"Theater is just not the place for crisps — or chips, for my American cousins. Unless you wanna suck them until they are soft like baby food..."

"... and then you can chew them down. The crunching, the crackling — it’s just the worst thing in the world."

Said Zoë Roberts, a writer and star of 'Operation Mincemeat," quoted in rule #6 — about keeping quiet — in "The 37 Definitive Rules of Going to the Theater/Everything you need to know about seats, coats, eating, drinking, clapping, peeing, compliments, autographs and not being a jerk to those around you" (WaPo)

Rule #6 is "You’ve heard of quiet luxury? Try quiet essentials." We're told you can bring in "water bottles, and even your own candy," but "try emptying candy or snacks into a cup, where you can pluck them out with minimal ruckus."

But Rule #23 creates a big loophole: "Pick your time to sip or bite." It quotes a sound designer who says: "In a musical there are certainly louder scenes where you can probably get away with a little more." Just decide the show is being noisy enough and apparently it's okay to crunch chips.

I feel sorry for the actors on stage. They can see us, the audience. It's not a movie, people. I feel sorry for actors who not only have to tolerate the unreality of a theater full of humans who do not belong in the scene but also have to see us shoveling in food, sucking on straws, chewing, and tipping water bottles up in the air. But the theater people are afraid to call for traditional decorum. They need to fill the seats, and they know we are needy, entitled louts. 

If someone cooks dinner for you, I hope you radiate appreciation like this.

A little something from TikTok:

"Definitely a boundary violation, but, hey, what do I know?"/"This seems like scope creep. In my area, a therapist can't bill insurance and do this type of practice."

Comments on the NYT article "Unpacking the Past (and the Groceries) With Your Therapist/Mental health professionals are meeting clients in the kitchen to harness the therapeutic powers of cooking."

From the article: "Ms. Borden begins each session by asking her patients what they’re bringing to the table, literally and figuratively. 'They might say, "Oh, well, you told me to get salad,"' she joked. 'No, "How are you feeling right now?"'After getting a sense of the client’s mental mise en place, the work begins. One of Ms. Borden’s signature dishes to cook with clients is a zucchini noodle salad with feta and olives. The olives, with their soft fruit and hard pit, are particularly ripe with therapeutic metaphor, Ms. Borden said. She likes to ask clients: 'What is the pit in your stomach?'"

Ugh! Don't get me started on "pit in your stomach." I covered this topic back in 2021. It's a corruption of "pit of your stomach," which means the bottom of your stomach. The pit is the location of the bad feeling, not a tangible item that's causing discomfort. Also "What is the pit in your stomach?" assumes there is a bad feeling in the stomach. The presence of the olive created an opportunity for clever repartee that took precedence over listening to the client's expression. Does the client rise to the prompt and enumerate ways she's like that damned olive?

Do you want your therapist in your house and cooking with you, using food metaphors to pry into your emotional innards? 

Prompt for Grok: "Tell me about the psychiatrist Brian Wilson kept in his house."

"Cannelloni arrived. Sausage. The sommelier poured orange wine from Virginia. Then more food, more wine. 'I’ve always loved good stuff, because I grew up with so little'..."

"Mr. Shteyngart said. His 2014 memoir, 'Little Failure,' is a chronicle of ill-fitting clothes and disapproving parents who seem convinced that he is not going to meet their traditional immigrant expectations. His father hits him at home. At school, bullies await."

From "Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Real Money From the Craft?/Mr. Shteyngart was once told he might be. With his sixth novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' out now, he’s spent the last few years spending it well" (NYT).

About that new novel: "In an era when the charge of cultural appropriation still carries professional risk (though perhaps not quite as much risk as five years ago), Mr. Shteyngart’s decision to write in the voice of a tween Korean American girl was a bold one. He said he was partly motivated by his own son’s experience. 'He and his little friends, they mention Trump all the time,' he said. 'And when you’re growing up and you have to think about the Great Leader all the time, that’s always going to stick with you.'"

"Then, given that I have no appetite, I don’t find cooking interesting any more. Food has become completely dull..."

