According to the leading economist and serious food lover Ha-Joon Chang, many young Korean boys like him grew up warned by their ever-loving mothers that their willies would fall off should they enter the kitchen, traditionally the exclusive domain of women. It’s not the sort of factoid one usually finds in a work on economic […]
There is plenty of scope for dissonance in a cookbook: between your memories and my expectations; between your devising dishes in a lavishly equipped professional kitchen, then serving them to paying customers, and my making them for loved ones at home. The short (or not so short) passages of travelogue and cultural history, the snippets […]
This is the third book on food matters by Tim Spector. A medic turned professor of epidemiology, he produced a celebrated long-term study of twins. Then his attention was drawn to food, particularly the task of unravelling the relationship between genes, nutrients and their interactions in the gut. He is especially interested in how the […]
What a delectable banquet of a book this is. Diane Purkiss examines how food has created and underpinned the history of the English nation by detailing the slow work of transforming raw ingredients into sustenance. Purkiss divides her book into chapters devoted to broad categories (such as apples, pigs, loaves, fishes, foraging and tinned foods), interspersing these with entertaining and discursive essays on breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. If occasionally the
Jonathan Meades is the Jonathan Meades of our generation. Okay, it was A A Gill who said that, not me. But I’m going to steal it anyway because it’s a perfect summary of the man, and this is a review of an ‘anti-cookbook’ that positively boasts that it’s full of plagiarism. There is no such […]
The first question one asks on seeing this book is ‘why?’ The answer comes in the introduction: it is that there is now ‘another world of cheese’ beyond the boring old British and European ones we know and love. Those ‘age-old cheese traditions are now being embraced by US artisan cheese producers and, as a […]
‘Gastrophysics’, a portmanteau of ‘gastronomy’ and ‘psychophysics’ (the study of perception), is defined by Charles Spence as ‘the scientific study of those factors that influence our multisensory experience whilst tasting food and drink’. In layman’s terms, it is an examination of the external factors that shape our responses to food and drink, which, as none […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm