conditions, you must first control yourself. Self-mastery is the hardest job you will ever tackle. If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self. You may see at one and the same time both your best friend and your greatest enemy, by stepping in front of a mirror. 6. ILL HEALTH. No person may enjoy outstanding success without good health. Many of the causes of ill health are subject to mastery and control. These, in the main are: a. Overeating of foods not conducive to health b. Wrong habits of thought; giving expression to negatives. c. Wrong use of, and over indulgence in sex. d. Lack of proper physical exercise e. An inadequate supply of fresh air, due to improper breathing.

Later, we stand on the pavement outside Marcy's for a few moments, saying our goodbyes, moving aside as people weave in and out of the heavy doors leaving little incomplete jokes hanging in the air behind them like smoke. I glance in the window, into the room which is full of a buttery low light pricked out with candles and silverware, and see the waiter clearing our table, whisking away the wine glasses and the coffee cups, the plate of petit fours, and lowering on a new white cloth with easy dramatic precision. A couple approaches, fresh from an opening night or a concert; the waiter adjusts a knife and swings to greet them. A swift reinvention, the final movement of someone else's evening.

Al-Shabaab seemed right about many things. The newsletter said that international aid was brought to ruin Somali agriculture and to make people dependent on foreign food; both had indeed been side effects of the relief effort. They said that the West wanted Somalis to be held in ‘camps, like animals’, which could be an accurate description of Dadaab. Most of all though, it was the rhetorical question posed in the newsletter that had the biggest impact among Guled’s traumatized generation: ‘Why invade a country that has been fighting a civil war for a decade and a half the moment they have decided to live in peace?’ The Islamic Courts Union had brought peace. It had been wildly popular and Somalis resented the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion. ‘The United States cannot abide a situation in which Islam is the solution,’ the newsletter argued. And to many that seemed like the truth. The

But if you build a habit of only shopping for items from a list, then you decrease the likelihood of eating junk food—and you’ll save a lot of money along the way. Description: Look in your refrigerator, review the meals you have planned, and check out your cupboard. Write down a list of only the items you need, and do it before you leave for the store.

In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.

My favourite description of sophisticated infidelity on the part of the female concerns a small brown bird, the dunnock. The male and female, the epitome of contented monogamy, were first seen as they hopped side by side across a lawn, pecking up morsels of food. When they reached a bush, the male went round one way, the female the other. As soon as the bush shielded her from her partner, the female flew in an instant into dense vegetation nearby. There, she copulated with a lurking male, then flew back to her position behind the bush. A few seconds later, male and female hopped back into each other's view, past the bush. Still intently pecking at morsels, the female acted as if nothing had happened. Nearly as appealing is the film, shown worldwide, of a female monkey foraging on the ground for food while being watched attentively from a high branch by her consort. Alongside her comes another male. He sits down, innocently picking at himself, hiding his erection from her consort. Every time the consort's attention is distracted, the other male taps the female on the shoulder. In an instant she stands and presents and the male inseminates her. So quick is their intercourse that by the time her consort looks back in their direction, they have resumed their previous activities — innocence personified.

Charles opened a thick volume of the encyclopedia to a chapter on owls and read as he ate. He found himself quickly distracted by a description of this strange bird’s incredible powers of hearing (a high perched owl could detect the sounds of a tiny mouse moving beneath a foot of snow!) as Adèle slowly finished her food in silence. She never seemed to object when he worked at the supper table. In fact, it was how they spent many evenings. She was employed at the university library and would often bring him home books on subjects related to his cases. It made him happy to share his work with her, and he was always grateful for her thoughtful assistance and insights. To him, it was like they were one organism, different arms and legs carrying the two lobes of one great mind.

Allison had once taken stock of every description she could think of for large bodies, and they were pretty much all food-related: pear-shaped, apple-shaped, juicy bottom, big melons, etc. It was disgusting. So, until everyone started referring to thin people as ‘asparagus-shaped,’ Allison would be curvy or plus-sized, or if she really wanted to watch people have a shock, fat.

This text contains a wealth of details, among which stand out the following: the kingdom is a land of play and pleasure, a beautiful country of rivers, green meadows, forests, and plains. A kind of darkness reigned there, as the sun did not shine on it directly; the days there were misty, and neither the moon nor the stars illuminated the nights. This mist is reminiscent of the name of the Nibelungen and of Montnuble, the castle of Aubéron according to Gandor of Brie. In this particular occasion, we have a summary description of these subterranean beings at our disposal, which also describes their mind-set and their food: They are small in size but possess immense qualities. They are yellow and have long hair. They eat a kind of milk-based broth flavored with saffron. Lies, fickleness, and infidelity are odious to them (this trait is strongly reminiscent of Aubéron).