"... and I have begun to wonder why I’d liked it in the first place. It’s extraordinary. I used to spend all day thinking about what to buy and what to cook and how much everyone would love it and how much I would love it, and now I can’t even get a flatbread down me. If I were living on my own, that would be fine. I would have virtually nothing in my fridge except a bit of smoked salmon and some vegetables and fruit. But I’m still living with three out of my four children and there has always been this coming together as a family to eat delicious food prepared by me — it has always felt very bonding. So they were rather taken aback when it got to the first Sunday of my weight-loss journey and no roast appeared. 'Oh, are we having a roast today?' my daughter asked, because she loves a Sunday roast...."

Writes Lucy Cavendish, in "Mounjaro transformed me — but it had a huge effect on my family’s life/When Lucy Cavendish started taking a weight-loss drug, she resigned as the family cook. It’s had a profound impact on her relationship with her children" (London Times).

"But that might be a mistake—as it turns out, many of those edible villains have earned their 'bad' wraps unfairly, and, according to recent studies, some of them might even be healthier for us than we initially thought."

Says the first sentence I read in this Vogue article Meade sent me — Meade sends me Vogue articles?! — "9 Foods That Are Healthier Than You Would Think."

That article is from March 2024, and no one has corrected the error yet?

I'm giving Vogue a "bad wrap" — perhaps a tainted burrito or a scruffy mink stole.

By the way, these 9 foods are healthier than I "would think" if I hadn't already read numerous articles touting potatoes, eggs, coffee, butter, cheese, whole milk, nuts, chocolate, and fatty fish. 

Sandhill cranes take a long lunch.

From the driver-side window, Meade takes a 24-second video:

 

After our hike, riding home, 2 hours later, I take a 24-second video from the passenger-side window at exactly the same spot:

One might casually and shallowly dream of needing to eat constantly, just to maintain a healthy weight. Perhaps you'd love to take a pill that would put you in this predicament. But imagine living like this!

"Research on chemicals that have been vetted by the F.D.A. tends to be extremely narrow in focus, looking mostly for cancer, genetic mutations or..."

"... organ damage in animal or laboratory studies. This means the ingredients in our coffee creamer, cereal, ketchup and frozen pizza aren’t tested for more subtle effects on long-term health, or whether they may increase the risk of the other common chronic diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.... Regulators also don’t routinely re-examine chemicals already on the market — checking if new science has emerged suggesting they might be dangerous — something European regulators do.... In short, the rules that are supposed to protect Americans from food hazards don’t reflect the reality of how people eat — or how they get sick — today. There are a couple of reasons for this. The F.D.A. was established in the early 1900s, as America was urbanizing and industrial food processing was taking off. Back then, food made people sick mainly through poisoning. Now our diets make us chronically ill, causing diseases that develop over decades...."

From "Kennedy Is Right About the Chemicals in Our Food" (NYT).

"At a moment when the creation of art at such a scale feels impossible without a corporate sponsor, when most visual stunts are shallow cries for publicity..."

"... the preservation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy feels urgent. And a crucial part of their oeuvre is that the inception of their grand, internationally known works happened humbly, in an unglamorous, gritty industrial building.... At first, only Christo was recognized as the artist behind the pieces, but in the mid ’90s, he started sharing equal credit for outdoor works with Jeanne-Claude. She also acted as his publicist and began hosting dinner parties, inviting influential dealers and gallerists. 'She was notorious for being a terrible cook.... They had no money at all, so she would cook flank steak and canned potatoes. That was it.' ... [T]he dealer Ivan Karp described one of the gatherings as 'a disastrous, bleak evening with some of the worst food served in a private home, ever!' Still, some people returned — two frequent dinner guests were Marcel Duchamp and his wife, Teeny.'"

From "Where Christo and Jeanne-Claude Cast Their Spells/The couple’s lives are preserved in a SoHo building where for decades they plotted their monumental projects" (NYT)(free-access link).

Lots of cool pictures of the Christo real estate, so go check them out at that link, but I want to show you this picture of Teeny, by Henri Matisse (who was her father-in-law during her first marriage):

Duchamp was her second husband. He said: "Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase." Christo went colossal, but Duchamp went small. And he was married to a woman named Teeny.

Is there some idea that you should either go very big or very small? What springs to mind is the related idea of hot or cold: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth." File that under: Things Jesus Said In Someone Else's Dream.

Looking for quotes that credit the very small and shun the medium-sized:

"It's the $19 strawberry from Erewhon!"

