by Elatia Harris

All photos courtesy of Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan is the prize-winning author of The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage, and a co-editor of the Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. In this interview, Rachel and I talk about her new book, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, and her transition from historian and philosopher of science to historian of food.

Elatia Harris: I can remember when there was no such academic discipline as food history, Rachel. What was involved in getting there from being a historian of science and technology?

Rachel Laudan: I can remember when there was no such discipline as history of science! In fact, moving to history of food was a breeze. After all, the making of food from plant and animal raw materials is one of our oldest technologies, quite likely the oldest, and it continues to be one of the most important. The astonishing transformations that occur when, for example, a grain becomes bread or beer, or (later) perishable sugar cane juice becomes seemingly-eternal sugar have always intrigued thinkers from the earliest philosophers to the alchemists to modern chemists. And the making of cuisines is shaped by philosophical ideas about the state, about virtue, and about growth, life, and death.

A lot of food writing is about how we feel about food, particularly about the good feelings that food induces. I'm more interested in how we think about food. In fact, I put culinary philosophy at the center of my book. Our culinary philosophy is the bridge between food and culture, between what we eat and how we relate to the natural world, including our bodies, to the social world, and to the gods, or to morality.

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Making a Home
.

What I think over and over
eventually I do

I’ve been training body all along
to dance the cantos of my thoughts,
how can it not do what it learns?

Innocence seeps away
through the interstices of neglect—

if I have not built a room
to house a pure idea
it will move on to a better man
and leave my vacant skull to host
what loathes a vacuum
.

by Jim Culleny
9/2713

by Maniza Naqvi

Here, down in the valley, when the news broke, people were, as was to be expected, up in arms. A contract had been awarded to XNexst. It was for a system for monitoring citizens and to create a unified registry system for the identification and targeting of deviants: threats to society—those who do not belong to civil groups –those who refuse to belong to communities–those-who refuse to get jobs like the rest of us—those who refuse to play by the norms that were so clearly laid out for our collective good—you know— groups representing low proclivity to consume. These deviants, of course, are also those who do not belong to the clearly defined civil groups and minorities defined around allergies and who do not perform well on our happiness indexes—The system was meant to identify these deviants and dispose of them. Everyone must belong to a minority. And everyone must demonstrate that they are happy. Otherwise, the system cannot assign a value to them.

We were outraged. The proposal was to monitor all internet activity, perform a deviant survey based on deviant activities score card and then based on the score— link each of the eyes on screen or EoS and the deviant score to a national identification card for easy targeting and for initiating logging out and cancelation. Disposal was to be done through mobile disposal units—much like the garbage trucks that prowl through cities every night. In this case—after the deviating EoSs log out—yes—die as a result of a deep sensation of depression which would cause either a stroke or a hemorrhage—or both, after this, disposal teams would move in—unlock the codes on the computerized lock systems on buildings apartment doors, and houses—since now every single home conforms to code and this building standard —the disposal teams would pick up the bodies and throw them into the garbage truck to be taken to a disposal site for instant incineration.

Our people were horrified when this news broke. No attention to detail at all! In comparison, our entire proposal was so much better! Much more effective and cost efficient. Of course it was. We were the ones who had designed and implemented the happiness index monitoring system. Hello! An efficient measure of success as linked to each bank account: Happiness. So of course just as elegantly and relevantly, for this, for our proposal for XNexst we had proposed a much more sure fire way of logging out—without any risk of failure—It had a two-step approach if step one which resembled XNexst's approach failed, step two would kick in—in this phase an added doze of subliminal messaging would persuade the EoS to click on the fire arm and body bag facsimile option and then walk out of their dwellings to a point of pick up, PoP. Then on the sighting of the approaching disposal truck the EoS would get into the body bag and shoot himself.