The period of their probation was about to expire. Noah had faithfully followed the instructions which he had received from God. The ark was finished in every part as the Lord had directed, and was stored with food for man and beast. And now the servant of God made his last solemn appeal to the people. With an agony of desire that words cannot express, he entreated them to seek a refuge while it might be found. Again they rejected his words, and raised their voices in jest and scoffing. Suddenly a silence fell upon the mocking throng. Beasts of every description, the fiercest as well as the most gentle, were seen coming from mountain and forest and quietly making their way toward the ark. A noise as of a rushing wind was heard, and lo, birds were flocking from all [98] directions, their numbers darkening the heavens, and in perfect order they passed to the ark. Animals obeyed the command of God, while men were disobedient. Guided by holy angels, they “went in two and two unto Noah into the ark,” and the clean beasts by sevens. The world looked on in wonder, some in fear. Philosophers were called upon to account for the singular occurrence, but in vain. It was a mystery which they could not fathom. But men had become so hardened by their persistent rejection of light that even this scene produced but a momentary impression. As the doomed race beheld the sun shining in its glory, and the earth clad in almost Eden beauty, they banished their rising fears by boisterous merriment, and by their deeds of violence they seemed to invite upon themselves the visitation of the already awakened wrath of God.

No one constructed fairy-tale childhoods for their spawn, developed an innate set of personal talents, fostered a stimulating and world-changing career, created stunning homes and yardscapes, provided homemade food for every meal (locally sourced, of course), kept all marriage fires burning, sustained meaningful relationships in various environments, carved out plenty of time for “self care,” served neighbors/church/world, and maintained a fulfilling, active relationship with Jesus our Lord and Savior. You can’t balance that job description.

There’d been a time when he and his ex had discussed dinner plans every day and what to feed Jake. He didn’t really miss it. Food should be uncomplicated, not requiring thought and planning. Sure, he was shoveling chemicals and processed crap into his body. But who wanted to live forever? He’d passed on the description of

Emmanuel, leafed through a book of photographs, color printouts, bound in black plastic and covered with a thin transparent sheet: There was green grass and a white-paneled house and a little blond girl smiling. There was a large van and an even larger play set. There was a countertop completely covered with food. “This is a very nice place,” Emmanuel said in a quiet voice. “I would like to go to this place.” For Emmanuel, the snapshots of suburban America presented an impossible dream, a portrait of manicured abundance as distant and as glorious as a preacher’s description of heaven.

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.

In the grim aftermath of World War II and the Stalinist purges, the term “totalitarianism” has become a bad word. But for progressives before the war, Jonah Goldberg points out, it was a good word. “Totalitarianism” was a term used by Mussolini in a positive, descriptive sense. It meant giving total allegiance to the state; it meant a state that took care of people’s physical, emotional, and aspirational needs. Totalitarianism implied an exhilarating unity of thought and action. 19 Totalitarianism, in this sense, was the shared aspiration of fascists, Nazis, and progressives. Schivelbusch writes, “The New Deal Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany all profited from the illusion of the nation as an egalitarian community whose members looked out for one another’s welfare under the watchful eyes of a strong leader.”20 Progressives across Europe and America in the 1930s relished the idea of the totalitarian society in which they could impose this unity, in other words, to supervise and control people’s lives. Does totalitarianism in this sense seem unfamiliar? It shouldn’t be. Recall President Obama’s propagandistic “Julia” videos. Essentially the Obama administration promised this hypothetical young woman cradle-to-grave protection. Absurdly, the package of benefits offered by the government under Obama would be worth more than the wages of a typical forty-hour work week. “Under President Obama” Julia would get education subsidies, minimum wage, food stamps, and free health care. “Under President Obama” Julia even decides to bear a child. To me, it’s a bit unnerving. But this is progressive utopia: citizens are all brought into complete subordination and submission to an all-powerful state.

Dear Lord, you are a vampire,” Eva gasped, then covered her mouth to keep the wayward thing from spouting any other unwanted revelations. Connall stiffened, his eyes shooting to her face. He had the oddest expression on his face, she noted. He looked . . . scared? Nay, apprehensive was a better description, and Eva had to wonder why he was looking so apprehensive when he was the soulless— Nay, not soulless, she reminded herself, recalling their conversation from the night before. He was not dead, nor soulless, he had assured her and he did not kill those he bit. Connall had described himself as just different and while Eva thought that was something of an understatement, she reassured herself with that information, now. He was just different, still her husband, the kind, sweet, gentle man who had treated her as if she had value, and shown her such consideration, as well as taught her passion. Nothing else had changed, she reminded herself as her head began to spin. He was the clan chief of the MacAdie, and her husband. And really, as flaws went, vampirism was much more pleasant to deal with than his being a wife beater or some such thing. Wasn’t it? “Dear Lord,” Eva breathed, shaking her head at her own thoughts, then she glanced to Connall again. He was uncharacteristically silent, his attention focused on her with an intensity that made her nervous. Her husband hadn’t said a word since she’d blurted that he was a vampire and it was making her uncomfortable enough to start searching her mind for a way to make him leave. “If you have things to do, you need not trouble yourself to wait here for me to finish eating. I can manage well enough on my own,” she murmured at last, though the food was all gone. “Tis no trouble to be with ye,” he said with a frown and there was sudden anger on his face. “Yer no a burden to me, Eva, ye ne’er ha’e been and ne’er will be. Dear God, ye saved me life this morn, woman, no once, but twice. Ha’e ye no realized yer worth yet?” “I—” Eva shook her head helplessly, confused by the tears suddenly pooling in her eyes. His vehemence was as surprising to her as the words themselves. She had saved his life that morning. She’d driven the intruder off with the log, then . . . well all right, the feeding bit wasn’t that impressive. Anyone would have done in that instance, but she had fended off the intruder. “Ye’ve courage and beauty and intelligence and are a worthy wife. E’en a king would ha’e pride in claimin’ ye to wife. I have felt nothing but pride in claimin’ ye meself.” “Despite my bein’ accident prone?” she teased with a wry twist of the lips. “Yer accidents are a result o’ tryin’ too hard to earn a place here,” he said quietly. “But ’tis only because you doonae realize ye already ha’e a place here. Yer the Lady MacAdie. My wife.” Eva swallowed, her gaze dropping from his at those words. They made her heart ache for some reason. “Why do ye look away? Do ye hate me now?” Eva glanced back up with surprise. “What?” “Now that ye know what I am?” he explained. “Will ye be wantin’ an annulment? Beggin’ to be set free? Wid ye rather a mortal man to husband? Should I take ye back to Caxton?” Eva stared at him in horror, fear clutching at her heart at the very idea of what he suggested.

