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.

“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.