Plus our proposal used garbage trucks which had built in functions for separating bones, blood and flesh. We had pilot tested the process in several locations when the opportunity had presented itself. And another one was coming up. Soft drinks are not the only product testing that follow our troops! In our proposal our system not only took the waste product and immediately disposed of it by incineration, creating fuel for heating while the rest of the waste product was turned to compost for organic farms. In addition to contributing to a green economy we had also noted in our proposal that our firm was one hundred percent minority owned and minority run. Our happiness index was well off the charts: in the top one percent of the top quintile. It was an air tight case. So for this to have gone to someone else—was a travesty. We are planning a strong protest. Such injustice has to be resisted.

by Sarah Firisen

My topic today, online dating
Is this really the best way for mating?
Is it worth all the pain?
The interest I feign
In the men who on my nerves are grating?

Was the bar scene so great in its day?
Does venue change the games that we play?
Is this way really worse?
Are the men more perverse?
Am I seen more as their sexual prey?

From boys barely out of high school
Who think that a cougar is cool
And try to pretend
That sex alone’s not the end
All these years doesn’t make me a fool

Then there’s each man who’s age is just right
But who want abs and butt that are tight
Or think they have one last bid
To get them a kid
Interest from that demographic is slight

And so often when a man sounds just great
I know that I just have to wait
Then the truth comes along
He’s really so wrong
And enthusiasm starts to deflate

I sigh as it starts to emerge
That he’s really relieving an urge
I try to heap scorn
I’m not here as his porn
Clearly our interests diverge

Each day I think, “Should this be the end?
And the best use of time I expend?”
But what else to do
If this I eschew?
And my profile I decide to suspend?

The problem isn’t really the way
That I find all these men who dismay
I’d forgotten the scene
Was bound to demean
Is there no better game I can play?

by James McGirk

I live surrounded by retirees in rural Oklahoma. They are spry. They own arsenals of gardening equipment: lawnmower-tractor hybrids that grind through the fibrous local flora with cruel efficiency; they wield wicked contraptions, whirling motorized blades that allow withered men to sculpt hedges into forms of sublime and delectable complexity. Their lawns are soft to touch and inviting and deep emerald green. They host garden parties. They know the mysteries of mulch and sod, their vegetables bulge with vitality and nutritious color, their compost heaps are not heaps at all, they are tarry and primordial, oozing and glowing with health. Their flowers glow. Their insects are harmless flutterers, not the stinging biting buzzing slithering demonic horde that inhabits my yard.

In the spring I chose a manual mower to help maintain my garden. I am no environmentalist nut, but as an ostensible elite urbanite, I wrinkled my nose at the fumes belched by my neighbors’ devices. This was a grave error. My man-powered motor leaves bald patches when I hoist the thing through a rough patch uphill and it accidentally sheers too close, and leaves miniature Mohawks when the sturdier weeds simply dip beneath my blades and spring up behind me unscathed. But I cannot blame the device. This is an operator error. I chose the thing, and I vowed to live with the consequences.

For months I huffed and puffed, hauling the bright orange plastic and metal contraption through the thickets in my yard. I felt close to the land. Its contours became familiar to me: the mysterious dead patch, which I fantasized came from natural gas seeping up from the Cherokee Shelf, five fathoms below; or the pits dug by the previous tenants where I once found a black snake tangled in my spinning blades (coward that I am, I let him crawl away instead of dispatching a merciful death: and lo the next afternoon my elderly neighbor came over to apologize for the shriek I might have heard because the poor thing had taken shelter in her kitchen before her husband—an octogenarian—beheaded it with a rake) and the plunging predator birds and the mysterious mushrooms and the owl feathers and squawking fledglings and tiny tragedies: the robin’s nest spilled on the ground after a titanic storm, her pale blue eggs still intact, the nest like a spun basket, and the mother’s frayed carcass a few feet away. I watched it slowly decay.

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at one ment
—Yom Kippur, 2013

To find the means to a mend
To try a new take to forsake a mistake
To unfold the past and straighten its bend
To un-muddy a pool and make it clear
To lift the flat rock of our self and let the sun do its work
To yank the inside out and give it some air
To build a whole man of the parts of a jerk
To morph a long fall into a hairpin turn
To lance a boil and do what's best for us
To kindle the badly done and watch it burn
To unbury the past and make its corpse a Lazarus
To sew a split in one cloth now two
To impossibly do what the humble do
To end a grudge to make us whole again:
…..atonement then

by Jim Culleny
9/13/13

by Gerald Dworkin

In this country 58% of male infants are operated upon shortly after birth. A part of the body is cut off and the operation usually does not use an anaesthetic. There are three relevant features which prompt ethical reflection. The infants cannot consent to the operation. There is no convincing evidence that the operation promotes the health of the infant. The operation is usually motivated by cultural reasons–usually of a religious nature. The operation, of course, is circumcision.