it seems as though our eating tends to grow more tortured as our culture's power to manage our relationship to food weakens. This seems to me precisely the predicament we find ourselves in today as eaters, particularly in America. America has never had a stable national cuisine; each immigrant population has brought its own foodways to the American table, but none has ever been powerful enough to hold the national diet very steady. We seem bent on reinventing the American way of eating every generation, in great paroxysms of neophilia and neophobia. That might explain why Americans have been such easy marks for food fads and diets of every description.

Percy was in command during the terrible winter that followed. The winter of 1609-10 has been described through the years as the "starving time," seemingly, an accurate description. It saw the population shrink from 500 to about sixty as a result of disease, sickness, Indian arrows, and malnutrition. It destroyed morale and reduced the men to scavengers stalking the forest, fields, and woods for anything that might be used as food.

A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish - paper, porcelain shards, food remains and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.

The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, “good” would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what “looks good” would be ignored. The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

Alfred began, on occasion, to scream in public: on the L train; in Times Square; at Whole Foods; at the Whitney. He can recall, with remarkable clarity (for someone who was screaming), the tableaux of chaotic reaction that followed, although these descriptions are curiously inert for the listener, like hearing someone recount a dream. The exception is Duane Reade on Union Square, because of what happened after: Escorted brusquely from the store by two security guards, Alfred encountered a girl whose look of rapt curiosity had stood out among the panicked shoppers inside. Now she leaned against a wall, apparently waiting for him. “What were you doing in there?” she asked, the very question thrilling Alfred. Most people would have said he’d been screaming, but Kristen had seen beyond that. Over latkes and hot apple tea at Veselka, Alfred explained his screaming project.

The pub had become a gastro pub, which meant the same old food with the usual gastro pub descriptions. Salads were “drizzled” with vinaigrette. There was a soup of “foraged” greens. Cheese on toast was described as “whipped goat’s curd, garden shoots and pickled alliums.” She ordered the “taste of Italy, home-cooked lasagne with hard-cut chips.” “What are hard-cut chips?” Agatha asked the landlord, John Fletcher. “Because it’s hard to get the frozen ones out of the bag,” he said. “And you don’t even blush,” said Agatha. “Okay, I’ll have the lasagne and a glass of Merlot.

thepsychchic chips clips iii Jared gives me an assignment: I need to map out my emotional process so that I can start finding ways to solve each problem. I need to actually sit down and make a spreadsheet. Each time something happens, write it down in the situation trigger column. In the next column write a description of the thoughts, emotional reactions, and behaviors that the situation or trigger causes. In the next column give your best assessment of the underlying flaw or problem, and finally, write a logic statement that I can use in the moment to inject some rationality into the issue. 258 Jared’s 20 minute break routine for Maria: First 5 minutes of break: off load and brain dump. I write down some of the key hands so that they don’t occupy any of my headspace going forward. … Then a few minutes of contemplating my decision making. Asking myself: How was my thinking? Were there any emotionally compromised decisions? … Next 10 minutes: nothing. No poker talk, no thinking. Just walking and relaxing. And then, right before the end of break, a few minutes of warm-up for the next level. 276 - 277 EB White: “an honest ratio between pluck and luck.” 287 Food in Los Vegas: For sushi, Yui and Kabuto. For dinner close to the Rio, the Fat Greek, Peru Chicken, and Sazón. For when I’m feeling nostalgic for the jerk chicken of my local Crown Heights spots, Big Jerk. Lola’s for Cajun. Milos, but only for lunch. El Dorado for late-night poker sessions. Partage to celebrate. Lotus of Siam to drown your sorrows in delightful Thai. 314

