A Literary Feast

The Farmer General > Recent > issue 10

Blog Archives

The Customer Is Always Wrong: Restaurant Breakfasts In Film

Posted on November 24th, 2012

(Excerpted from AltaMira’s upcoming BREAKFAST: A HISTORY, to be published in the first half of 2013) Everyone who has eaten at a restaurant has experienced the annoyance of being told that some desired item is unavailable, but never is this more unbearable than first thing in the morning. Restaurant breakfasts can make or break one’s day, and they can make or break a film. Due to the urgency of the morning, or perhaps that one does not always present one’s most polite, patient self in the morning, frustration is a recurring theme in theatrical breakfast scenes. In the diner scene of the 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces, a frustrated Bobby (played eloquently by a young Jack Nicholson) orders a “plain omelet, no potatoes –…

Categories: Uncategorized

Responses to the Curious Reader Who May Not Yet Have Watched Babette’s Feast

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Yes, I was raised Lutheran. Despite our church’s cushioned pews and climate control, we shared a certain earnestness with this film’s “little flock.” Worship, like life, was to be taken very seriously: grace may have saved, but actions mattered. It’s not surprising that our congregation, like the film’s, at times became “testy and querulous….Little schisms erupted.” In 2009, our denomination began allowing gay, partnered clergy to serve. Some indignant parishioners promptly started their own congregation, joining a ramshackle Lutheran body that was liberal enough to ordain women, but conservative enough to exclude gays. No, my family never hired a French servant—probably because no French servant ever came to our door seeking asylum. If one had, and if after fourteen years she prepared a feast…

Categories: Uncategorized

Big Night

Posted on November 24th, 2012

I once read a scathing restaurant review that began, “This is basically the bad Italian restaurant from Big Night.” I put the movie in my Netflix queue, where it sat for six months before I decided to watch it. Big Night is an intimate film about food, art, family, and business told through the story of two restaurants: one good, one bad. The good restaurant — aptly named the Paradise — is run by Primo and Secondo, Italian immigrant brothers. Primo is the (quintessential) chef’s chef: gifted, cantankerous, and obsessed. His younger brother, Secondo, handles the business side of running the restaurant. The Paradise has just a few tiny tables and only one waiter. However, the food that appears on those tables is something…

Categories: Uncategorized

Putting You Off Your Grub

Posted on November 24th, 2012

You probably don’t want to read this article. Publication has been considerately withheld until after Thanksgiving, presumably so that neither our editor nor I are held responsible for spoiling anyone’s gleaming turkey, perfectly candied yams, or goblets of rose red Beaujolais. In fact, wipe that image from your head entirely. You don’t want to associate it with any of the following. And if you’ve eaten in the last hour, or plan to eat in the next day, you might want to stop reading now.   I’m not here to talk about the heartwarming bites at the end of “Ratatouille” (the stuff of dreams), the five-dollar milkshake in “Pulp Fiction” (it was worth it), the two dozen pies from “Waitress” (that’s an estimate), or anything…

Categories: Uncategorized

Season One, Episode Six

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Season one episode 6 of ” The Adventures of Pete and Pete” opens with Big Pete saying, more or less, “By the time you are fourteen years old you will have eaten over 14,000 meals and if you look back at all of your favorites not one of them began with a tray.” He was of course referring to school lunch. As he and his friend Teddy go through the lunch line and decide between the gray and uniform meatloaf – one of the various disguises given to mystery meat by the aging, hideous, underarm jiggling lunch ladies – and the previously-frozen fish-sticks, it becomes clear that Teddy in fact loves school lunch and Pete does not. Pete’s skepticism is vaguely confirmed when the one young attractive…

Categories: Uncategorized

With Nary A Banana

Posted on November 24th, 2012

I felt bad for my professor; he had a tough audience. No one, no matter how nerdy, should have to face sixty undergrads who haven’t done the reading before 10 a.m. Granted, he wasn’t doing himself any favors with his checked bowties, obscure literary allusions, and hours of monotone lectures. It would’ve taken a student with an unnatural interest in eighteenth century literary conventions and a superhuman ability to stay awake to be an active participant in this class, a student who would forgo several shorter essays in favor of a culminating 30 page research paper on the economic subtext in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa , a student like me – the only graduate student in ENG348: Rise of the English Novel. I got an…

Categories: Uncategorized

Comfort Me With Sharp Objects

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Some people are comforted by a cigarette. I’d heard the stories about the healing properties of warm milk. I was feeling sorry for myself, and I chose the headless duck.   Who knows what I was feeling sorry about—I was 23, and didn’t really need a reason. Maybe it was one of those days where I’d sat on the upturned milk crate behind the coffee shop that I was working at, furiously scribbling in my notebook about how undignified it was that I had to serve lattes to my former professors, when I was pretty sure I was supposed to be writing a novel instead. Maybe it was the time I’d had so many gallons of espresso that I’d sweated my way into heart…

Categories: Uncategorized

Following Your Coffee Muse To A Better Bean

Posted on November 24th, 2012

Coffee is not just a drink. Those who are content with their one morning cup of Dunkin’ Donuts stuff, or whatever the corner coffee cart man is selling – nuked beyond recognition with milk and sugar – are missing the point. Sure, caffeine is a drug, and some will take one hit on the way to work so as not to fall asleep over a spreadsheet. But drinking coffee just to stay awake is like having sex only to procreate: it does the job, but where’s the fun?   Coffee is a lifestyle. It is the anticipation of a hot, delicious mug on a Saturday morning, brewing on the counter as you button your old flannel shirt and unroll your newspaper (or turn on…

Categories: Uncategorized