Very recently the operation has come in for legal scrutiny by courts and legislatures in Germany. In 2010 a young Tunisian immigrant brought her four year old son to Cologne University Hospital. He was suffering from a postoperative hemorrhage after a circumcision had been performed by a surgeon two days before. Surgeons stopped the bleeding. The mother who appeared to be in shock mentioned a circumcision but was confusing about who performed it, and whether it was her decision or her husband's. The staff called the police who took testimony from the ER personnel. This lead to a trial charging the surgeon with criminal bodily harm.

The District Court judge acquitted on the grounds that there was no evidence of malpractice and circumcision was protected by parental consent and the parents religious freedom. A Court of Appeals overruled the District Court arguing that parental rights are limited by the best interests of the child, and rights of the child to bodily integrity. Nevertheless the court accepted the acquittal of the surgeon on the grounds that he had good reason to believe that what he was doing was legal.

The decision stirred up an enormous controversy in the media and the public. Clearly, the decision to make illegal a Jewish religious obligation by a German court was considered outrageous. Chancellor Merkel petitioned the Bundestag to take immediate action, and in an emergency session voted to draft legislation that would ensure the legality of circumcision.

( For more–much more– on the history and the nitty-gritty legal details see H. Pekarek, “Germany's Circumcision Indecision– Anti-Semitism or Legalism?“)

I

I am interested in the legal issues only as a special case of what the limits of the criminal law ought to be. The issue I want to discuss is does the state have the right to limit circumcision, and, if so, ought it to do so? Note that these are distinct issues. Not everything that one might think is within the legitimate scope of state interference ought to be legislated. One might think that many lies are both wrong and harmful, and so something that a state has the right to consider making illegal, without thinking that it would be a good idea to make all lying a criminal offense. This might be because one thought that it would be impractical to do so, or that it would be destructive of many relationships to do so, or that it would over-burden the court system, or that the effects on personal relationships would be worse than leaving people free to lie. But all of these reasons for not legislating are consistent with believing that the state would not be over-stepping its legitimate powers were it to make lying a crime.

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by Liam Heneghan

More than any at other conferences I have attended, participants in the annual Mars Society meeting, which was held this year in Boulder, Colorado (August 2013) — their 16th such meeting, my first — like to nod their agreement. In contrast, attendees at the meetings I more regularly visit concerning the ecological fate of the planet signal their comprehension with aghast motionlessness. When Robert Zubrin, director of the (currently Earth-bound) Mars Society, announced in Boulder this summer, that Mars is our future, the audience nodded. Rather, I should say, we nodded.

Not only is a manned mission to Mars technically feasible with existing, or almost-existing, technology but Zubrin insists that it is desirable for us to go to Mars sooner rather than later. Zubrin was reasserting an argument that he has been making for some time. In The Case for Mars — The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must (1996) he set out his blueprint for Mars Direct, a plan for manned missions to Mars that would pave the way for colonization and would be both cost-effective and possible with current technology.