There are around 200 species of leaf-cutter ants that do this, and it’s been part of their existence for more than twenty million years. They are obligate fungal cultivars, meaning they fully depend on this activity, just as we do on farmed food. The dependence is mutual too: the fungus grows filaments called gongylidia, which are packed with nutritious carbohydrates and lipids, so that the ants can harvest them more easily to feed to the queens and larvae. Gongylidia don’t exist outside of fungal-ant agriculture. There’s a further outrageous layer to this symbiosis. The leaf beds are prone to infection by another fungus, which the ants weed manually (actually, with their mandibles). But they also carry Pseudonocardia bacteria on their bodies and in specialised endocrine glands. These bacteria produce an antibiotic which attacks the fungal infections. This is an astonishing description of mutualism on many levels: an animal farming a fungus, using bacteria as a pesticide, each dependent on the others.

The resignation, apathy, dislocation and sheer fatigue at the attritional suffering – quite apart from the suffocating repression of the regime – meant, however, that the collapsing morale could not be converted into a revolutionary fervour. Reports by observers from neutral countries smuggled out to the western Allies provided graphic descriptions of the depressed mood in Berlin as preparations were made for the defence of the city, the chaotic situation on the railways, panic buying of food in central Germany and the appalling living conditions throughout the country.

Satan first tempts the starving Christ to quell His hunger by transforming the desert rocks into bread. Then he suggests that He throw Himself off a cliff, calling on God and the angels to break His fall. Christ responds to the first temptation by saying, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” What does this answer mean? It means that even under conditions of extreme privation, there are more important things than food. To put it another way: Bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving.*3 Christ could clearly use his near-infinite power, as Satan indicates, to gain bread, now—to break his fast—even, in the broader sense, to gain wealth, in the world (which would theoretically solve the problem of bread, more permanently). But at what cost? And to what gain? Gluttony, in the midst of moral desolation? That’s the poorest and most miserable of feasts. Christ aims, therefore, at something higher: at the description of a mode of Being that would finally and forever solve the problem of hunger. If we all chose instead of expedience to dine on the Word of God? That would require each and every person to live, and produce, and sacrifice, and speak, and share in a manner that would permanently render the privation of hunger a thing of the past. And that’s how the problem of hunger in the privations of the desert is most truly and finally addressed.

The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you. If God is commonly thought to have created the world and then arranged it for our benefit, then the free market (and its invisible hand) is a pretty good candidate for being a god. You can begin to understand why libertarians sometimes have a quasi-religious faith in free markets. Now let’s do the devil’s work and spread chaos throughout the marketplace. Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs. That, says Goldhill, is what we’ve done to ourselves. As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse.

I wanted to eat, yes, but more than anything I was hungry to know. I wanted to know about foods I’d never heard of, but I also wanted to know about the best versions of food I already knew. Surely the cheese you ate in France was different from the Brie we bought at the supermarket? Because I thought that supermarket Brie was pretty damn good. The notion that there existed some version of this delight that I couldn’t even grasp until I consumed it was the tantalizer that spurred me into nearly everything I did for about twenty years. Each new flavor felt like a dare and an impossible promise. All my books were telling me there were transporting versions of everything I knew out in the world. It was all—MFK Fisher’s paean to ultra-fresh peas, Ephron’s description of cool ripe tomatoes hitting hot linguine—about magic, not stumbling on it but learning how to conjure it.

Only the rougher folks are out at night, and Blue Jean's is the one place they'll go for a meal. With a reputation of serving anybody, no matter who they are or what they're involved in, the diner attracts all sorts of characters.

Now you may have noticed that my description of what we should eat includes a conspicuous omission: animal foods, meaning meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products. It

At a street corner meeting in Watts when the riots were over, an unemployed youth of about twenty said to me, "We won." I asked him: "How have you won? Homes have been destroyed, Negroes are lying dead in the streets, the stores from which you buy food and clothes are destroyed, and people are bringing you relief." His reply was significant: "We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us. The police chief never came here before; the mayor always stayed uptown. We made them come." Clearly it was no accident that the riots proceeded along an almost direct path to City Hall.... This is hardly a description of a Negro community that has run amok. The largest number of arrests were for looting—not for arson or shooting. Most of the people involved were not habitual thieves; they were members of a deprived group who seized a chance to possess things that all the dinning affluence of Los Angeles had never given them.

Expectation is both the job description of the brain and its currency. It shapes how we think and move in the world around us. It dictates how we respond to music, how we experience food, how we communicate.