I'm reading "I tried the viral $20 strawberry. It tasted like the end of the American empire/A single strawberry flown in from Japan is selling for $20 in a hip LA grocery store. Does it symbolize the worst of American excess, or is it simply delicious?" in The Guardian.

It calls attention to this TikTok of a young woman — whose family owns the luxury grocery store Erewhon — emoting over the consumption of an overpackaged, overpriced single strawberry:

"But it is all the relentless smiling, the desperate upbeatness of this high-spec, lavish production, that jars."

"At least I suspect it will with a more cynical British audience. Americans may feel differently. Meghan must have had face-ache with all that grinning. It is a world where people use superlatives about a cherry tomato and in Californian accents say, 'That’s so funny!' but then don’t actually laugh from their bellies. There is no authentic humour. Meghan says we aren’t 'in pursuit of perfection … we are in the pursuit of joy' — and yet we all know she told Oprah Winfrey that Kate made her cry over a difference of opinion about flower girl dresses. This is a series that entreats you to fill every moment of life 'with wonder'...."

Writes Carol Midgley, in "With Love, Meghan review — smug, syrupy and endlessly spoofable/The new Netflix series from Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, is full of immaculately tasteful domestic tips from Montecito and relentless smiling, but it is a performative kind of joy" (London Times).

We could do a little dollop of yogurt as our clouds.

"Occasionally [Balzac] took a boiled egg at about nine o’clock in the morning or sardines mashed with butter if he was hungry; then a chicken wing or a slice of roast lamb..."

"... in the evening, and he ended his meal with a cup or two of excellent black coffee without sugar."

That was while writing a book. When he was done, “he sped to a restaurant, downed a hundred oysters as a starter, washing them down with four bottles of white wine, then ordered the rest of the meal: twelve salt meadow lamb cutlets with no sauce, a duckling with turnips, a brace of roast partridge, a Normandy sole, not to mention extravagances like dessert and special fruit such as Comice pears, which he ate by the dozen. Once sated, he usually sent the bill to his publishers.”

From "A Hungry Little Boy/Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar)" (NYRB).

I hope you met your 3-drink minimum at breakfast this morning.

How to assemble and consume breakfast:

Why doesn't this article even mention RFK Jr.? This is precisely his issue.

I'm reading "We Tire Very Quickly of Being Told That Everything Is on Fire," by Jeneen Interlandi in the NYT:

The obesity crisis has... brought its share of unintended consequences. Alarm bells have almost certainly nudged more people to eat healthier foods. They also helped spur the development of effective anti-obesity medications. But they have not touched off any meaningful effort to repair our food system, which most experts agree is the root cause of expanding waistlines. 

"Obesity did not reach epidemic proportions because of changes in human nature or human willpower," says Tom Frieden, who served as C.D.C. director under the Obama administration and is now president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. "What changed is that our environment became far more conducive to weight gain." 

What crisis vibes have managed to accomplish is to normalize fat-shaming, especially among doctors. Shame is a deeply ineffective way to resolve any health crisis, but it has proved especially counterproductive and cruel when it comes to weight loss.....

Why doesn't this article even mention RFK Jr.? This is precisely his issue. He blames the food industry, and Trump's elevation of him to Secretary of Health and Human Services surely  represents a "meaningful effort to repair our food system." But why look at him when we have an Obama era former C.D.C. director to quote? And, more importantly, why give him any credit for getting something right when we are deeply into the agenda of portraying him as a dangerous crackpot.

Yes, I'm journalism-shaming, and I think it needs to be cruel to be productive.

"Omnivore, Intermittent Faster, Reformed Twinkie Lover: the R.F.K. Jr. Diet/Mr. Kennedy... could wield considerable influence over the nation’s food supply. Here’s what we know about his own habits."

The NYT asks "What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eat?" Go down one post to see him feasting on McDonald's things alongside Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But let's check out this article:

In his [2023] interview with [Lex] Fridman, Mr. Kennedy said he ate his first meal around noon and tried not to eat after 6 or 7 p.m.... It is nearly impossible to avoid processed food, a category that is most broadly defined as any food altered from its original state, including chopped vegetables.

Including chewing! 

Some of his podcast interviews suggest that he is using “processed” as shorthand for “ultra-processed,” a term that more narrowly refers to industrially made foods containing hard-to-pronounce additives and ingredients....

Oh, well, then... never mind. 