Why should we go to Mars? There are economic arguments in favor of us doing so, Zubrin claims. Certain elements, such as deuterium used in nuclear reactors, are hyper-available elements on Mars could be profitably used on Earth. Additionally, rare metals: platinum, gold and silver, can be recovered from Mars and returned to Earth. The economic arguments are important to the case for Mars, but central to Zubrin’s argument, is what exploration of Mars says about us as a species. We should go because we can; it’s who we are. According to Zubrin “virtually every element of significant interest to industry is known to exist on the Red Planet”. Of all the planets in our solar system Mars has by far the greatest potential for self-sufficiency. The resources on Mars will cater for both initial colonists and for the subsequent expansion of a civilization on the Red Planet. For example, subsurface accumulation of water can provide supplies to explorers. Moreover, the colonization of Mars “reaffirms the pioneering character of our society.” Drawing parallels to Roald Amundsen’s successfully traversing the wilderness of Canada's Northwest Passage in 1903, an expedition which adopted a “live off the land” strategy, Zubrin appeals to a pioneering grit and esprit in forging his plans for Mars. Summarizing his reasons for colonizing Mars, Zubrin wrote, “For our generation and many to follow Mars is the New World”. Considering that as of the 9th September 2013 more than 200,000 have applied for a one-way settlement mission to Mars over at the Mars One website, it would seem that Zubrin’s assessment is confirmed.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Premise #1: Not since the Beijing Olympics has a media -generated spectacle so thoroughly taken hold of and twisted the liberal imagination as what we are seeing now concerning Syria.

++

I almost hate to bring it up but does anyone recall the media spectacle when China hosted the olympic games in 2008? At that time, I had not consumed American media in about 15 years, so imagine my shock when I came home to California in the summer of 2008 and turned on the TV during the opening ceremony…

I could not believe my ears.

For me, perhaps the most memorable “story” being trotted around by “intellectuals” was the supposed similarity between the Beijing opening ceremony and that seen in the 1936 Games staged by Nazi Germany. This was repeatedly stated– but never argued– in much the same way as Bush's “Axis of Evil” comparison. And, one wondered whether liberals have dared to “go there” without backing up their claims if they had been talking about France or Austria, for example? Or Russia? It was pretty diminishing –if not patronizing to the Chinese.

Zhang Yimou and Leni Riefenstahl? Really?

I thought the worst days were behind us after that. A few days ago, however, a friend posted on Facebook the following open letter about Syria and the “left-wing” response:

The schizophrenic delusions of the Western anti-war movement: A response to Lindsey German

In the letter, the author describes the discussion on the left in the following way:

It is, rather, an ideologically driven habit of twisting facts so that they conveniently fit into a pre-constructed narrative about 'those people' and how they do things. It is, in other words, Orientalism.

That American journalists pander in narratives-as-consumer-products is somehow understandable given the economic realities, but I have been really taken aback by the equally troublesome response we are seeing by the left-wing elite. As Shiar suggests, to frame non-intervention as some kind of morally-elevated action (ie as “anti-war”) is problematic–for not only does it cease to make any mention of what Syrians want or think but the suffering that we see happening has been absolutely staggering.

There are some very compelling practical arguments for non-action, don't get me wrong. But this feels lost in what is a tidal wave of liberal insouciance —or twitter-talk; whether basing opinions on erroneous comparions to Iraq (really?) or in anti-war slogans and (to quote Shiar again) “obsessing about big politics from a statist perspective: regime change, foreign intervention, regional war, Israel, Iran, blah blah blah.”

Obama, without any support on the left or the right, has displayed a surprising show of honest resolve.

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by Jalees Rehman

The United States Census Bureau recently released the results from its 2012 survey of income, poverty and health insurance in the United States. One of the most disheartening results is the high prevalence of poverty in the United States.

The term “poverty” is of course a relative term. The poverty thresholds in the United States depend on the size of a household and are adjusted each year. Currently, poverty for a single person household is defined as an average monthly income of $995 or less– taking into account all forms of earnings including unemployment compensation, workers' compensation, Social Security, veterans' payments, survivor benefits, pension or retirement income, interest, dividends, alimony, child support as well as other sources. A four-person family consisting of two adults and two children is considered to live in poverty if they have to live on an average monthly income of $1,940 or less. This is still a far cry from the global definition of poverty used by the World Bank, which describes fellow humans who have to survive on an income of less than $1.25 per day (or $38 per month). But the US, a country which considers itself as being among the wealthiest in the world, has to face the fact that 15 percent of its population – 46.5 million people – live in a state of poverty!

We worry about the faltering economies of Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal, but the US Census reminds us that the number of poverty-stricken people in the US is roughly equal to that of the total population of Spain, and more than twice the size of the combined populations of Greece, Portugal and Cyprus.

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by Omar Ali

I was very clear when this crisis started that the US should not launch an overt military strike on Syria. Not for reasons of naïve pacifism (or for more vacuous notions, like the editor of “The Nation” wanting to have her cake and eat it too by demanding that Obama “use the United Nations and tough diplomacy”, LOL), but because I believe the US now lacks the institutional and cultural capacity to successfully carry out such an intervention. That slight qualification (“now”) may not be necessary, but all I mean by it is that irrespective of whether the US once had the ability to quote democracy and human rights while promoting hardcore imperialist interests, it does not have that ability anymore; and it never had and still does not have either the legal authority or the institutional mechanisms or the cultural consensus to act effectively as worldcop. These are, of course, the two most commonly cited reasons for “doing something” in this case. Either we are supposed to be doing it because there are serious imperial/national interests at stake and we have some (right or wrong) notion about how those interests are promoted by this action, or we are doing it because we are the world’s policeman and the police cannot possibly allow a criminal regime to carry out new and unprecedented atrocities using chemical weapons.

I did write a quick piece last week saying that the US lacks the ability to do either with success and that this is especially true in the Middle East (due to the complexity of the region, the importance of oil, and the role the US has played as Israel’s benefactor and supporter). After all the US failed in Iraq by its own standards; and it has done poorly in Afghanistan in spite of holding so many cards there (I firmly believe that it was very much possible for the US to impose a non-Jihadi regime in Afghanistan and to stabilize it, clever sound bites from William Dalrymple type analysts notwithstanding). In short, I argued that leaving aside all arguments about legality and morality (and there are strong legal and moral arguments that can be made against military action), US intervention is not a good idea because it is unlikely to work well (either as imperial action or as worldcop). Not because Obama and Susan Rice are amateurs (though there may be some truth to that), but because the official institutions of the US are systemically incapable of doing such things well, and because the majority of the US public is not ready to take on either role (again, irrespective of whether it was or was not willing in the past).

The official institutions of the United States (the state department, the Pentagon, the inteliigence agencies) are not staffed by mysterious aliens. They are staffed by Americans, educated in American universities, with the strengths and weaknesses of American culture. They (on the whole) neither understand the Middle East too well, nor act according to some uniform and well thought out secret plan. For example, it was not just Bush or Obama who were foiled in Afghanistan; it was thousands of officers and advisers who (frequently with the best of intentions) spent half a trillion and could not achieve what Russia or Pakistan could (and did) achieve in the face of more powerful enemies with just a few billion. Are there good reasons then to think that the same officials will do any better in Syria? And of course when it comes to public opinion, it is obvious that most Americans (not just fringe leftists or rightists) are tired of foreign wars and are unwilling to take on the job of worldcop even if it is legally and morally justified.

But since then, as public opinion and events seem to have swung further against intervention, I have had some second thoughts. Not yet enough to change my mind, but enough to become a little conflicted.

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“Many (ancient) life forms are so hard to categorize that (scientists) call these organisms the ‘Problematica.’” —from: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newitz

Other Problematica
.
Here we are, never still, casting lines
upstream like fly fishers toward sources
teeming with what came first
hooking what we can, reeling it in
holding it before our mind's eye smiling,
snapshotting bizarre Cambrian trophies
placing ourselves at the daisy chain’s end
hoping not to be rolled over or under
by our own cleverness, extinct as past
Problematica looking odd and grotesque
to future fishers —as uncategorizable
as the dead husks of Amebelodon
whose strange tusks are the only ruts
they’ve left in rutted time
.

by Jim Culleny
9/4/13

MY MOTHER’S SCRIBE

Half-moon above the table
Her face by candlelight

Her upper lip twitches
My right leg flutters

In All Things Be Men
The school motto on my cap

Parker fountain pen
Gold-plated nib

Waterman's ink
Eggshell paper

My blue-black fingers
Pilot her fervent verses

To Prime Ministers of the World
A moth at a candle's edge

Flame flickering
Only calligraphy at her robe's hem

by Rafiq Kathwari