Unfortunately, the problem is complicated by quite irrelevant human needs that claim the attention: for companionship and understanding, for a feeling of participation in the social life of humanity. And of course, for a roof over one’s head, and food and drink. The artist tries to give attention to these, but it is difficult when there are so much more important things to think about; and it is all made more difficult by the hostility of other people who every day arouse the question, Could it be that I’m wrong? Sometimes the strain makes the Outsider-artist think of suicide, but before he gets to that point, the universe is suddenly making sense again, and he has a glimpse of purpose. Moreover, that sense of accord is not the warm, vague harmony of a sleeping baby, but a blazing of all the senses, and a realization of a condition of consciousness unknown to the ordinary bourgeois. He realizes that this was what he left out of account in making up his mental balance-sheet of Pro and Contra in the universe. The Christian might call it a sense of the Fatherhood of God; a Hindu would probably prefer to call it a sense of the Motherhood of God, and his symbolism would be more congenial to the artist, who can only find comparison for the feeling in a child’s confidence in its mother. In any case, these are only symbols of a state that is too little known to human beings for their descriptions of it to be accurate.

On his own admission, Gerald was an extremely handsome man.95 He had known Baldwin for a number of years and the Archbishop was very fond of him.96 His conversation was brilliant and he must have been a gay travelling-companion. He was intrigued by every place they visited, and familiar with quite a few of them. His personal enthusiasms seem to have had no limit: local history, local topography, folklore, animals of all sorts, clothing, language, weapons and warfare, religious houses, food, weather, demoniacal possession, mountain scenery, forests covered by the sea, silver mines, quicksands, genealogies, music.

You haven’t even come in contact yet with the really harsh toxins that lurk outside, generated by car exhaust and manufacturing processes, or that lie in wait for you at your workplace and in the fast food and junk food that you sometimes consume. “We are the first generation of people to ever be exposed on a daily basis to such an unprecedented number of chemicals,” says Dr. Sherry A. Rogers, a fellow of the American College of Allergy and Immunology. “At no other time have patients, through reading and education, had such an important and crucial role in determining their own wellness.” MYTHS WE CHERISH TOXICITY IS SOMEONE ELSE’S PROBLEM While it may sound rather harsh to label each and every one of us a living toxic waste dump, the reality of the body burden of toxins we each bear does support that description. We absorb so many synthetic chemicals during an average lifetime that, according to some reports, when we die our bodies decompose more slowly today than if we had died just three decades ago.

God’s lovingkindness is “better than life” (Ps. 63:3). This description of God’s thoughts and actions toward us is so magnificent that it does not compare even to what we consider most precious. It is better than our highest reality and enjoyment. God’s lovingkindness is better than food, better than peace, better than comfort, better than travel, better than sports, better than marriage, better than adventure, better than nature, better than every good thing we enjoy.

She sighed and sniffed the air. The smell of dirty water hung thickly in it. They were supposed to be running a clean-up initiative. Whether they had and failed, or they’d succeeded and it had grown filthy again she wasn’t sure. Either way, she wasn’t fancying a swim.  ‘Johansson,’ Roper called from the tent, beckoning her over, the report from the uniformed officer already in his hand. ‘Come on.’ She approached and he held the edge of the door-flap open for her so she could pass inside. It was eight feet by eight feet, and the translucent material made everything bright with daylight.  The kid in front of them could have been no more than eighteen or nineteen. He was skinny and had thick curly brown hair. His skin was blued from the cold and had the distinctly greyish look of someone who did more drugs than ate food. He was lying on his back on the bank, eyes closed, hands bound together on his stomach. His clothes were enough to tell them that he was homeless. It was charity shop mix and match. A pair of jeans that were two sizes too big, tied tight around pronounced hip bones with a shoelace. He was wearing a t-shirt with the cookie monster on it that looked as old as he was. But that was it. He had no jacket despite the time of year and no socks or shoes.  Jamie crouched down, pulling a pair of latex gloves from her jacket pocket. She had a box of them in the car. ‘We got an ID?’ she asked, not looking up. She knew Roper wouldn’t get down next to her. He didn’t have the stamina for it for one, and with his hangover the smell would make him puke.  He’d leave the close inspection to her.  ‘Uh, yeah. He matches the description of a missing person’s — Oliver Hammond. Eighteen years old. No positive ID yet though. No picture on file.’ ‘Eighteen,’ Jamie mumbled, looking over him more closely. ‘Jesus.’ ‘Yup.’ Roper sighed. ‘Probably scored, got high, took a little stroll, fell in the river… And here we are.’ ‘Did he zip-tie his hands together before or after shooting up?’ She side-eyed him as he scrolled through something on his phone. She hoped it was the missing person’s report, but thought it was more likely to be one of the daily news items his phone prepared for him. ‘I’m just testing you,’ he said absently. ‘What else d’you see?’ Jamie pursed her lips. No one seemed to care when homeless people turned up dead. There’d been eight this month alone in the city — two of which had been floaters like this. She’d checked it out waiting at some traffic lights. There were more than a hundred and forty homeless missing persons reported in the last six months in London. Most cases were never closed. She grimaced at the thought and went back to her inspection. Oliver’s wrists were rubbed raw from the zip-tie, but that looked self-inflicted. She craned her neck to see his arms. His elbows were grazed and rubbed raw, and the insides were tracked out, like Roper had said. He wasn’t new to the needle. She didn’t need to check his ankles and toes to know that they’d be the same.  She lingered on his fingers, honing in on the ones with missing nails.  ‘Ripped out,’ Roper said, watching as she lifted and straightened his fingers, careful not to disturb anything before the SOCOs showed up to take their photographs. In a perfect world the body would have stayed in situ in the water, but these things couldn’t be helped.  She inspected the middle and the index fingers on the right hand — the nails were completely gone. ‘Torture,’ Roper added to the silence. ‘Probably over the heroin. You know, where’s my money?

