Category Archives: Food & Drink

Food & Drink

What Hemingway Means in the 21st Century ‹ Literary Hub

David Barnes on the Masculinity and Baggage of Ernest Hemingway at 100 Years

By David Barnes, April 17, 2023

From article…

In the playwright Simon Gray’s literary diary The Last Cigarette, there’s a moment where he struggles to recall the name of a particular figure. Gray keeps returning to the image of a strutting, bare-chested, big-bellied man on a boat, holding up a huge dead fish.

He has “a grey beard, a square bullish face, something stupid about it, and aggressive.” Who is it, Gray asks himself, who is this obnoxious, swaggering figure?

“Hemingway!,” he finally remembers.

For many writers, talking about Ernest Hemingway is like talking about an embarrassing ancestor. Hemingway comes burdened with baggage, lots of it; pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms, an obsession with a pure and “clean” prose, a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism. And then there are all the dead animals. There they are, heaping up behind the great man’s hulking physique: Key West marlin, and bulls, and elephants, and antelope, and lions.

Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item...

Source:What Hemingway Means in the 21st Century ‹ Literary Hub

Finally, Peek Into the Arctic Seed Vault That Could Save Humanity – Mother Jones

The repository, designed to last forever, offers virtual tours for the first time.

By Patrick Greenfield, March 5, 2023

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“It is a bit like being in a cathedral. It has high ceilings and when you’re standing inside the mountain, there’s hardly any sound.”NordGen

Jutting out of the permafrost on a mountainside on Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, the entrance to the world’s “doomsday” seed vault is worthy of any James Bond movie.

Surrounded by snow, ice and the occasional polar bear, the facility houses 1.2 million seed samples from every corner of the planet as an insurance policy against catastrophe.

It is a monument to 12,000 years of human agriculture that aims to prevent the permanent loss of crop species after war, natural disaster or pandemic.

Source: Finally, Peek Into the Arctic Seed Vault That Could Save Humanity – Mother Jones

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

DrWeb’s Note: In honor of International Women’s Day, 2023…

From article…

Though travel and adventure have historically been publicly claimed by men, women have always been part of those narratives, too.

Each week, host and Condé Nast Traveler editor Lale Arikoglu shines a light on some of those stories, interviewing female-identifying guests about their unique travel tales—from going off-grid in the Danish wilderness to country-hopping solo—sharing her own experiences traveling around the globe, and tapping listeners to contribute their own memorable stories.

This is a podcast for anyone who is curious about the world—and excited to explore places both near and far from home. For more from Women Who Travel, visit our website or subscribe to our email newsletter. Share your thoughts on Condé Nast Traveler’s Women Who Travel podcast.

Source: Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Look Inside Vic’s, the New Jazz Lounge and Italian Bistro in Las Vegas – Eater Vegas

Seventy years after Vegas Vic first appeared downtown, the neon cowboy gets a lounge of his own

by Janna Karel, Feb 24, 2023, 3:55pm PST

Vic’s
Louiie Victa

Seventy years after the neon cowboy, Vegas Vic, first started waving his neon thumb over visitors’ heads in downtown Las Vegas, the family that still owns his trademark has opened a jazz lounge in his name.

In opening Vic’s, the father-son duo of Paul and Chris Lowden are adding one more offering to downtown’s cultural epicenter, in the form of a vibey lounge for watching live performances over Italian food.

Located inside Symphony Park and next to the Smith Center of Performing Arts and the Discovery Children’s Museum, Vic’s is a single-story venue with a bar, sports lounge, and main dining room for taking in live music over dinner.

Designed for live jazz and blues, the main dining room is built to scatter and absorb sound. The tables are lightly padded to reduce the clatter of plates and silverware and they fan out away from the stage, providing a view of the action to every seat, booth, and setee.

Source: Look Inside Vic’s, the New Jazz Lounge and Italian Bistro in Las Vegas – Eater Vegas

A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online | Open Culture

in Food & Drink | September 3rd, 2020

Screenshot from article…

As you know if you’re a reader of this site, there are vast, interactive (and free!) scholarly databases online collecting just about every kind of artifact, from Bibles to bird calls, and yes, there are a significant number of cookbooks online, too.

But proper searchable, historical databases of cookbooks seem to have appeared only lately. To my mind, these might have been some of the first things to become available. How important is eating, after all, to virtually every part of our lives? The fact is, however, that scholars of food have had to invent the discipline largely from scratch.

“Western scholars had a bias against studying sensual experience,” writes Reina Gattuso at Atlas Obscura, “the relic of an Enlightenment-era hierarchy that considered taste, touch, and flavor taboo topics for sober academic inquiry. ‘It’s the baser sense,’ says Cathy Kaufman, a professor of food studies at the New School.” Kaufman sits on the board of The Sifter, a new massive, multilingual online database of historical recipe books. Another board member, sculptor Joe Wheaton, puts things more directly: “Food history has been a bit of an embarrassment to a lot of academics, because it involves women in the kitchen.”

Source: A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online | Open Culture