Discover more from Eating an Island
Outside my window: A very Newfoundland fall morning, when the wind comes at you from every corner to whip rain and leave you wondering about your life choices. It makes for great reading weather, however; here’s some recommended writing on food and other things. -JRS
Articles
Currently on our menu:
Navneet Alang, The Movable Feast.
On food media, recipes and “archival repair”. Alang’s writing on food culture makes me feel that my eclectic choices of work, study and hobby – e.g. literature, art, cooking, a healthy YouTube addiction – make sense.
James Hansen, London Chef Elizabeth Haigh’s Cookbook Withdrawn After Plagiarism Allegations
Put the kettle on. An astonishing account of plagiarism in the cookbook of a successful London chef.
Bettina Makalintal, Suburbia’s Bittersweet Allure
Makalintal’s piece on writer Rax King makes for an exemplary study in profile-writing.
Virginia Sole-Smith, The Dieter’s Diet
The success of Noom has hinged on its marketing and reputation as a “non-diet”; Sole-Smith explores the falsity of this premise.
Jenny G. Zhang, Identity Fraud
Zhang deftly threads numerous needles here on identity and social capital. It makes an interesting companion piece to a favourite food-related essay of mine, Zoey Yijing Yang’s To the Briar Patch: on the Limits of Food as Protest.
Books
Remember books? Currently reading or recently read:
Amy Berkowitz, Tender Points
I’ll credit several books with reshaping how I see the potential of fiction and non-fiction, memoir and poetry – and how I’d like to write my own. These include: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje; The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson; and now, Tender Points. A fragmented memoir meets a meditation on chronic illness and art.
Svetlana Alexeivich, The Unwomanly Face of War
An incredible act of reportage, documentation and writing, as well as a welcome counter to the propagandistic portrayals of wartime in popular culture. I began reading this on the back of rereading Chris Hedge’s War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning; the two of these together will change how you see and understand conflict.
Megan Gail Coles, Satched
Having read Coles’ first novel Small Game Hunting several times, I first felt some disappointment on seeing that her next book was a collection of poetry. Now that I’ve spent a few weeks knee-deep in these poems, I like this one even more. When these poems hit you, they hit you, hard—I’ll add that, as a writer and artist who came back to make a go of it in This Marvellous, Terrible Place, Coles says many Things that Need to be Said.