"RFK Jr. Fact-Check Dispute: Social Media vs. New York Times."

That's a big trend on X. Top post on the topic:

This “fact check” from the NYT is wild. Why have fruits and veggies when you can have lab-made chemicals? 💁‍♂️#MakeAmericaHealthyAgain pic.twitter.com/L7ZyD0cuU4

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) November 17, 2024

Oh! That is really quite insane.

Or is there some complexity in the phrase "But he was wrong" that I am missing?

Here's the original NYT article, "Kennedy’s Vow to Take On Big Food Could Alienate His New G.O.P. Allies/Processed foods are in the cross hairs of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but battling major companies could collide with President-elect Donald J. Trump’s corporate-friendly goals" (and that's a free-access link, so you can scour it for a justification for that insane paragraph). No comments enabled over there. I wonder why. (I love social media!)

"During the pandemic, we recovered the spaces and customs that tourism had forced us to abandon. You could have a coffee at a table..."

"... in front of the cathedral, or chat calmly with your neighbors on the street. There were even beautiful scenes like children bathing in the fountain in the Plaça Reial."

Said Daniel Pardo, 48, co-founder of the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Tourism Degrowth, quoted in "'The Demand Is Unstoppable': Can Barcelona Survive Mass Tourism? This summer, thousands of local protesters in the Spanish city denounced overtourism. With more crowds expected for the America’s Cup, we visited the areas where tensions are highest" (NYT).

"For more than 20 years, South Korea has prohibited food or food scraps from going into trash bins."

"Instead, food waste is used to create compost, animal feed or biogas. France has a mandatory composting law, which means municipalities must provide residents ways to divert organic waste from landfills. In 2016, France became the first country to require supermarkets to donate still-safe food. California is furthest along. Since 2022, the state has required grocery stores to donate, not throw away, 'the maximum amount of edible food that would otherwise be disposed,' or face fines. This year large restaurants, hotels and hospital cafeterias also came under the law. The legislation also requires every city and county to reduce the volume of organic waste that goes into landfills by 75 percent by 2025, compared with 2014 levels. That means building more composting facilities or putting in machines that create biogas from organic waste...."

From "White House Announces Strategy to Keep Edible Food Out of Landfills/The government will look at ways to extend the shelf life of foods and to create more composting and other facilities, as well as urge companies to donate more food" (NYT).

"For Isabel Marie Barbosa, a transgender and trans-disciplinary artist, queer food tastes like tart lime and fatty cream."

"In their session, they brought two pillowy Key lime pies made from a recipe in the 'Get Fat, Don’t Die!' column of Diseased Pariah News, Beowulf Thorne’s darkly comic, H.I.V./AIDS-themed zine.... Mx. Barbosa... also brought along a 'sleazy wine cake,' made with Marsala and coconut, and a pecan buttercrunch — recipes from the zine that they tested and ate with a friend who was recovering from top surgery...."

From "What Is ‘Queer Food’? A Conference Explores (and Tastes) Some Answers/At Boston University, scholars, students and writers gathered to share thoughts on the role of gender and sexuality in the food space. Snacks were plentiful" (NYT).

We're told that the conference "considered food (pie, seaweed), food culture (potlucks, cookbooks) and food spaces (a co-op, clambakes) through queer, Marxist, feminist and anti-colonialist perspectives." And: "The goal of the event was to reclaim histories and imagine futures, not of a cuisine — queer food has no set taste profiles or geographic origins — but of food that 'challenges binaries and any kind of normativity....'"

It's like an episode of "Portlandia." 

"Last August, a woman in Chicago opened her Too Good to Go bag and found seven pounds of smashed cake..."

"... (which she and her friend, the friend confessed, gobbled down). Someone who goes by Cassie Danger on Reddit reported receiving a 'corn sandwich' from a Choc O Pain in the Hoboken/Jersey City area, that is, a roll containing a handful of canned corn niblets topped with a couple of lettuce leaves."

Writes Patricia Marx in "Spoiler Alert: Leftovers for Dinner/How to host a dinner party for nine using a pre-trash haul from Too Good to Go and other food-waste apps. Carb-averse guests, beware" (The New Yorker).

Marx's 9 guests arrived and dumped out the "surprise bags" they'd ordered from the app Too Good to Go (which packages food left over from 6,987 NYC stores and restaurants):