When you buy products labeled ‘super’ food, it should be known that it is a description and not a statement.

We are sinking under the weight of the taxpayer burdens to the tune of $46.7 billion dollars to fund just one executive order by the treasonous President Clinton, Executive Order 13166, that requires multi-lingualism everywhere and everyplace. This is the main reason why you see so many signs, descriptions on food products, etc. in Spanish. It was mandated by law.

Nietzsche's 'On the Genealogy of Morality' and especially its third essay 'What do ascetic ideals mean' is to my mind, not only an abstract discussion of an issue but also a memoir, a description of his family's home ambiance and pedagogical practices. In one section, describing the defeatist, self-righteous outlook on life, Nietzsche has the word 'poison' appear four times. Going into details of glances and sighs typical locutions, makes the reader almost visualize Nietzsche's windowed mother and unmarried aunts, economically dependent on the goodwill of his grandmother, using their weakness to tyrannize the child, trying to make him a well-behaved, disciplined, adult-like boy — 'the little pastor', as he was called by his school friends. 'They wander around among us like personifications of reproach, like warnings to us — as if health, success, strength, pride, and a feeling of power were already inherently depraved things, for which people must atone some day, atone bitterly. How they thirst to be hangmen! Among them there are plenty of people disguised as judges seeking revenge. They always have the word 'Justice' in their mouths, like poisonous saliva, with their mouths always pursed, always ready to spit at anything which does not look discontented and goes on its way in good spirits. [ . . .] The sick woman, in particular: no one outdoes her in refined ways to rule others, to exert pressure, to tyrannize.' The mother-poison connection is also supported by a passage, mentioned before in trying to solve Nietzsche's riddle 'as my own father I am already dead, as my own mother I still live and grow old'. In it, he described the horrible treatment he received from his sister and mother, who were described as canaille (rabble), hellish machine and a poisonous viper. What is the nature of poisoning? It consists of exposing a victim, imperceptibly, to a harmful material, sometimes camouflaged as beneficial (when mixed with food or drink), without the possibility of resisting or avoiding it, resulting in diminished strength, health, and energy, or even death. In fact, the psychologist Alice Miller used the term 'poisonous pedagogy' to describe emotionally damaging child-raising practices, intended to manipulate the character of children though force, deception, and hypocrisy. Nietzsche was sensitized to such poison in his childhood and could smell it anytime he felt pressure to conform, or experienced disrespect for his separateness and individuality.

Science terminology really falls flat on its face when it comes to describing the differences between [carpometacarpus] bones. For example, part of the description of this owl carpometacarpus reads: "Carpal trochlea ends in a long shallow depression deeper than but continuous with a groove on the lateral surface of metacarpal 3. Metacarpal 3 flares at proximal end. Intermetacarpal tuberosity flaring on the interior side of proximal end of metacarpal 3." By comparison, my description was more like: a sad-looking fellow with a bent back, mousy ears, and a slightly open mouth, looking like a character being yelled at for not bringing home any food today.

As to the technique employed at Ahmedabad Girish Mathur gave the following description: “What happened in Ahmedabad was not a communal riot in the ordinary sense. Rachi, Rourkela, Calcutta were put to shame by Ahmedabad. There more people were burnt alive than died of stabbings or as a result of clashes, and they were burnt alive not because they were caught in the fire. The technique was to set fire to a group of houses belonging to the minorities and, as men and women and children rushed out they were caught hold of, their hands and feet were tied and then they were thrown into the fire. This could not have been the spontaneous action of an angry mob. And the largest number of cases of arson and this type of murder took place during the curfew hours, which can mean only one thing, that the curfew was ineffective.” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s shock with pain over what she saw and heard in Ahmedabad could be seen on her face as she stepped out of her plane at Palam on her return to Delhi. A dog feeding on a half-burnt corpse in the midst of the ruins of buildings razed to the ground; five thousand refugees confined without food or even drinking water in a small chawl stinking with human excreta, there being no lavatories nearby; scores of young and old men, women and children rushing towards her crying, some with folded hands–“Indraben, I have lost all my children, I have lost my parents, my wife was cut to pieces, they caught hold of my son and threw him into the burning house; now at least save us, for God’s sake, save us, may you live long.

