“Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of the young animals. It’s about danger – risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first 207 Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your 208th may send you to bed with sweats, chills, and vomits.” – Anthony Bourdain, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” The New Yorker, 1999

I haven’t had time to cook in the last week. I’m too busy reading, mostly about food, to finish my Gallatin degree. [Don't ever go to Gallatin, unless you're 35, the smartest person you think you've ever met, and you want to write a dissertation without anyone bothering you with their crap program. If you believe you're a candidate, come talk to me and I'll set you straight.]

My final class at NYU was called Food in Performance Art. I believe its original intent was to augment the very dry curriculum of the nutrition studies majors, and not for the whatever-strikes-your-fancy students of my college. [If you're unfamiliar, NYU has maaaany colleges. At one point the university owned the most real estate in NYC second to the Catholic Church.] In class we read, watched, and viewed works of art that “interpreted the role of food” or “used food to make a political statement.” As you (or at least I) would expect, many of the performance artists were feminists commenting on the role of housewives, hunger as lust, food as expression body as canvas, and characters like Kim Basinger’s Elizabeth in Nine 1/2 Weeks.

“Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn’t robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak (I didn’t want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience…. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses… that the task of the critic must be assessed. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more…. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” – Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 1964.

“Without the ability to smell, taste is a mere whisper. After the accident, my taste buds registered salty, sweet, bitter and sour. But there was nothing more. While my fractured pelvis and torn knee ligaments eventually healed, milk remained a viscous liquid, steak a slimy rubber, and ice cream was little more than freezing.” – Molly Birnbaum, “Finally, the Scent of the City” for The New York Times

“You don’t want people ever to taste something and say ‘Oh, nutmeg.’ ” – Julia Child, “The Spinach Twins,” The French Chef

It was total chaos, and Giorgio [DeLuca] was slicing some preservative-free bacon, and he lopped off the tip of his thumb. He started cursing and rushed off to the clinic on Spring Street. Once he was gone, I decided to merchandise the piece of thumb, which still had fingernail on it. I put it on a little piece of marble in the display case with some rosemary and thyme and put up a sign that said ‘Gaetano Crudo’ ” – crudo meaning “raw” in Italian, Gaetano being DeLuca’s middle name. Fortunately no one asked to taste the product, though Jenkins says a few people inquired as to “what the hell it was.”

- Steve Jenkins, Cheesemonger for Dean and DeLuca, remarking on a busy day at the shop back in 1997 from David Kamp’s United States of Arugula

“Remember, you’re alone in the kitchen.” – Julia Child, frequently on The French Chef

“I wonder about my selfishness… I want them to want me most…. before I begin to cook, I have to touch the food. I’ll hold the leg of lamb. Touch the tomatoes. It’s the same as Jerry, Tom, or David – I want to… touch home base with them.”

- Alice Waters, on controlling food and her exes from The United States of Arugula

When you think about penny pinching what gets cut first? Coke and strippers, shoes for every occasion, electronics, and of course eating out. Restaurants across the country are beginning to see the fallout from the market, increasing food prices, and substantial loss in customer turnout. In New York it’s unclear how much of an impact there will be. Over at Chow, the kids are talking. I had to ask too, have you cut your restaurant/bar budget or changed your diet? Are you seeing increases in entree prices or pre fixes? Or more happy hours and value meals?