Then there is levitation, of which there are between two hundred and three hundred historical cases in the descriptions of the saints, including Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663). Saint Joseph was observed to levitate by thousands of witnesses, usually in broad daylight, over a period of thirty-five years. Reports can be found in witnesses’ private diaries and in depositions provided under oath, including 150 eyewitness reports from popes, kings, and princesses.97 Purely secular cases of levitation also exist, including most famously that of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886).98 Like Saint Joseph, Home was observed to levitate in daylight by dozens of prominent witnesses. Not a single case of fraud was ever discovered. Other charisms include bilocation, in which the mystic is observed to appear in two distant places at the same time; fragrances, or the “odor of sanctity,” issuing from the mystic’s body or clothes; inedia, or complete abstinence from food or drink for long periods of time, without harm; infused knowledge, or the supernormal ability to gain wisdom without studying; incorruption, the absence of the normal decay of the body after death; discernment of spirits, which in the Catholic context means interacting and knowing the difference between angels and demons; and luminous irradiance, a glowing light surrounding the heads, faces, and sometimes the whole bodies of mystics.

Take the mad cow “threat” for example: Over a decade of hype, it only killed people (in the highest estimates) in the hundreds as compared to car accidents (several hundred thousands!)—except that the journalistic description of the latter would not be commercially fruitful. (Note that the risk of dying from food poisoning or in a car accident on the way to a restaurant is greater than dying from mad cow disease.) This sensationalism can divert empathy toward wrong causes: cancer and malnutrition being the ones that suffer the most from the lack of such attention. Malnutrition in Africa and Southeast Asia no longer causes the emotional impact—so it literally dropped out of the picture. In that sense the mental probabilistic map in one’s mind is so geared toward the sensational that one would realize informational gains by dispensing with the news.

A specification is a clear and concise but complete description of the exact item desired so that all vendors have a common basis for price quotations and bids. As such, it is an essential communication tool between buyer and seller. Specifications should be realistic and should not include details that cannot be verified or tested or that would make the product too costly. Without up-to-date product information, specifications are useless. The specific information varies with each type of food, but all specifications should include at least the following information:Δ Clear, simple description using common or trade or brand name of product; when possible, use a name or standard of identity formulated by the government such as IMPS Amount to be purchased in the most commonly used terms (case, package, or unit) Name and size of basic container (10/10# packages) Count and size of the item or units within the basic container (50 pork chops, 4 ounces each) Range in weight, thickness, or size Minimum and maximum trims, or fat content percentage (ground meat, 90 percent lean and 10 percent fat, referred to as 90/10) Degree of maturity or stage of ripening Type of processing required (such as individually quick-frozen [IQF]) Type of packaging desired Unit on which price will be based Weight tolerance limit (range of acceptable weights, usually in meat, seafood, and poultry)

this religious concept becomes evident from Josephus' description of John's baptism: "For thus, it seemed to him, would baptismal ablution be acceptable, if it were not to beg off from sins committed, but for the purification of the body, when the soul had previously been cleansed by righteous conduct" (Ant. XVIII, 117).94 By "purification of the body" Josephus means ritual purity, which was a concept of great importance in the Judaism of the Second Commonwealth generally. This purity, according to John the Baptist, is not obtainable without the previous "cleansing of the soul", i.e. repentance. This idea, that moral purity is a necessary condition for ritual purity, is emphatically preached in DSD, which says about the man whose repentance is not complete: "Unclean, unclean he will be all the days that he rejects the ordinances of God . . . But by the spirit of true counsel for the ways of man all his iniquities shall be atoned, so that he shall look at the light of life, and by the spirit of holiness which will unite him in his truth he shall be cleansed from all his iniquities; and by the spirit of uprightness and meekness his sin will be atoned, and by the submission of his soul to all the statutes of God his flesh will be cleansed, that he may be sprinkled with water for impurity and sanctify himself95 with water of cleanness" (DSD III, 5-9).96 This doctrine leads to the rule: "Let him not enter the water to touch the purity of the men of Holiness, for they will not be cleansed unless they have repented from their wickedness" (DSD V, 13-4; cf. ibid. VIII, 17-18). The regular ablutions of the sect, which enabled its members to touch their pure food97, were forbidden to outsiders (and to members of doubtful behaviour) because these ablutions were not considered valid unless preceded by full repentance. That baptism leads to the remisssion of sins was accepted by Christianity generally (Bul. 135-6), but the idea that the atonement is really caused by the repentance which precedes the actual immersion98 94. The first to interpret the NT correctly on the basis of Josephus's words was E. Meyer (Ursprung und Anfange des Christentums I, Berlin 1924, p. 88). His view is confirmed by the Scrolls. 95. See below. 96. W. H. Burrows, "John the Baptist" in The Scrolls (see note 1 above), pp. 39-41.—See also S. E. Johnson, "The Dead Sea Manual", ZAW 66 (1954), 107-8. 97. See C. Rabin, Qumran Studies, Oxford 1957, pp. 7-8. 98. The outward expression of this view in the baptism of John is the 51 gradually weakened in the new milieu.

Name/ First name: Madeline (mads, or maddy) Middle name: Marie Last name: Fractures --------------------------- Birth/ Age: 17 Date of birth: 9/13 Date of death: none Place of birth: West Place of death: none ---------------------------- Romantic and social/ Gender: Girl Sexuality: heterosexual Friends: 3 Boyfriend/ Girlfriend: none Crush: none ---------------------------- Personality/ Likes:hunting, reading, drawing, knife throwing, music, fighting Dislikes: none can think of Disorders: PTSD (explained in history) Personality: Strong, has had a rough life, may seem stuck up at times, is close to her 3 friends as she can be because she is afraid to loose them if they see her violent side. She has this side because of what happened when she and her twin brother were small. ---------------------------- History/ History: was born in west katos, and lost parents and older brothers when she was five, only she and her twin survived. Was on the streets for one year with her brother before he was found while he was looking for food. They were reunited at the age of 7 one year later. He was living at the palace with a noble family, she was allowed to return with him and stay, she soon became close friends with the secondborn boy Jacob (if this is'nt fine let me know). When she was 13 her brother was kidnapped by a group from the east, she soon discovered that they were the same group that killed their family.4 years later she is still looking. Now she works at the palace as a hunter, archivest, and guard, and does some art. Lore: ( Any lore behind your character?) ---------------------------- Appearance/ Description : Dark brown hari, Forest green eyes, and one scar on the left side of her face from her first fight. Picture: Hair: Dark Brown Eyes: kind of almond shaped but also round and are forest green Skin: lightly tan ---------------------------- Family/ Mother : Deceased Father: Deceased Husband/ Wife: None Sons/ Daughters/ Offspring : None ---------------------------- Other/ Living situation: Small cottage in woods with her 3 friends Money: not rich but not poor either Pets: A wolf named Alla (a-la) Job: Hunter, guard, and archivest Other Side: West

Glossary Agni: God of fire Agnipariksha: A trial by fire Angaharas: Movement of limbs or steps in a dance Ankush: Hook-shaped prods used to control elephants Annapurna: The Hindu Goddess of food, nourishment and plenty; also believed to be a form of Goddess Parvati Anshan: Hunger. It also denotes voluntary fasting. In this book, Anshan is the capital of the kingdom of Elam Apsara: Celestial maidens from the court of the Lord of the Heavens – Indra; akin to Zeus/Jupiter Arya: Sir Ashwamedh yagna: Literally, the Horse sacrifice. In ancient times, an ambitious ruler, who wished to expand his territories and display his military prowess, would release a sacrificial horse to roam freely through the length and breadth of any kingdom in India. If any king stopped/captured the horse, the ruler’s army would declare war against the challenger, defeat the king and annexe that territory. If an opposing king did not stop the horse, the kingdom would become a vassal of the former Asura: Demon Ayuralay: Hospital Ayurvedic: Derived from Ayurved, an ancient Indian form of medicine Ayushman bhav: May you have a long life Baba: Father Bhang: Traditional intoxicant in India; milk mixed with marijuana Bhiksha: Alms or donations Bhojan graham: Dining room Brahmacharya: The vow of celibacy Brahmastra: Literally, the weapon of Brahma; spoken of in ancient Hindu scriptures. Many experts claim that the description of a Brahmastra and its effects are eerily similar to that of a nuclear weapon. I have assumed this to be true in the context of my book Branga: The ancient name for modern West Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh. Term coined from the conjoint of the two rivers of this land: Brahmaputra and Ganga Brangaridai: Literally, the heart of Branga. The capital of the kingdom of Branga Chandravanshi: Descendants of the moon Chaturanga: Ancient Indian game that evolved into the modern game of chess Chillum: Clay pipe, usually used to smoke marijuana Choti: Braid Construction of Devagiri royal court platform: The description in the book of the court platform is a possible explanation for the mysterious multiple-column buildings made of baked brick discovered at Indus Valley sites, usually next to the public baths, which many historians suppose could have been granaries Dada: Elder brother

The first thing I said was, “Long lunch.” Which was supposed to be just a descriptive comment, but she took it as more. She said, “Jealous?” “Depends what you ate. I had a cheeseburger.

The first thing I said was, “Long lunch.” Which was supposed to be just a descriptive comment, but she took it as more. She said, “Jealous?” “Depends what you ate. I had a cheeseburger.

A Reality Inside The Reality *** I foresee And often envisage I cannot figure out Such description Such sense Which would exhibit The picture of events Even that I stay evoking it. I draw the scene To observe it. Unfortunately, I fail to interpret that What it means; Therefore, I question you Perhaps you have the answer: As we send you the toys For your children; We consign the oil To run your factories, To brighten your cities, To preserve your standards of life. We emancipate the cheap work To enhance your way of life And other such objects. In return, what you render: Guns, bombs, tanks, dynamite, And such weapons For our children With the conduct of supporting dictators. When you can associate with love: Why do you perform that with the gun I donate you My eyes, to deem pain And tragedies. I offer you My ears, for listening to the cries I devote you My heart To feel the sorrow Of the innocent people I gift you my brain to perceive justice When you enrapture us With the medical devices, medicines, And food articles than dynamite. When you demonstrate to us Love, peace, harmony, Justice, equality, and empathy, Instead of the hatred, enmity, isolation Just effectuate and accept: We also breathe as others.

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